Dongkun Lee, formerly of Hyundai, will oversee its strategy. Samsung has created a new division called RX or Robotics eXperience for all of its robotics projects. Its strategy will be headed by Dongkun Lee, who joined Samsung in May as an Executive Vice President. Before he joined Samsung, Lee led Hyundai's robotics strategy, including Boston Dynamics' . Samsung CEO TM Roh himself will oversee the new division.

Diffusion Large Language Models (dLLMs) break the rigid left-to-right constraint of traditional LLMs, enabling token generation in arbitrary orders. Intuitively, this flexibility implies a solution space that strictly supersets the fixed autoregressive trajectory, theoretically unlocking superior reasoning potential. Indeed, for specific constraint satisfaction tasks (e.g., sudoku puzzles), this capability has proven to be highly advantageous. However, in this paper, we reveal that for general reasoning tasks (e.g., mathematics and coding), arbitrary order generation may in fact limit the reasoning potential of dLLMs. We find that dLLMs tend to exploit this order flexibility to bypass high-uncertainty tokens that are crucial for exploration, leading to a premature collapse of solution coverage. This observation motivates a rethink of RL approaches for dLLMs, where considerable complexities, such as handling combinatorial trajectories and intractable likelihoods, are often devoted to preserving this flexibility. We demonstrate that effective reasoning can be better elicited by simply forgoing arbitrary order and applying standard Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO) instead. Our approach, JustGRPO, is minimalist yet surprisingly effective (e.g., 89.1% accuracy on GSM8K) while fully retaining the parallel decoding ability of dLLMs.

Imagine you want to teach a robot to push an object on a table. The standard recipe in robot learning is to collect hundreds of expert demonstrations on a real robot, train an imitation learning policy on that data, and then evaluate the policy by running it many times on the same real robot. Both stages (data collection and evaluation) are slow, expensive, and hard to reproduce: hardware breaks, lighting changes, objects drift out of place, and every new task means more hours in the lab. A natural question is whether we can replace some of this real-robot work with a simulator. Classical physics-based simulators are powerful, but building one for a new task means manually modeling geometries, contacts, friction, and deformation, and the resulting simulator often still does not match reality closely enough for policies trained inside it to transfer.

This year, RoboCup took place in Incheon, South Korea, from 2-6 July. The event saw teams take part in competitions, training sessions, and a symposium. Take a look at what the participants got up to in our round up from social media. RoboCup 2026 officially begins today! A post shared by RoboCup Federation (@robocup.official)

The forty-third International Conference on Machine Learning (ICML) took place in Seoul, South Korea from 6-11 July. We take a look at what the participants got up to during the event. The PC Chairs are presenting the welcome remarks. One of the best conference dinners I've ever had. Try TimeChat-Captioner (at #ICML2026) -- a videoLLM that generates dense, time-aware captions for long videos.

South Korean chip giant SK Hynix has raised a record-breaking $26.5bn ahead of its Wall Street debut amid soaring demand for semiconductors used in AI. SK Hynix said on Friday that it had sold 177.9 million American depositary shares (ADS) at $149 each ahead of its listing on the New York-based Nasdaq stock exchange. SK Hynix's 177.9 million ADSs are equivalent to 18 million ordinary shares. SK Hynix's initial public offering (IPO) marks the largest-ever listing by a foreign company in the US, surpassing Chinese e-commerce giant Alibaba's $25bn debut in 2014. The listing also ranks as the second-largest globally, after SpaceX's record-breaking $85.7bn Nasdaq listing in June.

South Korean computer chip maker SK Hynix has raised $26.5bn (£19.8bn) in its New York share offering, marking the largest ever listing by a foreign firm in the US. The company, a key supplier to artificial intelligence (AI) chip giant Nvidia, said on Thursday that it had sold 177.9 million American depositary shares for $149 each. The shares are set to begin trading on Friday on the Nasdaq. In May, SK Hynix saw its market value top $1tn in its home country, lifted by the boom in demand for AI chips. Its share price has more than tripled in South Korea this year, which along with Samsung Electronics has helped boost the benchmark Kospi index by more than 70% over the same period.

This year, RoboCup took place in Incheon, South Korea, from 2-6 July. The event saw teams take part in competitions, training sessions, and a symposium. Take a look at what the participants got up to in our round up from social media. RoboCup 2026 officially begins today! A post shared by RoboCup Federation (@robocup.official)

The EurAI Distinguished Service Award started in 2012, and it is presented annually to individuals who have made exceptional contributions to the European AI community. This year, the award goes to two researchers: Jérôme Lang and Luc de Raedt. Find out who won the small, middle and large divisions in Incheon. Find out the latest from day two of the competition. In the first of our round-ups from the humanoid league we introduce the competition, and report some preliminary results.

Image caption, Samsung is also one of the world's leading smartphone makers South Korean technology giant Samsung Electronics says it expects to post a 19-fold jump in its profits, driven by global demand for artificial intelligence (AI) memory chips. The company forecast that it made 89tn won (£44bn; $58bn) between the start of April and the end of June, marking its third record quarterly operating profits in a row. Major South Korean firms like Samsung release forecasts of their earnings ahead of official detailed reports to help guide investors. Samsung's latest forecast, released on Tuesday ahead of its full results due later in July, comes as demand for semiconductors continues to outstrip supplies - which has pushed up prices . Samsung said in the preview, known as earnings guidance, that it brought in around 171tn won of sales during the quarter, more than double the amount for the same period last year.