My Decoder guest today is Hayden Field, The Verge’s senior AI reporter, and we’re discussing the new wave of consumer-friendly AI agents. If you’ve been paying attention to this space, you know AI enthusiasts have been using agents for a minute now — homebrew OpenClaw setups led to a surge in Mac Mini sales earlier this year. But the launch of Meta’s Muse, OpenAI’s Dots, and xAI’s Grok bot has brought easy to use agents to millions. Muse and Dots have had the highest-profile product launches, and they’re fascinating to pit against each other. Both Meta and OpenAI have decided to pitch these agents to mainstream users and businesses in the form of cute, animated mascots. Verge subscribers, don’t forget you get exclusive access to ad-free Decoder wherever you get your podcasts. Head here. N…

OpenAI, CloudFlare, and Amazon have all copied this tiny startup.

Gears of War: E-Day leads the charge on GeForce NOW this week, bringing Marcus Fenix and Dom Santiago’s first fight against the Locust Horde to the cloud with GeForce RTX-powered performance. A new way to join the action is also coming: Fire TV users will soon be able to purchase GeForce NOW memberships directly through […]

The combination of Replit & Databricks gives enterprises a complete development-to-deployment platform...

We’d like to hear from people who have been monitored or assessed by AI at work and what they thought about the experience Firms are increasingly using AI to monitor or assess their employees, leading to concerns about workplace surveillance. Instructors at tech training company Multiverse recently blew the whistle at their “remorseless” and “unnerving” AI monitoring system, while The Co-Op has used automated listening technology that rates every phone call some of them make to customers. Continue reading...

LegalOn cut estimated daily Codex costs by 65% while maintaining development speed. It matched Astra, Sol, and Luna to tasks and managed budgets strategically.

With GPT-5.6, GPT-6 Astra, and GPT‑Image‑2.5, Pollo AI helps creators turn bold ideas into detailed images and cinematic video ads.

Artificial intelligence systems are difficult to reproduce because their behavior depends on nondeterministic models and on data, configurations, policies, and external services that continue to change. But exact reproducibility is not always what operators, investigators, or auditors need. They often need something different: historical reconstructability. The central claim is that reconstructability is a system property […]

Jev started a revolution. Now we are getting dozens of decision models

AI is already implicated in violent deaths and nearly started world war three. Those bad things? They only happen to other people Sam Altman, the chief executive of OpenAI, has some words for you about his company and the future of artificial intelligence. “One of the differences between us and some of the stricter AI safety people is that we believe that the world should accept some bad things happening for the benefits of this technology and people having the agency [to use it],” Altman told Politico’s new technology podcast and newsletter Decoded. Moustafa Bayoumi is the author of the award-winning books How Does It Feel to Be a Problem?: Being Young and Arab in America and This Muslim American Life: Dispatches from the War on Terror. He is professor of English at Brooklyn College, Cit…

Have an idea for a lesson illustration, a project chart, or a comic for your next presentation? Nano Banana 2.1 lets you explore these formats with text prompts, making it easier to try different visual styles without switching between tools. In this article, we test Nano Banana 2.1 across four practical tasks: a clay illustration, […] The post Nano Banana 2.1 Review appeared first on Analytics Vidhya.

Whistleblower says recording and analysis of all probate calls is ‘oppressive and dystopian’ The Co-op has become the latest employer to place workers under AI surveillance with an automated listening technology that rates every phone call some of them make to customers. In a system described as “oppressive and dystopian” by a whistleblower, Co-op Legal Services is using AI models to record, analyse and award a percentage score for interactions between agents and customers seeking advice about probate, wills and estates. Continue reading...

Refugee gig workers for tech companies don’t know how much they’ll be paid – if AI hasn’t already taken their jobs In a portable building in Kakuma, a refugee camp near Kenya’s northern border with South Sudan, Grace used ChatGPT to research translations of Christian hymns in languages she doesn’t speak. She didn’t know the client, the purpose of her work or whether she would be paid, but as a refugee unable to legally work in Kenya, she needed any opportunity she could get. Grace, who requested anonymity due to a nondisclosure agreement, prompted ChatGPT to translate the hymn’s English text into the assigned east Asian language. She then used the translation to search for existing versions and find information about its translator, author and Christian denomination. She fed those details…

Architect Financial Technologies has launched Liquid Inference, an LLM router that runs a live auction for every request. Liquid Inference is an LLM inference marketplace from Architect where providers bid to serve each prompt. The buyer pays the lowest offer that meets its rules. For developers, it is quite simple message: swap a base URL, […] The post Architect Launches Liquid Inference, a Real-Time Auction for LLM Inference appeared first on MarkTechPost.

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NVIDIA researchers introduced PivotOPD, an on-policy distillation method that trains multi-turn LLM agents to avoid early pivotal mistakes and recover from them, posting the best average against 13 baselines on 3 agent benchmarks. The post NVIDIA PivotOPD Teaches Multi-Turn AI Agents to Recover From Pivotal Mistakes appeared first on MarkTechPost.

yay small models

Sparse neural retrieval finally started getting more and more attention (SPARSEUP, MILCO, sparse encoders in Sentence Transformers…). Well, amazing, we like attention! Our miniCOIL v1 sparse neural retriever article ended with a promise: to keep working on this sparse neural retriever in-depth, improving the model’s quality, and in-width, “extending it to other dense encoders and to languages beyond English.” Here is the next “in-width” step of the miniCOIL saga: to try and cross the language barrier, that is, make the model suitable for multilingual retrieval. It’s a fun challenge, as sparse retrievers are hard to adapt to this scenario: exact matching in cross-lingual text search usually means translation.

