March 12, 2025

Gemini Robotics uses Google’s top language model to make robots more useful

Google DeepMind has released a new model, Gemini Robotics, that combines its best large language model with robotics. Plugging in the LLM seems to give robots the ability to be more dexterous, work from natural-language commands, and generalize across tasks. All three are things that robots have struggled to do until now. The team hopes…

Waabi says its virtual robotrucks are realistic enough to prove the real ones are safe

March 11, 2025
Canadian robotruck startup Waabi says its super-realistic virtual simulation is now accurate enough to prove the safety of its driverless big rigs without having to run them for miles on real roads.  The company uses a digital twin of its real-world robotrucks, loaded up with real sensor data, and measures how the twin’s performance compares…

The Download: making AI fairer, and why everyone’s talking about AGI

March 11, 2025
This is today’s edition of The Download, our weekday newsletter that provides a daily dose of what’s going on in the world of technology. Two new measures show where AI models fail on fairness What’s new: A new pair of AI benchmarks could help developers reduce bias in AI models, potentially making them fairer and less likely…

Junction, an API to link health wearables with labs, raises $18M

March 11, 2025

Medical devices, wearables — we are all familiar with them. But are they linked in any way to the healthcare system and the databases that are supposed to keep us healthy? The answer in most cases is no, they are not. Vital, which is rebranding to “Junction”, provides a single API to integrate wearables and […]

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General Fusion fires up its newest steampunk fusion reactor

March 11, 2025

The reactor, called Lawson Machine 26 (LM26), is General Fusion’s latest iteration in a string of devices that have tested various parts of its unique approach.

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Sola emerges from stealth with $30M to build the ‘Stripe for security’

March 11, 2025

Enterprises these days can choose from hundreds of apps and services available to secure their networks, data and assets — nearly as many more to help them manage all the alerts and extra work that those security apps generate. But what if you could build your own apps, customised to your own workloads, to simplify […]

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AGI is suddenly a dinner table topic

March 11, 2025
This story originally appeared in The Algorithm, our weekly newsletter on AI. To get stories like this in your inbox first, sign up here. The concept of artificial general intelligence—an ultra-powerful AI system we don’t have yet—can be thought of as a balloon, repeatedly inflated with hype during peaks of optimism (or fear) about its potential…

These two new AI benchmarks could help make models less biased

March 11, 2025
A new pair of AI benchmarks could help developers reduce bias in AI models, potentially making them fairer and less likely to cause harm. The research, from a team based at Stanford, was posted to the arXiv preprint server in early February. The researchers were inspired to look into the problem of bias after witnessing…