Tesla unveiled an upgraded hand system for its Optimus humanoid robot, featuring 22 total degrees of freedom

The robot teleoperated by a human, can now catch a ball, with tactile sensing and fine tendon control improvements coming by the end of the year.

BCG has released its insightful AI Maturity Matrix report.

Key findings :

1. The report categorizes economies into three groups: AI Emergents, AI Practitioners & Contenders, and AI Pioneers.

2. AI Emergents are economies in the early stages of AI adoption, requiring strategies to build competitiveness.

3. AI Practitioners & Contenders are economies with gradual or exposed AI adoption, including countries from East Asia, Eastern Europe, and South America.

4. AI Pioneers are the top 5 economies (out of 73) that excel in AI integration, R&D, infrastructure, and talent.

5. The report notes a substantial gap in AI preparedness, with over 70% of nations scoring below the halfway mark in areas like skills, research, and ecosystem development.

6. Global AI expenditure is expected to double, reaching $632 billion by 2028, reflecting technology's central role in future economic strategies.

7. The AI Maturity Index is measured by two indices: AI exposure and AI readiness, evaluated across six dimensions (ASPIRE framework).

8. Economies like Luxembourg and Singapore lead in AI readiness due to their reliance on financial and business services.

9. Developing economies like India can benefit from AI applications in 'agritech' and industrial optimization.

10. The report concludes with recommendations for each economy archetype, urging pioneers to drive global standards, contenders to expand AI applications, and emergents to build foundational infrastructure.

Reverse Thinking Makes LLMs Stronger Reasoners

Shows that training LLMs to learn "reverse thinking" helps to improve performance in commonsense, math, and logical reasoning tasks.

It claims to outperform a standard fine-tuning method trained on 10x more forward reasoning.

World Labs has unveiled an AI system that transforms regular images into fully explorable 3D worlds right in your browser

No complex software needed – just upload an image and step into a three-dimensional universe.

What the system can do:

• Analyzes 2D images and creates realistic 3D geometry
• Fills in unseen parts of the scene
• Lets you freely move around like in a video game
• Supports camera effects (depth of field, dolly zoom)
• Maintains the original artistic style

Perfect for:
• Game designers and developers
• Artists and animators
• Filmmakers
• Architects and designers
• Anyone who wants to bring their ideas to life in 3D

This technology will be available to users soon. Stay tuned – the future of 3D generation is here.

Anthropic announced Fellows Program

This is an exceptional opportunity to join AI safety research, collaborating with leading researchers on one of the world's most pressing problems.

ARIA Research has launched a funding program that aims to revolutionize our understanding of neurological disorders through innovative brain computer interface research.

Key highlights:

The program offers funding up to £500k per proposal, targeting high-potential ideas within the Scalable Neural Interfaces space.

ARIA is seeking groundbreaking approaches that could transform how we interact with and understand the human brain at scale.

What they're looking for:

- Bold, innovative ideas that challenge current assumptions about brain interfaces.

- Research ranging from early-stage exploration to pre-commercial science.

- Projects that could fundamentally change our understanding of what's possible in neurotechnology.

Not included:

- Projects within the Precision Neurotechnologies programme scope
- Conventional ideas that could progress without ARIA support
- Commercial or near-commercial products

ARIA's focus on scalable solutions could lead to breakthrough discoveries in treating neurological disorders.

SpaceX is now likely to be valued about $350B in a new tender offer, $100B MORE than what was discussed last month and would make it the most valuable startup in the world, surpassing Bytedance.

Sakana AI introduced CycleQD: A population-based model merging via Quality Diversity

CycleQD builds on our model merging research, advancing two fronts: evolving a swarm of specialized agents to complement one another, and laying the groundwork for life-long learning by enabling diverse, adaptable skill acquisition at the population-level.

Tsinghua NLP & OpenBMB
introduced the Proactive AI Agent

Even the most advanced AI agents like ChatGPT are still traditional Reactive Agents, requiring explicit user instructions to perform tasks.

But now, new Proactive Agent changes the game. These agents aren’t just instruction followers—they're smart assistants with "insight".

They actively observe, predict human needs, and solve problems before being asked.

Code.

Future House in collaboration with E11 Bio announced a new way to map brain circuits at scale.

The key ingredients are simple (but putting them together has been hard):

1. Electron microscopy, which is standard for connectomics today, is too slow.

2. Standard optical microscopes don't have enough resolution to map brain circuits.

3. Researchers use pan-stains to label membranes and synaptic stains to label synapses.

4. Finally, and crucially: mapping neurons with nanometer resolution across centimeters of axon length, without many any errors, is supremely difficult. Researchers use optical protein barcodes, like brainbow, and multiplexed antibody staining to get the neurons to trace themselves.

Amazon has launched Nova, a highly competitive family of foundation models.

