Robotics foundation models have made remarkable progress. Today's best systems can follow natural language instructions to pick, place, sort, and manipulate a... Robotics foundation models have made remarkable progress. Today’s best systems can follow natural language instructions to pick, place, sort, and manipulate a wide variety of objects. But as these models grow more capable, evaluating them rigorously has become one of the field’s hardest unsolved problems. In this blog post, we introduce…
Large language model (LLM) training workloads increasingly run into GPU memory limits before compute is fully used. Model weights, gradients, optimizer states,... Large language model (LLM) training workloads increasingly run into GPU memory limits before compute is fully used. Model weights, gradients, optimizer states, communication buffers, and intermediate activations all compete for GPU high-bandwidth memory (HBM). As model size, sequence length, and batch size grow, HBM capacity often beco…
There are many ways to optimize code for GPUs. In this post, you’ll learn how kernel fusion can improve memory bandwidth and reduce kernel launch overhead,... There are many ways to optimize code for GPUs. In this post, you’ll learn how kernel fusion can improve memory bandwidth and reduce kernel launch overhead, along with multiple ways to apply it in NVIDIA CUDA code. A common bottleneck when writing GPU code is that GPU compute is so fast that even high-bandwidth device memory doesn’t use the…
AI performance comes down to three dimensions: Accuracy: How well the model reasons and produces outputs Throughput: How many tokens per second a... AI performance comes down to three dimensions: Deployments must balance all three: High accuracy is wasted if responses are slow, and raw throughput means little if each user’s experience is laggy. Practical systems therefore optimize accuracy, throughput, and interactivity together. This post focuses on throughput and interactivity, and how model-d…
Video Friday is your weekly selection of awesome robotics videos, collected by your friends at IEEE Spectrum robotics. We also post a weekly calendar of upcoming robotics events for the next few months. Please send us your events for inclusion. RSS 2026: 13–17 July 2026, SYDNEY Summer School on Multi-Robot Systems: 29 July–4 August 2026, PRAGUE Actuate 2026: 18–19 August 2026, SAN FRANCISCO IROS 2026: 27 September–1 October 2026, PITTSBURGH Humanoids Summit Seoul: 22–23 September 2026, SEOUL Enj…
Biomolecular structure prediction and co-folding with models like OpenFold3 are now mainstream, large-scale workloads powering drug discovery and protein... Biomolecular structure prediction and co-folding with models like OpenFold3 are now mainstream, large-scale workloads powering drug discovery and protein design. Increasingly, they’re driven end-to-end by AI agents. For an agent to run that pipeline well, every step needs to be fast and scalable: Multiple Sequence Alignment (MSA) generation,…
Borys Drozhak has a vision: a front line almost free of humans, patrolled by flying drones and ground robots, and continuously monitored by AI-controlled sensor networks. And it’s not a pipe dream. Ukrainian roboticists have made major strides in that direction over the past four years. Remotely controlled ground vehicles fitted with machine guns and grenade launchers now patrol the no-man’s-land straddling the front, part of a robotic legion that has stymied Russia’s territorial ambitions so fa…
Fine-tuning LLMs for financial natural language processing (NLP) is constrained by limited, imbalanced data. Real-world financial news overrepresents earnings... Fine-tuning LLMs for financial natural language processing (NLP) is constrained by limited, imbalanced data. Real-world financial news overrepresents earnings and stock movements, while rarer events such as credit-rating changes, product approvals, and labor issues are harder to capture at scale. Synthetic generation can help fill those…
The large language models (LLMs) that form the basis of generative AI chatbots such as ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini can generate uncannily human-like text and images. But these models still struggle with a skill that, ironically, looks at face value to be right in their wheelhouse: analyzing structured data. A new type of generative AI is set to change this situation. Although you can get your favorite chatbot to solve intractable math problems, review dense legal documents, compose a catchy pop …
General Intuition is betting millions of hours of video game data can train the foundation models for physical AI, making it easier to build smarter robots with minimal real-world data.
