From the archive
Follow the latest AI news and artificial intelligence developments across models, agents, robotics, research and the wider industry. Explore new AI tools, advances in computing, business moves, safety and policy, with clear reporting and useful sources. Read the stories, catch up with News in Brief and join the conversation.
Lead story
Robots can now use vision-language-action models to handle tasks such as packing a lunchbox, but they are still likely to fail at jobs beyond their training examples. MIT Technology Review’s account explains why progress in robot AI is real, while claims of near-term general-purpose humanoids remain a much…
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HSBC is adding AI and wealth roles in Singapore while, according to reporting cited by Resultsense, planning substantial cuts in its UK wealth business. The contrast puts the focus on which jobs change, and where, rather than whether AI simply creates or destroys jobs.
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A Senate energy bill would make large data centres cover more of the electricity-grid costs linked to their growth, while speeding up energy infrastructure approvals. The proposal could reshape who pays for the AI build-out, but it is not yet law.
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Google is introducing AISeal, a hardware-isolated vault for personal data used by AI on Android devices. The first step is protected storage for personal context; running models and agents inside the vault is a later goal, not a capability Google says is already in place.
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AI trading startup Catalyst has raised a $30 million seed round led by Sequoia, Fortune reports. The company says a pilot generated hundreds of millions of dollars in trading volume over two weeks, a striking figure that measures activity, not whether investors made money.
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Google Cloud has introduced Gemini agent, a work-focused AI assistant designed to handle knowledge work, content creation and coding from one prompt box. Its notable twist is that the agent can use both Gemini and Claude models, with Google saying it plans to add more open and private…
Meta AI Watch
Meta says it is donating 1,000 Ray-Ban Meta AI glasses to four Singapore organisations serving people with disabilities, alongside US$30,000 for accessibility training. The scheme pairs glasses that can read text and describe surroundings with free training on using them safely and effectively.
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Developers are using AI regularly, but most draw the line at work they cannot readily check. A new survey account suggests that, for many, trust depends less on enthusiasm than on whether they can inspect the answer.
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Reflection AI has introduced Beam, its first open-weight model, and is pitching reasoning efficiency rather than a clean sweep of the model rankings. The reported results put it near an earlier GLM model on one coding test, while newer Chinese models score higher on several comparisons.
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Argonne National Laboratory has connected an AI agent to an X-ray microscope, letting researchers ask it in natural language to inspect areas of interest. The experimental system can collect and analyse data, reconstruct images as they arrive and flag places to investigate next.
MIT CSAIL Watch
MIT researcher Christina Delimitrou is applying machine learning to make data centres more efficient, reliable and secure. Her work targets a practical problem: getting more useful computing from existing equipment could reduce wasted energy and pressure to build more capacity.
AWS AI Watch
Hancom is working with AWS to prepare Nomadian, its AI-agent workforce platform, for the US market, with a beta planned for late December. The partnership brings product development and commercial planning together, making this more than a listing on a cloud marketplace.
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Jamie Dimon says AI will eliminate some jobs, but argues businesses and governments should phase in the transition and help affected workers. His example of automated lorries is hypothetical, but the policy choice behind it is real: who absorbs the cost when technology changes work faster than people…
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Jeff Bezos says AI-driven productivity could let some people support their families on a single income or work a three-day week. In a Fox News interview, he also argued for light regulation of AI while the technology develops, putting a prominent tech leader’s optimistic view of work and…
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SafeWorld has emerged from stealth with $12.2 million to build software that tests how autonomous robots behave in dangerous or unexpected situations. The company says its simulations can expose more edge cases before robots are deployed around people, though the announcement offers no independent results showing how well…
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Developer Brandon Thomas says he used Anthropic’s Claude Opus 5.5 to build seven open-source apps modelled on Adobe tools, in an ambitious project that puts AI-assisted software development and the boundaries of imitation in the same frame.
NVIDIA Watch
NVIDIA and Microsoft have announced a partnership to build hardware and software for AI agents running on Windows PCs. The plan combines NVIDIA’s RTX Spark platform with Microsoft’s agent-containment tools, bringing local AI computing and agent execution into the same Windows push.
