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AIOf 1,933 IROS 2026 papers, Robot Learning/Embodied AI appears in about 809, while Navigation/Planning covers 564 and Perception/Vision 556. The article argues large models are being embedded into traditional planning, geometry, and control rather than replacing them. Vision-language-action models are shifting toward efficiency, 3D understanding, memory, and system integration.

AIEpoch AI estimates the AI chips shipped through 2027 could support about 30 to 170 million concurrent frontier-model agents, or nearly 2 billion with cheaper models. Its researchers find the cost of a fixed level of AI performance has fallen about 47% per quarter over the past three years. The newsletter also reports China's semiconductor supply-chain exposure is 2.7 times that of the US.

AIArtificial Analysis and Harvey released LAB-AA v1.1, which credits a legal task only when deliverables pass every rubric criterion with no material hallucinations. Grok 4.7 (xhigh) leads at 9.4%, ahead of Muse Spark 1.3 (max) at 8.9% and GPT-6 Astra (max) at 8.6%, while over 60% of otherwise passing results contained a material hallucination. The sharper reordering appears in the hallucination counts, where GPT-6 Astra averages 0.03 material hallucinations per task against 13.96 for Gemini 3.8 Flash (high).

AIAmong models with a Hallucination-Gated All-Pass Rate above 0%, GPT-6 Luna (max), GPT-6.1 Sol (max), Muse Spark 1.3 (max), and Grok 4.7 (xhigh) set the Pareto frontier for score versus cost per task. GPT-6 Luna (max) is the cheapest at about $0.22 per task, scoring 3.3%, while Grok 4.7 (xhigh) leads at about $9.50 per task and Muse Spark 1.3 (max) costs about $4.20. The three Claude models cost about $18 to $22 per task.

AIArtificial Analysis reports that Kimi K3 (max) achieves a 93.0% Criterion Pass Rate but averages 2.09 material hallucinations per task. Muse Spark 1.3 (max) scores higher at 96.0% while averaging 1.68 material hallucinations per task, showing that completing criteria and avoiding hallucinations are distinct skills.

AIEpoch AI says it will expand its task suite, retire saturated tasks, and publish updated findings as new models are released. The announcement points to a full report by Kelly Hong on whether AI can automate tasks.

AIEpoch AI introduced Epoch Automation Reports, which evaluate frontier models on realistic, open-ended tasks drawn from its own work. Claude Fable 5.1 and GPT-6 Astra lead the results, but neither comes close to fully automating Epoch's work.

AIHarvey LAB-AA v1.1 adds hallucination checks that audit every model deliverable against task source documents, with material hallucinations zeroing a task's score. GPT-6 Astra averaged 0.03 material hallucinations per task across 120 tasks, while Gemini 3.8 Flash averaged 13.96. Harvey uses GPT-6 Sol (high) as the hallucination checker, separate from its three-judge rubric panel.

AIWaymo research found that even fully sober human drivers face nighttime fatal crash risk 3.1 to 3.9 times higher than daytime risk, pointing to systemic hazards beyond impairment. The study used an exposure reconstruction model across the 50 most populous U.S. urban areas, showing removing alcohol-involved drivers lowers the average urban fatal crash rate by 23%, from 1.42 to 1.10 per 100 million miles.

AIA Google Research field experiment with 133 patent lawyers found AI tool access raised drafting scores by 0.34 to 0.38 standard deviations over three months. When the tool was removed for a redlining task, only senior lawyers kept an advantage of 0.45 SD, while junior lawyers showed no discernible improvement. The authors argue that tools which boost current output must not stop junior professionals from building the judgment that senior experts rely on.

Why it matters: The field experiment separates AI's short-term productivity gains from skill retained after the tool is removed, which matters for training junior professionals.

AIGoogle describes new research intended to help researchers and public health officials complement existing health information and bridge reporting gaps. The stated goal is to address health challenges proactively. The post provides no further details on the specific research, methods, or results.

AIGoogle researchers, working with Northwestern Medicine and Jacaranda Health, trained healthcare workers to perform "blind sweep" ultrasounds analyzed by machine learning models. The models estimated gestational age and fetal presentation as accurately as a trained sonographer in a study of 1,000 mothers each in Nairobi and Chicago. The AI processes results on the device, so it needs no electricity supply or Wi-Fi.

AIGoogle Research reports that Population Dynamics Foundation Model (PDFM) embeddings, built from search trends, mobility, built environment, and weather signals, were tested by partners across five public health tasks. The embeddings improved results in cross-border MMR vaccination coverage, dengue forecasting, postpartum depression screening, and cholera outbreak prediction, and matched census inputs for cardiovascular mortality nowcasting.

AIOpenAI researchers' daily coding-agent usage, valued at API prices, rose from under $1 in January 2026 to $601 for the median researcher by mid-August. The 90th-percentile researcher reached over $7,000 per day, and both groups show doubling times of roughly one month. Epoch notes these are API-list values, not OpenAI's internal costs.

Why it matters: The figures show internal coding-agent usage growing fast enough to matter for research cost, though they measure API-list value rather than OpenAI's actual spending.

AIThe post argues that counting all research as safety work because it widens the safety-usefulness Pareto frontier is misleading. Safety research typically creates new safety options without boosting usefulness, while capabilities research typically raises usefulness at safety's expense, so developers tend to choose less safe points.

