During a recent visit to Generalist AI, I watched a robotic arm improvise and use a banana as a tool. Last week, I ventured a whopping 15 minutes from my house to see robots do some mind-boggling, jaw-dropping stuff. I visited the Cambridge, Massachusetts, offices of a startup called Generalist AI, where I watched robot arms perform simple chores like stacking cups, putting blocks into bowls, and the like. I was astonished by how quickly they figured things out--it was reminiscent of a flesh-and-blood person. The arms mastered a range of tasks after ingesting a short, instructional video and, most impressively, no specific training for a given task.

German drone maker Helsing has enlisted Japanese e-commerce and finance firm Rakuten to help finalize a deal to sell its unmanned systems to Japan's army, a spokesperson for Rakuten said on Monday. Japan's Ground Self-Defense Force is currently testing Helsing's HX-2 strike drone, as Tokyo looks to modernize its military and counter an increasingly assertive China. The field tests will run until the end of September, the spokesperson said. Helsing struck an "initial agreement" for the Japanese government to use its systems earlier this year, a spokesperson for the Munich-based company said, adding that the move was made possible by an unnamed "local brokerage partner." Japan's Ground Self-Defense Force did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

SoftBank Group's $200 million investment in Swiss startup Gravis Robotics marks another major robotics bet as founder Masayoshi Son seeks to make the company a pivotal player in the global AI race. SoftBank Group has invested $200 million in Gravis Robotics, a Swiss startup that makes autonomous software for construction machinery. Zurich-based Gravis announced the Series A investment in a statement on Monday but didn't share a valuation. It was reported in July that SoftBank was considering an acquisition of Gravis that might be completed in several stages, which includes injecting fresh capital over time. The deal marks another splashy investment into robotics from SoftBank, whose founder, Masayoshi Son, is trying to make his firm a pivotal player in the global artificial intelligence race. The Japanese investor, which by October is set to own a 13% stake in OpenAI, has backed a range of robotics businesses, including with the acquisition of ABB's industrial unit last year.

Rakuten Group is working with defense AI startup Helsing to bring the German company's military drones to Japan. The Tokyo-based online shopping mall operator served as the point of contact between Helsing and the Japanese government, according to a Rakuten spokesperson. The country's Ground Self-Defense Force will conduct field tests of Helsing drones through the end of September, he said, without providing further details. The tie-up, which would be one of Helsing's first partnerships in the Asia-Pacific region, was first reported by the Nikkei. Japan, which for decades restricted arms exports, has been stepping up defense spending, and the country's companies have followed suit. E-commerce pioneer Rakuten has shifted some of its focus to the sector: It's partnered with a Ukrainian government agency to develop defense technologies, while subsidiary Rakuten Mobile has taken part in joint U.S.-Japan military trials of mobile technologies.

LemonLime cofounder Jordan Zietz hears your criticism loud and clear. That's why he got his startup's logo tattooed on his shoulder. Jordan Zietz wants to be clear: He has never, and will never, force anyone to tattoo his startup's logo on their body. The 24-year-old briefly became the internet's most hated person after LemonLime, his AI-for-small-business startup, hosted a party following Y Combinator's Startup School in late July. In a LinkedIn post, Zietz wrote that he brought an "actual tattoo artist" to the party, and "offered an instant interview to anyone who got a LemonLime tattoo."

Startups and Big Ag are using Crispr gene editing to create crops that taste better and grow on a hotter planet. But will they find a market? If you wanted to create better blackberries, you could try to breed a variety without the seeds that get stuck in your teeth. Or one without the thorns that make the berries hard to pick. Or you could aim for more environmentally efficient plants that produce more berries per acre with less water and fewer chemicals.

Way back in the summer of 2017, AI researchers at Google put out a paper called "Attention Is All You Need," in which they described a new type of neural network called a transformer. It proved to be very good at processing long sequences of data, especially text. Nine years on, transformers are the engines inside every major large language model on the market. "The entire AI industry is built on transformers," says Justin Dangel, cofounder and CEO of the AI startup Subquadratic. "They are one of the most important innovations in the history of computer science, and they've changed the world." But transformers are starting to show their age. Many of the recent advances in LLMs, such as the development of so-called reasoning models and their ability to handle large amounts of input at once, are not neat extensions of that core technology but workarounds that patch over some of its fundamental flaws. A growing number of scientists and engineers are now asking what's coming next. LLMs are not going anywhere, but the way they get built is up for grabs.

How are companies, governments responding to the OpenAI hack? ChatGPT owner OpenAI has admitted an "unprecedented cyber incident" - two of its most capable artificial intelligence models hacked into another AI company on their own - stirring debates over the need for stronger technology guardrails. The company said its AI systems broke out of a testing environment and hacked startup Hugging Face. The startup had disclosed on July 16 that its servers were hacked by an unknown but sophisticated agent acting on its own. Here's the latest on how companies, some governments and lawmakers have responded to the first such publicly disclosed cyberattack: What has Hugging Face said?

Undergrads' weed-killing robot wins top prize A team of Cornell undergraduates beat 95 other teams to take the grand prize at The Farm Robotics Challenge with their invention: an autonomous robot that kills weeds with electricity. Their robot can travel through a vineyard or orchard without a human operator, zapping weeds with a small amount of electricity, saving labor and energy and preventing crop loss, without the use of herbicides. Led by Andrew James, an agricultural sciences major in the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences (CALS), the team of agricultural specialists and engineers studied the existing electrical weeding technology, developed their own low-energy system and built a working prototype over the course of four intense months. Natalia Kurz, a biological engineering major in CALS, said the project required a lot of late nights. "There were fears for us, like, was it just going to be for nothing?"

Here's Why Anthropic Is Pushing States to Regulate AI Faster The company endorsed landmark AI transparency laws in California and New York last year, but its head of US state and local policy says they may already be outdated. Anthropic threw its support behind the first wave of frontier AI safety laws in the United States last year, securing new transparency requirements in California and New York that much of Silicon Valley fought against, arguing they would stifle the AI boom . But Anthropic says those laws may already be outdated, and the company is now pushing states to adopt even tougher regulations. "The transparency-focused safety bills of 2025 were a really important start, but as the capabilities of AI systems continue to advance quickly--the policy responses need to match," Cesar Fernandez, Anthropic's head of US state and local government relations, told WIRED in an interview. "We think that transparency and self reporting are no longer sufficient safety measures for the most powerful AI systems."