Sunday Robotics has a new way to train robots to do common household tasks. The startup plans to put its fully autonomous robots in homes next year. Memo may not be the world's fastest barista, but it is impressive--for a robot. I recently watched as Memo, a new home robot from a company called Sunday Robotics, made coffee in an open-plan kitchen in Mountain View, California. Memo looks like something out of Wall-E, with a gleaming white body, two arms, a friendly cartoonish face, and a red baseball cap.

Why human-shaped robots loom large in Musk's Tesla plans It has appeared in Tesla showrooms, on its factory floors and has even posed with Kim Kardashian. But Elon Musk's vision for his human-like robot Optimus is much grander than that. Since first unveiling it at a Tesla showcase in 2022, the tech billionaire has suggested his company's droid could play a huge role in the homes and lives of people all over the world. Along with self-driving robotaxis and Cybertrucks, Musk believes Tesla robots are key to establishing a foothold in the artificial intelligence (AI) landscape. And investors who signed off on his $1tn (£760bn) pay package on Thursday would appear to agree .

Maintaining a perfect lawn takes time, effort, and dedication, and mowing the grass can become a relentless, repetitive chore. Not keeping up with maintenance could mean your garden quickly starts to resemble a jungle. Two new robot lawn mowers from eufy hope to change your outlook on garden maintenance. The eufy E15 and E18, available for sale now, are a pair of connected robot lawn mowers. These clever gadgets can take this chore off your hands by bringing smart tech into your yard.

If you look at your Roomba with disgust, thinking about what a far cry it is from the Jetsons' Rosey the Robot, help is on the way. Bloomberg reported on Friday that Meta plans to leverage its advances in AI and augmented reality to build a platform for futuristic humanoid robots that can help with household chores like folding laundry. Meta is reportedly creating a new team within its Reality Labs hardware division, which handles Quest VR headsets and the long-term Orion AR glasses project. Although it will build robot hardware during development, Meta's long-term goal is more like Android, where Google makes the software platform that almost all of the industry (outside of Apple) uses. Meta would make the underlying sensors, AI and software for other companies to put inside their hardware.

This paper addresses the problem of finding EFX orientations of graphs of chores, in which each vertex corresponds to an agent, each edge corresponds to a chore, and a chore has zero marginal utility to an agent if its corresponding edge is not incident to the vertex corresponding to the agent. Recently, Zhou~et~al.~(IJCAI,~2024) analyzed the complexity of deciding whether graphs containing a mixture of goods and chores admit EFX orientations, and conjectured that deciding whether graphs containing only chores admit EFX orientations is NP-complete. In this paper, we resolve this conjecture by exhibiting a polynomial-time algorithm that finds an EFX orientation of a graph containing only chores if one exists, even if the graph contains self-loops. Remarkably, our first result demonstrates a surprising separation between the case of goods and the case of chores, because deciding whether graphs containing only goods admit EFX orientations of goods was shown to be NP-complete by Christodoulou et al.~(EC,~2023). In addition, we show the analogous decision problem for multigraphs to be NP-complete.

Google once only wanted to organize the world's information. Now it seems more intent on shoveling that information into artificial intelligence algorithms that become dutiful, ever-present, and increasingly powerful virtual helpers. Google today announced Gemini 2, a new version of its flagship AI model that has been trained to plan and execute tasks on a user's computers and the web, and which can chat like a person and make sense of the physical world as a virtual butler. "I've dreamed about a universal digital assistant for a long, long time, as a stepping stone on the path to artificial general intelligence," Demis Hassabis, the CEO of Google DeepMind told WIRED ahead of today's announcement, alluding to the idea of AI that can eventually do anything a human brain can. Gemini 2 is primarily another step up in AI's intelligence as measured by different benchmarks used to gauge such things.

The idea of a robot that does a wide range of household chores, from unloading the dryer to folding laundry to cleaning up a messy table, has long seemed like pure science fiction--perhaps most famously embodied by the 1960s fantasy that was Rosey in The Jetsons. Physical Intelligence, a startup in San Francisco, has shown that such a dream might actually not be so far off, demonstrating a single artificial intelligence model that has learned to do a wide range of useful home chores--including all of the above--by being trained on an unprecedented amount of data. The feat raises the prospect of bringing something as magical and generally capable as other AI models like ChatGPT into the physical world. The advent of large language models (LLMs)--general-purpose learning algorithms fed vast swaths of text from books and the internet--has given chatbots vastly more general capabilities. Physical Intelligence aims to create something similarly capable in the physical world by training a similar kind of algorithm with enormous amounts of robotic data instead.

We study a fair division model where indivisible items arrive sequentially, and must be allocated immediately and irrevocably. Previous work on online fair division has shown impossibility results in achieving approximate envy-freeness under these constraints. In contrast, we consider an informed setting where the algorithm has complete knowledge of future items, and aim to ensure that the cumulative allocation at each round satisfies approximate envy-freeness -- which we define as temporal envy-freeness up to one item (TEF1). We focus on settings where items can be exclusively goods or exclusively chores. For goods, while TEF1 allocations may not always exist, we identify several special cases where they do -- two agents, two item types, generalized binary valuations, unimodal preferences -- and provide polynomial-time algorithms for these cases. We also prove that determining the existence of a TEF1 allocation is NP-hard. For chores, we establish analogous results for the special cases, but present a slightly weaker intractability result. We also establish the incompatibility between TEF1 and Pareto-optimality, with the implication that it is intractable to find a TEF1 allocation that maximizes any $p$-mean welfare, even for two agents.

I've recently accepted the fact that I am, and always will be, a pen-and-paper kind of gal. When it comes to writing, nothing does it for me quite like the act of scrawling by hand. I'm more creative, less distracted and more emotionally invested in what I'm doing than when I type on a keyboard. But over the last decade or so of writing professionally, I've become disconnected from writing by hand. I spend most of my time hunched over a laptop, and have unwittingly conditioned myself into writing almost exclusively in this way for the sake of efficiency.

This week a startup called Cognition AI caused a bit of a stir by releasing a demo showing an artificial intelligence program called Devin performing work usually done by well-paid software engineers. Chatbots like ChatGPT and Gemini can generate code, but Devin went further, planning how to solve a problem, writing the code, and then testing and implementing it. When asked to test how Meta's open source language model Llama 2 performed when accessed via different companies hosting it, Devin generated a step-by-step plan for the project, generated code needed to access the APIs and run benchmarking tests, and created a website summarizing the results. It's always hard to judge staged demos, but Cognition has shown Devin handling a wide range of impressive tasks. It wowed investors and engineers on X, receiving plenty of endorsements, and even inspired a few memes--including some predicting Devin will soon be responsible for a wave of tech industry layoffs.