Hardware
Drone Swarms Go to War: Ukraine experiments with small groups of low-contact, high-autonomy drones that strike on initiative
Swarms of drones that coordinate with one another autonomously have become a battlefield staple in Ukraine.
AI Agents
Tech & Society
2 Hours With AI Versus 6 With Teacher: Inside Alpha School, a Texas-based program using algorithms and video monitors to teach children
A growing private school system replaces the typical 6-hour school day with 2 hours of personalized, AI-assisted education.
Machine Learning Research
Cybersecurity for Agents: Meta releases LlamaFirewall, an open-source defense against AI hijacking
Autonomous agents built on large language models introduce distinct security concerns. Researchers designed a system to protect agents from common vulnerabilities.
Hardware
Proactive AI Assistance for Phones: Inside Magic Cue, Google’s new AI assistant for Pixel 10
Google’s latest smartphone sports an AI assistant that anticipates the user’s needs and presents helpful information without prompting.
Machine Learning Research
Training Data for Coding Assistants: Stanford and Alibaba build bug fixing dataset and pipeline to train AI
A bottleneck in fine-tuning large language models for software engineering is building a dataset that can show them how to edit code, search for subroutines, write test scripts, control a terminal, manage a file system, and so on. Researchers built a pipeline that produces such data automatically.
Machine Learning Research
Robot Surgeon Cuts and Clips: Doctors at Stanford, Johns Hopkins, and Optosurgical operate on animal organs without human intervention
An autonomous robot performed intricate surgical operations without human intervention.
Machine Learning Research
Agentic System for Harder Problems: Google’s AlphaEvolve uses LLMs and evolutionary code to solve complex math and speed up Gemini training
LLMs can struggle with difficult algorithmic or scientific challenges when asked to solve them in a single attempt. An agentic workflow improved one-shot performance on hard problems both theoretical and practical.
Machine Learning Research
Born To Be Agentic: Moonshot releases Kimi K2, a trillion-parameter model fine-tuned for agentic tool use
An agent’s performance depends not only on an effective workflow but also on a large language model that excels at agentic activities. A new open-weights model focuses on those capabilities.
Business
Powers Realign in AI-Assisted Coding: Google, Cognition carve up Windsurf after OpenAI’s failed $3B acquisition bid
A $3 billion bid by OpenAI to acquire Windsurf, maker of the AI-assisted integrated development environment of the same name, collapsed at the 11th hour, setting off a tumultuous few days of corporate maneuvering.
Machine Learning Research
More Robust Multi-Agent Systems: Researchers improve multi-agent systems by studying how they tend to fail
Researchers addressed weaknesses in existing multi-agent frameworks. Their systems achieved scientific and technical breakthroughs.
Machine Learning Research
Generated Data for Training Web Agents: Researchers scale up production of training data for web agents
Developing an agent that navigates the web can involve a lot of human effort spent annotating training examples to fine-tune the agent’s LLM component. Scientists automated the production of data that fine-tuned LLMs effectively for web tasks.
Tech & Society
CEOs Look to AI to Replace Workers: Amazon and other major companies say AI will reduce their corporate workforces
Leaders at some of the biggest U.S. corporations say they’re preparing for AI to eliminate many jobs within their organizations.