The father of reinforcement learning is leaving Carmack to build his own AI
The father of reinforcement learning is leaving Carmack to build his own AI

One of the most decorated minds in AI is striking out alone. Richard Sutton shared the 2024 Turing Award for founding modern reinforcement learning. On Monday he said he is leaving John Carmack’s startup Keen Technologies to start a new one, Oak Lab. H…

Intel is putting 5 billion euros into Ireland, and Europe just got one of the few EUV fabs on the continent
Intel is putting 5 billion euros into Ireland, and Europe just got one of the few EUV fabs on the continent

Intel is committing 5 billion euros, around $5.7bn, to expand its campus at Leixlip in Ireland. The money is aimed at data-centre processors for AI and high-performance computing, Bloomberg reports. It is a serious share of the company’s budget. The su…

The AI boom broke the memory market, and the bust could be brutal
The AI boom broke the memory market, and the bust could be brutal

The AI boom has broken the memory market’s oldest rule. Prices that should be falling are soaring instead, and the AI memory crunch will not ease until 2028. The hangover, when it comes, could be brutal. Memory is meant to be boring. For decades DRAM a…

Yann LeCun’s new VC fund lasted eight hours. Then it vanished
Yann LeCun’s new VC fund lasted eight hours. Then it vanished

A shiny new VC firm named the AI pioneer as a partner on Friday morning. By Friday night, the fund did not exist. Yann LeCun has had a busy year. Now he has had a strange one. On Friday, a new venture firm called Extelligence Invest named the man often…

Home robots already walk. 1X’s new hands try to solve the part that actually matters
Home robots already walk. 1X’s new hands try to solve the part that actually matters

Humanoid robots learned to walk years ago. The thing still tripping them up is the hand. 1X has given its NEO home robot new hands, and they are the most interesting thing about it. A robot can stride across a stage and still be useless in a kitchen. L…

China just caught a rocket in a net, and SpaceX should be watching
China just caught a rocket in a net, and SpaceX should be watching

SpaceX lands its rockets on legs. Blue Origin uses a platform. China just caught one in a giant net. China has recovered the first stage of an orbital rocket for the first time. The milestone pulls it into a club with only two other members. On Friday,…

From powerboat records to a $1bn war chest: meet Europe’s newest defence unicorn
From powerboat records to a $1bn war chest: meet Europe’s newest defence unicorn

First the Royal Navy shoved a robot boat out of a transport plane at 1,300 feet. Then its maker became Europe’s newest defence unicorn. Kraken Technology Group, a British maker of uncrewed surface vessels, has raised $175m (€152.9m) in a Series B round…

A €91M bet on the diamond microscope that could be Europe’s next ASML
A €91M bet on the diamond microscope that could be Europe’s next ASML

Europe uses about a fifth of the world’s chips, but makes only a tenth of them. A three-year-old Munich startup thinks it can help close that gap, and Brussels has just backed the bet. QuantumDiamonds is a spin-out of the Technical University of Munich…

Humanoid robots just removed organs from live animals for the first time
Humanoid robots just removed organs from live animals for the first time

Two robots that look roughly like people just reached inside a live animal and removed an organ. No film studio staged the scene. It happened in a lab in California, and it is a first for medicine. Surgeons at the University of California San Diego use…