When Redis changed its licensing in 2024, replacing its permissive BSD license with proprietary, source-available alternatives, it prompted a major The post Redis by proxy: Percona targets the last major hurdle to Valkey adoption appeared first on The New Stack.

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Perplexity's pplx-embed-v2-late comes in 2 sizes: a 0.6B model built to run on edge devices, and a 9B model for building high-quality indexes. Its best score is 92.4% on MADQA, and its weakest is 61.2% on ViDoRe v3 Markdown. Both are MIT-licensed and ready to self-host. The post Perplexity AI Releases pplx-embed-v2-late: A 0.6B Edge Model and a 9B Model Scoring 92.4% on MADQA appeared first on MarkTechPost.

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arXiv:2610.08970v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Humanoid loco-manipulation of large, heavy objects demands forceful interaction across the entire body. However, such payloads shift a humanoid's center of mass and impose sustained loads across the upper body, challenging balance and command tracking. We present HULK, a whole-body control framework for forceful loco-manipulation. Using model predictive control (MPC) to guide reinforcement learning with predictions of the loaded dynamics, we train two teachers: one tracks arm motions under wrist forces, and the other locomotes while holding large objects against the body. A capture-point control barrier function augments the wrist-force teacher during training to improve balance under load. We distill both teachers into a single policy. Eval…

arXiv:2610.08933v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Deep-space crews cannot rely on real-time ground support for urgent off-nominal events. Initial alerts may underdetermine cause, while discriminating evidence may reside in crew observations or at locations that are unsafe, costly, or unavailable for crew inspection. We present an evidence-driven architecture for human-agent-robot teaming in Earth-independent anomaly triage. Agentic AI is treated as a stateful coordinator over bounded, inspectable services rather than as a fully autonomous vehicle controller. A triage state manager maintains hypotheses, evidence provenance, uncertainty, operational context, and tool status; a crew-facing embodied agent elicits observations and explains assessment changes; and a mobile robot acquires targeted…

arXiv:2610.08870v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Unlike conventional teleoperation, wearable interfaces allow operators to collect dexterous demonstrations through their own hand motions while directly interacting with task objects. This direct interaction reduces dependence on the target robot during collection, but it also makes the collection hardware part of the physical process that generates each demonstration. Interface geometry can influence both how a task is performed and what tactile observations are recorded for learning. We study two versions of a DexUMI-family exoskeleton that share the same robot command definition, mapping procedure, and tactile module type but differ in hand-side geometry. The revised interface reduces reported physical demand, improves selected device rat…

arXiv:2610.08863v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: A common way for trajectory planning is to leverage generative models trained on large collections of expert trajectories. At inference time, the model generates executable trajectories by conditioning on task goal constraints. However, trajectory-based methods rely on costly supervision, scale poorly with sequence length, and often generalize poorly to unseen constraints such as novel start-goal pairs. We propose an alternative to learn the underlying state-space manifold and use the geometry of the manifold for trajectory planning. This approach requires only state observations and enables generalization to unseen constraints by con- structing trajectories on the learned manifold of the state space. Experiments on Maze2D and robotic motion…

arXiv:2610.08862v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Household robots must accommodate new user instructions while executing ongoing tasks. Existing agents often regenerate or extensively revise the remaining task sequence, introducing plan ambiguity, logical inconsistency, and redundant execution. We formulate continual instruction reconciliation and propose CIRRA (Continual Instruction Reconciliation for Robot Agents), a dual-level framework combining LLM-based semantic reasoning with rule-constrained structural integration. CIRRA first grounds incoming instructions to unique executable skills and resolves underspecified actions and execution locations. It then preserves the ongoing subtask sequence as an execution backbone and generates integration candidates by inserting incoming subtasks…

arXiv:2610.08852v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Self-driving laboratories (SDLs) are transforming chemical and materials discovery through closed-loop automation, yet automated infrastructure for physical manipulation of soft, deformable matter remains beyond current robotic platforms. A critical instance is autonomous droplet transport on an open surface, where contact-angle hysteresis, capillary pinning, and surface heterogeneity produce partially observable dynamics that pose significant challenges for classical model-based controllers. We introduce the first robotic platform for closed-loop autonomous liquid droplet navigation on an open, unconfined surface using model-based reinforcement learning. A two-axis tilting board coated with a thin silicone oil film drives the droplet, while…

arXiv:2610.08812v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We present Go2-DrivoR, a goal-conditioned adaptation of the end-to-end autonomous driving trajectory planning framework DrivoR for urban navigation with quadrupedal robots. By conditioning trajectory generation on a local-frame subgoal through a goal token and adapting the vehicle-centric scoring formulation, the method extends DrivoR to short-horizon goal-conditioned local planning without redesigning its core decoders. Specifically, we redefine drivable-area compliance for sidewalk-oriented navigation and reformulate the original ego progress term as goal-conditioned ego progress. Trained exclusively on TartanGround simulation data, Go2-DrivoR improves waypoint-conditioned planning performance on unseen simulation environments and transfer…