Nova Pro, Lite and Flash set new standards for the intelligence that can be accessed at the price and speed these models are offered at.

* 75% more cost effective
* Support fine-tuning and distillation.

Starlink + robotics + weather forecasting = Clippership autonomous wind-powered cargo vessels.

Zero emission maritime shipping, faster and cheaper than what's possible now.

MindSearch is an open-source AI Search Engine Framework with Perplexity Pro performance.

You can deploy your own Perplexity.ai-style search engine using either closed-source LLMs (GPT, Claude) or open-source LLMs (InternLM2.5-7b-chat).

Bitcoin breaks $100,000 and extends record rally to $104,000

Key drivers behind Bitcoin's price growth:

1. Strong Institutional Investment

- Over $31 billion in net inflows through U.S. spot Bitcoin ETFs
- Increased corporate adoption, particularly led by MicroStrategy's Michael Saylor

2. Technical Factors

- Bitcoin's fourth halving in April, which tightened the supply
- Market capitalization reaching $2 trillion for the first time

3. Political Developments

- Donald Trump's victory in the U.S. presidential election
- Appointment of crypto-friendly officials to key positions:
- Paul Atkins nominated as SEC chair to replace Gary Gensler
- Scott Bessent selected for Treasury
- Howard Lutnik chosen for Commerce Department
- Potential formation of what could be the most pro-crypto cabinet to date

4. Market Speculation

- Growing speculation about potential Bitcoin national reserves
- Positive sentiment from regulatory changes under the new administration
- Breaking through psychological barriers ($90,000 in November, then $100,000)

For context, while this represents a 126% increase since January (from $44,000).

Microsoft: genAI agents are powerful but complex—how do we design them for transparency and human control?

At the heart of this challenge is establishing common ground, a concept from human communication.

A new paper identifies 12 key challenges in improving common ground between humans and AI agents.

Google DeepMind introduced Genie 2, capable foundation world model that, given a single prompt image, can generate an endless variety of action-controllable, playable 3D worlds.

Genie 2 could unlock the next wave of capabilities for embodied agents.

From first person real world scenes, to third person driving environments, Genie 2 generates worlds in 720p. Given an image, Genie 2 simulates world dynamics, creating a consistent environment playable with keyboard and mouse inputs.

This is DeepMind's SIMA following instructions within Genie 2's generative world. Most robotic training won't happen in base reality.

Researchers have created a virtual laboratory staffed by ‘AI scientists’ — LLMs with defined scientific roles — that collaborate to achieve goals set by people.

The team trained one LLM to be the work’s principal investigator (PI) and a second to act as a ‘scientific critic’.

The ‘PI’ then trained three further LLMs to support the research efforts.

Each worked independently, but the group came together for short ‘team meetings’ overseen by a human.

When tasked with designing antibody fragments that can bind to the virus that causes COVID-19, the AI team proposed 92 structures in a fraction of the time it would have taken an all-human research group.

Revolutionary Breakthrough: Real-Time Inflammation Tracking Becomes Reality

In a groundbreaking development, scientists at CZ Biohub Chicago and Northwestern University have created the first-ever device capable of continuously monitoring inflammation in real-time.

This innovation could revolutionize how we understand and treat numerous diseases, as inflammation is linked to approximately 50% of all human deaths.

The team developed an ingenious solution to a long-standing challenge in medical monitoring.

Their "pendulum" sensors, thinner than three human hairs, can detect inflammatory proteins under the skin continuously – something previously thought impossible due to the strong binding properties of proteins.

The beauty of this breakthrough lies in its elegant simplicity. Rather than relying on new materials or AI, the team created a clever mechanical solution: sensors that literally "shake off" measured proteins to make room for new ones, similar to a dog's toy picking up and releasing balls. This enables continuous measurement of inflammation markers in living tissue.

The implications are staggering. Just as continuous glucose monitors transformed diabetes care, these sensors could revolutionize treatment for conditions like:

- Rheumatoid arthritis
- Crohn's disease
- Heart disease
- Cancer
- Diabetes complications

Initial tests in diabetic rats have shown remarkable accuracy, with the device even detecting minor inflammation from insulin injections. The biocompatible device can safely operate for at least two weeks, bringing us one step closer to a future where inflammation-related diseases could be monitored and prevented before symptoms appear.

Google released PaliGemma 2, a vision language model family that comes in various sizes: 3B, 10B, 28B, based on Gemma 2 and SigLIP, comes with transformers support day-0 .

Model collection.

NVIDIA introduced NVILA, a family of open VLMs designed to optimize both efficiency and accuracy.

Model arch focuses on scaling up spatial and temporal resolutions, and then compressing visual tokens, allowing for efficient processing of high resolutions.

Also uses "DeltaLoss" data pruning and FP8 training.

Competitive with proprietary VLMs on visual understanding benchmarks.