A.I./Robotics

Laura McGill, two weeks into her tenure as Sandia National Laboratories director, addressed the organization’s New Mexico staff on May 14. She stated that the lab would double down on its core role as the nation’s nuclear-weapons system integrator while also scaling up digital-engineering and AI projects. She announced a projection of up to $5…

GreyB on Wednesday rolled out Slate, an AI search tool that promises to collapse the grunt work of patent and literature hunts into a single query. The firm says early pilots cut document-finding time “from hours to minutes.” Slate’s index reaches across more than 160 million patents filed in 100-plus jurisdictions and roughly 264 million…

Low-quality, poorly curated, and siloed scientific data costs advanced economies billions of dollars each year by draining researcher productivity, duplicating experiments, and slowing innovation. A report commissioned by the European Commission estimated that failing to adopt FAIR (findable, accessible, interoperable, reusable) data principles costs Europe’s economy at least €10.2 billion annually owing to wasted researcher…

The R&D World Index (RDWI) slid this week even as several companies rolled out big new R&D projects. For the week ending May 9, 2025, the index closed at 3,773.11, down 3.85% (–151.24 points). Sixteen of the 25 members fell. Eli Lilly & Co. was the biggest laggard (–10.81%) despite breaking ground on a huge…

For R&D teams, the real question regarding AI agents is what they’re actually doing now, and whether they’re reliable enough for complex, high-stakes environments. There’s a common misconception that there are general-purpose AI agents that can seamlessly operate across every scientific domain. In reality, the most useful agents are domain-specific, practical tools that accelerate discovery,…

The Trump administration is signaling potential revisions to the Biden-era “AI Diffusion” export control framework. The shift could mean simpler, bilateral agreements and easing restrictions for key markets, following intense lobbying from U.S. tech giants and mounting economic concerns. Reuters was among the first to break the news. President Trump has lent weight to these…

After an April report emerged suggesting that Elon Musk was tapping AI to keep tabs on government workers, the Tesla and SpaceX reportedly told Milken conference attendees the U.S. government is “inefficient” and AI should replace some public-sector functions. Musk is also the leader of xAI, an AI company whose chatbot is rivaling those from…

UC Berkeley researchers have published the full blueprints for “Berkeley Humanoid Lite,” a mid-scale robot that undercuts six-figure commercial humanoids by nearly two orders of magnitude. The team says anyone with a desktop 3D printer and a parts budget below $5,000 can build the 0.8-meter-tall biped (about 2 feet 7.5 inches tall). Commercial humanoids such…

Philips sifted 146 million patent filings to map future medical-device options. Food-tech startup Sevvy ran a similar exercise to compare cooking technologies. Both projects relied on GetFocus, a Rotterdam-based firm that applies an MIT-derived algorithm to rank how quickly technologies improve. In the Philips project, the goal was to determine the optimal investment timing for…

In cosmology, invisible dark matter outweighs ordinary matter by roughly six to one. Drug discovery faces a similar imbalance: “dark data” marooned in lab systems. A bottom-up audit by scientific data and AI firm TetraScience estimated “greater than 10 million” discrete silos scattered across biopharma, everything from aging electronic lab notebooks and lone-wolf LIMS databases…

Instead of just another decimal-point upgrade to a massive language model, the latest AI move from publisher Wiley and AWS is a different breed: It’s a targeted agent from publisher Wiley and AWS: an AWS-hosted agent researchers can fork on GitHub and plug into their own pipelines. Wiley specifically mentioned its potential to cut research…

The National Science Foundation’s Networking and Information Technology Research and Development Coordination Office, acting for the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, is taking public comments through May 29 on a 2025 National Artificial Intelligence Research and Development Strategic Plan that aims to keep the U.S. “the unrivaled world leader” in AI. At…

A three-person team at Skoltech built a lightweight neural network, 10 layers and about 300 learnable parameters, that can take over the tedious Winslow-equation routine engineers rely on to wrap a square grid around oddly shaped domains. After roughly 5,000 training cycles, the model morphs a flat mesh into a curved one while keeping the…

