He Xiaopeng launches Xpeng's next-gen Iron humanoid robot during a press conference at the company's headquarters in Guangzhou on November 5, 2025. He Xiaopeng launches Xpeng's next-gen Iron humanoid robot during a press conference at the company's headquarters in Guangzhou on November 5, 2025. It was a controversy laced with pride for He Xiaopeng. In November, He, the founder and CEO of Chinese physical AI firm XPeng, had just debuted his new humanoid robot, IRON, whose balance, posture shifts, and coquettish swagger mirrored human motion with such eerie precision that a slew of netizens accused him of faking the demonstration by putting a human in a bodysuit. To silence the naysayers, He boldly cut open the robot's leg live on stage to reveal the intricate mechanical systems that allow it to adapt to uneven surfaces and maintain stability just like the human body. "At first, it made me sad," He tells TIME in his Guangzhou headquarters.

Physicists finally know how much faster time moves on the Red Planet. Breakthroughs, discoveries, and DIY tips sent every weekday. Tracking the first astronauts' visit to Mars won't be as simple as watching a clock or marking days off of a calendar. Thanks to relativity, time actually moves faster on the Red Planet than it does here on Earth. For years, scientists have wondered about the exact temporal difference between planets, but physicists at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) finally have an answer.

By how much, if at all, will AI boost the U.S. economy? New research by Anthropic, seen exclusively by TIME in advance of its release today, offers at least a partial answer to that question. By studying aggregated data about how people use Claude in the course of their work, Anthropic researchers came up with an estimate for how much AI could contribute to annual labor productivity growth--an important contributor to the total level of growth in the overall economy--as the technology becomes more widely used. Their answer: current-generation AI models could increase the U.S. annual labor productivity growth rate by 1.8%--doubling the average rate of growth since 2019. Assuming that labor makes up 60% of total productivity in the economy, and that AI reaches full diffusion in a decade's time, "this implies an overall total factor productivity increase of 1.1% per year," the researchers write.

Will artificial intelligence take our jobs? If you listen to Silicon Valley executives talking about the capabilities of today's cutting edge AI systems, you might think the answer is "yes, and soon." But a new paper published by MIT researchers suggests automation in the workforce might happen slower than you think. The researchers at MIT's computer science and artificial intelligence laboratory studied not only whether AI was able to perform a task, but also whether it made economic sense for firms to replace humans performing those tasks in the wider context of the labor market. They found that while computer vision AI is today capable of automating tasks that account for 1.6% of worker wages in the U.S. economy (excluding agriculture), only 23% of those wages (0.4% of the economy as a whole) would, at today's costs, be cheaper for firms to automate instead of paying human workers.

It was a strange Thanksgiving for Sam Altman. Normally, the CEO of OpenAI flies home to St. Louis to visit family. But this time the holiday came after an existential struggle for control of a company that some believe holds the fate of humanity in its hands. He went to his Napa Valley ranch for a hike, then returned to San Francisco to spend a few hours with one of the board members who had just fired and reinstated him in the span of five frantic days. He put his computer away for a few hours to cook vegetarian pasta, play loud music, and drink wine with his fiancé Oliver Mulherin. "This was a 10-out-of-10 crazy thing to live through," Altman tells TIME on Nov. 30. We're speaking exactly one year after OpenAI released Chat-GPT, the most rapidly adopted tech product ever. The impact of the chatbot and its successor, GPT-4, was transformative--for the company and the world. "For many people," Altman says, 2023 was "the year that they started taking AI seriously." Born as a nonprofit research lab dedicated to building artificial intelligence for the benefit of humanity, OpenAI became an $80 billion rocket ship. Altman emerged as one of the most powerful and venerated executives in the world, the public face and leading prophet of a technological revolution. On Nov. 17, OpenAI's nonprofit board of directors fired Altman, without warning or even much in the way of explanation. The surreal maneuvering that followed made the corporate dramas of Succession seem staid. So did OpenAI's powerful investors; one even baselessly speculated that one of the directors who defenestrated Altman was a Chinese spy. The company's visionary chief scientist voted to oust his fellow co-founder, only to backtrack. Two interim CEOs came and went.

Leonid Tymchenko spent the first month of Russia's invasion sitting in his dark government office after curfew. Unable to go home, Ukraine's Deputy Minister of Internal Affairs scrolled through Telegram, looking at thousands of videos and images of advancing Russian soldiers. When Tymchenko was offered a chance to test a new facial-recognition tool, he uploaded some of the photos to try it out. He could not believe the results. Every time Tymchenko added a photo of a Russian soldier, the software, made by the American facial-recognition company Clearview AI, seemed to come back with an exact hit, linking to pages that revealed the soldier's name, hometown, and social-media profile.

On Nov. 13, Facebook announced with great fanfare that it was taking down substantially more posts containing hate speech from its platform than ever before. Facebook removed more than seven million instances of hate speech in the third quarter of 2019, the company claimed, an increase of 59% against the previous quarter. More and more of that hate speech (80%) is now being detected not by humans, they added, but automatically, by artificial intelligence. The new statistics, however, conceal a structural problem Facebook is yet to overcome: not all hate speech is treated equally. The algorithms Facebook currently uses to remove hate speech only work in certain languages. That means it has become easier for Facebook to contain the spread of racial or religious hatred online in the primarily developed countries and communities where global languages like English, Spanish and Mandarin dominate.

In June of 2007, Albert Tsao, a nineteen-year-old native of Silver Spring, Maryland, was working in Trondheim, Norway, at the Kavli Institute for Systems Neuroscience. Tsao was a summer intern in the lab of May-Britt and Edvard Moser, married researchers who were well known in neurobiology circles for discovering "grid cells"--neurons that, by tracking our position, create a navigational map in the brain. Grid cells are located in an area of the brain called the medial entorhinal cortex. Tsao was curious about the relatively uncharted region next door--the lateral entorhinal cortex, or L.E.C. After implanting tiny electrodes in the L.E.C.s of some rats, he set them foraging for bits of chocolate cereal in a series of boxes, some black, some white.

Roughly 20 km away from Hong Kong's slick, densely packed urban center lies the New Territories -- a suburban mishmash of rugged hills and scruffy villages, soaring new housing developments and vacant lots. This is where over half of the territory's 7.2 million people live. It could also be the resting place for your old PC or printer. Up to 20% of all U.S. electronic waste may be ending up in Hong Kong. Not in some scrapyard in the developing world, picked over by haggard children and wheezing laborers, but in the backyard of one of the world's most sophisticated financial capitals.