AINathan Lambert's latest Interconnects plot tracks daily tokens processed by leading open model inference providers. The figures come from public disclosures by Together, Baseten, and Fireworks, plus the OpenRouter API. He says he underestimated OpenRouter's growth.

AIAnthropic's research rates how well present-day robots can perform US job tasks, finding they can do 74% of physical tasks, or 34% of working hours, mostly in limited settings. Robots are cost-competitive for only 0.3% of job tasks, and at a 3% annual price decline it would take about 40 years to reach 10%. The report also finds robot-exposed jobs tend to pay less and be more physically demanding than LLM-exposed jobs.

Why it matters: The report separates current robot capability from cost, showing that physical automation is technically broad but economically narrow for now.

AIHuawei will likely remain about four years behind Nvidia in AI chip performance and production through 2030, Epoch AI estimates. Its flagship Ascend 950 delivers roughly half the performance of Nvidia's 2022 H100, and Huawei is projected to produce about 1.5 million chips in 2026 versus Nvidia's roughly 6 million, leaving it about 25 times behind in total compute.

AIMicrosoft Research's latest Research Focus issue covers how coding agents behave at scale, evaluations of AI models that find lymphoma lesions in PET/CT scans, and understanding AI chatbot dependence. It also features research on advancing large-scale decision-making systems.

AIGeekbench 7 testing on the Snapdragon X2 Elite shows x86-64 binaries running through Windows 11's Prism translator lose substantial performance compared with native aarch64 execution. Binary translation roughly doubles executed instructions when running the x86-64 version, and every tested core, including Qualcomm's, takes a notable penalty. Even with that penalty, the Snapdragon X2 Elite's E-Cores outperform Neoverse N1 and its P-Cores outperform Neoverse N2.

AIDwarkesh Patel and a collaborator pretrained open model recipes and data corpora from 2019 to 2025 at small scales. Data improvements contributed 12.0x compute multipliers versus 3.7x for model improvements, and the two gains stack independently.

AIPiotr Migdał tested 16 AI models on 1,040 mushroom photos covering 55 species, and the best, Gemini-3.8-flash, was correct on its first guess only 65 percent of the time. Dangerous mistakes were common, with the death cap called edible 16 percent of the time, and Qwen3.8-27b wrongly labeled poisonous mushrooms edible 36 percent of the time. Migdał warns users not to eat any mushroom because an AI says it is safe.

AIGoogle's RT-2 model, announced in July 2023, trained a multimodal LLM to output robot actions directly, and the article argues this approach launched the current robotics boom. The author follows later work from Physical Intelligence, including action chunking with flow matching, reinforcement learning on real robots, and visual subgoal generation, and notes that the field is debating whether vision-language-action models will give way to world models.

AIEpoch AI argues US GDP growth over the last year was underestimated by about 0.3 percentage points because value from fabless chipmakers like Nvidia goes unrecorded. The report says no goods export, IP export, service export, or merchanting category captures Nvidia's value-add, and the Bureau of Economic Analysis confirmed the analysis. If Nvidia's growth continues, the gap could reach almost two percentage points per year by 2028.

AIPrompts built entirely from simulated experience, such as from a scripted policy, an RL agent, or a teleoperated simulated robot, can produce behaviors on a real robot. The model was not trained on the task in either the simulator or the real world, so the transfer is zero-shot.

AIResearchers from Keio University and the MIT Media Lab built a soft, helium-filled robot with gentle flapping fins and no face, rotors, or pinch points. In demos it served as an alarm clock, study buddy, movement reminder, and dance partner, communicating through movement. The team designed it to avoid the uncanny valley and be safe to touch, betting people will welcome it into their personal space.

AIThe AI Futures Project says its timelines shortened slightly, with coding uplift, revenue, and time horizon methods giving similar Automated Coder arrival dates. It estimates reality is progressing at roughly 70-90% the pace of its AI 2027 scenario, and it now states its forecasts assume progress as fast as technically feasible.

AIAhmad Al-Dahle outlined three architectural innovations ahead of a forthcoming technical report. KDA replaces Gated DeltaNet's single scalar decay with learned per-dimension forgetting, AttnRes retrieves selectively across depth, and LatentMoE activates 16 of 896 experts balanced from router score quantiles.

AIThe AI Futures Project has published AI 2040: Plan A, a detailed scenario recommending policy action that delays superintelligence until 2040 rather than 2030. The authors present it as a recommendation rather than a prediction, and it is available at ai-2040.com in text, audio, and mobile formats, with a fuller experience on a desktop computer.

AIOpenAI's Economic Research team published a new paper on the shift from chat to delegation, where people hand longer, more complex work to agents. The post draws on Codex usage inside OpenAI as a preview of what agentic work may look like in the future.

AIThe post argues that China's commercial-scale EUV machines should be forecast for the late 2030s and immersion DUV for the mid-2030s, using ASML's development timeline as a reference. It also weighs factors that could push these estimates earlier or later, including state funding, espionage, talent flows, and the use of AI in R&D. The authors note that forecasts placing either milestone in the 2020s would need strong justification.

AIResearchers trained a humanoid with 22-DoF dexterous hands mainly on over 20,000 hours of egocentric human video, with no robot in the loop, to perform tasks such as assembling model cars and folding shirts. They report a log-linear scaling law (R² = 0.998) between human video volume and action prediction loss, and state that this loss predicts real-robot success rate. The recipe, called EgoScale, pre-trains GR00T N1.5 on the video, adds only 4 hours of robot play data, and reports a 54% gain over training from scratch across five dexterous tasks.