The chief executive of Microsoft said up to 30% of the company’s software code is now being generated by artificial-intelligence tools, at Meta’s LlamaCon. Meta’s wager appears to be scale first, optimize later. The company plans to invest between $60-65 billion in 2025 to bolster its AI infrastructure. It recently hiked its 2025 capital-expenditure guidance…

Google chief Sundar Pichai told a federal judge Wednesday that a proposal to make the company share its search index and query data with rivals would amount to “a de facto divestiture” of its core intellectual property and cripple future research spending, according to a Reuters report. The same data trove that let Google dominate…

Elon Musk says xAI will ship Grok 3.5 to its top-tier SuperGrok subscribers “next week,” promising an AI that can tackle questions about rocket-engine cycles or electrochemistry by deriving answers instead of recycling web text. Musk claimed in an X post the upgrade will “come up with answers that simply don’t exist on the Internet”…

Meta and Groq used the Llamacon stage to debut a joint offering that pipes Meta’s first-party Llama API through Groq’s Language Processing Units (LPUs), promising production-grade speed at a fraction of conventional inference costs. What developers get The partners bill the service as “no-tradeoff” inference: fast responses, predictable low latency and reliable scaling, all at…

John Wiley & Sons has released a formal position statement on “illegal scraping of copyrighted content by AI developers.” The notice makes it explicit that training or operating artificial-intelligence systems on Wiley-owned literature requires a licence, countering any suggestion of implied permission. The publisher’s stance lands amid an industry-wide debate over the provenance of large-language-model…

Picture a semi-autonomous device scarcely thicker than a spaghetti noodle, crawling through living brain tissue at the pace of 3 mm per minute and guided by artificial intelligence. That is the vision behind Robeauté SA’s neurosurgical microrobot, a tethered, internally propelled system designed to reduce the trauma, complexity and cost of accessing deep-seated brain lesions.…

Fresh off securing three workshop acceptances out of four submissions at ICLR 2025 workshops, Autoscience Institute now claims a bigger coup. While the company framed those initial successes as making its AI agent Carl the “first AI system to produce academically peer-reviewed research,” it now reports that work generated by Carl has been accepted as…

Beijing has ordered every primary and secondary school to give students at least eight hours of AI lessons per year starting Sept. 1, 2025, making AI literacy compulsory from age six. Washington’s new “Advancing Artificial Intelligence Education for American Youth,” signed April 23, sets up a task force and dangles federal grants, but leaves curriculum…

A Georgia Tech robot skips wheels, legs and compressed gas; it relies on geometry, elasticity and a carbon-fiber spine to vault 10 feet, the height of a basketball rim. By turning a “kink,” normally a structural failure, into an elastic spring that releases about10⁴ W kg⁻¹ of power, the team shows a compact way to…

Less than five hours. One large-language-model co-pilot. Zero hand-drawn sprites. That’s all it took for SPACE SHOOTER DX, a mash-up of Space Invaders and Galaga complete with parallax starfields, multi-type UFOs, Stranger-Things-inspired synth loops and a laser that goes pew instead of meh. Roughly three-fifths of the 2.3k lines of TypeScript Claude 3.7 Sonnet’s idea.…

The University of Miami’s Systems Drug Discovery Lab routinely runs large-scale, physics-based simulations to study protein–ligand binding and support early-stage therapeutic modeling for research. In a proof-of-concept study, the Lab incorporated ALAFIA’s AIVAS Supercomputer, powered by Ampere’s 192-core AmpereOne processor, reducing simulation times from over 24 hours to just a few. This enabled more efficient…

Over the past two years, 218-year-old publisher Wiley has repositioned itself in the AI landscape, focusing on specialized “vertical” models over general chatbots. Explaining the company’s proactive strategy, SVP Josh Jarrett stated Wiley’s view is “we learn more by doing and potentially help shape AI’s development, rather than just be shaped by it.” This approach…