Niantic Spatial is turning a decade of Pokémon Go player photos into a 30-billion-image map that now powers real-world robot navigation, with Coco Robotics already deploying the technology across 1,000 delivery robots in major cities worldwide.
Halter, a startup making AI-powered smart collars for cows, is in talks to raise funding that would more than double its valuation to over $2 billion, with Peter Thiel's Founders Fund set to lead the round.
Nvidia GTC 2026 unveils a sweeping AI strategy spanning robotics, personal agents, and open models with the new Nemotron Coalition, as the company fights to defend its CUDA dominance against rising competitors and cement itself as the foundational platform of the entire AI industry.
China's £100bn robotics revolution is accelerating at breakneck speed, with 140 firms deploying AI-powered humanoid robots in factories and retail settings worldwide, as experts warn hundreds of millions of factory jobs could vanish by the mid-2030s.
A billion-dollar race to build world models is accelerating as AI giants and startups pour massive funding into technology that can simulate physical reality, with AMI Labs raising $1.03 billion and World Labs securing $1 billion to overcome the critical limits large language models face in robotics and autonomous driving.
OpenAI is racing to deploy an autonomous AI research intern by September 2025, with ambitions to build a fully automated AI researcher by 2028, even as major safety and misuse concerns remain unresolved.
Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang launches NemoClaw, a free open-source AI agent platform, repositioning Nvidia as the operating system of the AI era while using the move to defend GPU hardware demand against rival chips and prevent customers like OpenAI from gaining enough dominance to threaten Nvidia's pricing power.
Google upgrades its Universal Commerce Protocol with real-time catalog access, cart management, and loyalty integration, enabling AI shopping agents to browse, save items, and apply member perks across retailers, with Salesforce, Stripe, and Commerce Inc among the first partners set to implement the system.
NousResearch launches Hermes Agent, an open-source, self-improving AI that learns from experience, supports 200+ LLMs, runs on infrastructure as cheap as a $5 VPS, and connects across Telegram, Discord, WhatsApp, Signal, and Slack — already earning 8.7k GitHub stars from 142 contributors.
Michigan Senator Elissa Slotkin introduces landmark legislation to restrict the Pentagon's use of AI in military operations, prohibiting autonomous kill decisions, mass surveillance of Americans, and AI-controlled nuclear weapons, as tensions between the Defense Department and AI firm Anthropic highlight the urgent need for clear legal boundaries.