Agentic systems often face a trade-off between accuracy and cost. The highest-performing proprietary frontier models and harnesses provide top accuracy but are... Agentic systems often face a trade-off between accuracy and cost. The highest-performing proprietary frontier models and harnesses provide top accuracy but are expensive. Fine-tuning offers one way to address this problem. Smaller or more efficient open models starting with lower accuracy are taught to perform better with specific agen…
Presto is an open source, distributed SQL engine for running fast, interactive queries on very large datasets. On NVIDIA GPUs, Presto delivers peak performance... Presto is an open source, distributed SQL engine for running fast, interactive queries on very large datasets. On NVIDIA GPUs, Presto delivers peak performance for analytical query workloads and provides low latency for users and agents. GPU-accelerated Presto brings low latency to your analytical workloads, keeping you and your agents…
Large language models (LLMs) that can think through problems step-by-step have significantly increased the scope of tasks that AI can tackle. But new research suggests these reasoning capabilities also introduce a critical vulnerability that could allow attackers to slow these systems to a crawl. While earlier generations of LLMs would immediately produce a response to a user’s request, today’s most advanced models generate an internal monologue where they break down the problem into steps and r…
This year, RoboCup took place in Incheon, South Korea, from 2-6 July. The event saw teams take part in competitions, training sessions, and a symposium. Take a look at what the participants got up to in our round up from social media. The wait is over! 🤖🎉 RoboCup 2026 officially begins today! Join us for […]
Toshio Fukuda has been blazing trails for most of his career. He is considered to be one of the most prolific scholars in robotics, writing more than 2,000 research papers and authoring several books on the field. He’s an influential figure thanks to his pioneering work developing biomedical robotic systems, industrial robots, micro-nano robotics, mechatronics, and AI-driven automation. Fukuda launched one of the first robotics conferences, the IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Ro…
Agentic systems turn model reasoning into action through multi-step workflows that combine inference, tool use, code execution, retrieval, orchestration, and... Agentic systems turn model reasoning into action through multi-step workflows that combine inference, tool use, code execution, retrieval, orchestration, and result handling. As these systems scale across the AI factory, performance depends not only on GPU acceleration, but also on the CPU work that happens between model steps. Across th…
As more teams move from humanoid robot bring-up to task-specific skill development, the need for repeatable development workflows is growing. Building humanoids... As more teams move from humanoid robot bring-up to task-specific skill development, the need for repeatable development workflows is growing. Building humanoids remains complex, and today’s development pipelines are still highly fragmented. As a result, developers spend significant time configuring robotics infrastructure before they …
Spectrum is one of the most valuable assets in wireless communications. Over the last 30 years, telecom operators in the US have spent more than $240B to... Spectrum is one of the most valuable assets in wireless communications. Over the last 30 years, telecom operators in the US have spent more than $240B to acquire wireless spectrum. A goal of a radio access network (RAN) system is to extract the maximum spectral efficiency (bits/second/Hertz) possible, which translates into more capacity, str…
Industrial machinery generates more alarms than technicians can triage. For each important alarm requiring follow-up, the technician pulls historical context,... Industrial machinery generates more alarms than technicians can triage. For each important alarm requiring follow-up, the technician pulls historical context, determines the correct procedure, checks whether a specialist signal confirms the failure mode, and writes up a recommendation. This process remains consistent, and is well-suited…
In May, an anonymous artist who goes by SHL0MS on X posted that he had used AI to generate an image inspired by Claude Monet and asked people to weigh in on how it missed the mark. More than 600 responses called out issues, saying the colors were off, the depth was all wrong, and that AI didn’t understand how light worked. SHL0MS then revealed that the image was of a real Monet, one of around 250 variations of water lilies the artist had painted in his lifetime. He had simply downloaded a high-r…
... government of the people, by the people, for the people ... The cost of AI is dropping rapidly. GPT-4-class capabilities cost roughly $30 per million tokens in early 2023; today the same runs under $1, and some providers are pushing costs below $0.10. Across benchmarks, inference prices have fallen between 9x and 900x per year, with a median decline near 50x. Even frontier models are getting dramatically cheaper each generation, with open-source models following closely behind. And crucially…
Forterra has deployed more than 100 of its self-driving ATVs in conflict zones in Ukraine.
Training LLMs at massive scale brings unique infrastructure challenges, especially as jobs span thousands of GPUs and run for extended periods. The longer these... Training LLMs at massive scale brings unique infrastructure challenges, especially as jobs span thousands of GPUs and run for extended periods. The longer these jobs run, the greater the likelihood of encountering unscheduled interruptions or resource fluctuations. Even infrequent device unavailability can have outsized effects on tig…
One morning in 2019, Adebayo Alonge was in a Cape Town hotel room, preparing to demonstrate his startup’s AI answer to a serious problem in African health care: counterfeit medication, which kills thousands of people across the continent every year. The RxScanner is a handheld spectrometer that scans a pill with infrared light, then sends the item’s molecular profile to an AI model equipped with a pharmaceutical database. In seconds, the AI identifies the medication from its molecular profile—or…
This weekend saw the finale of the league competitions at RoboCup 2026 in Incheon, South Korea, with the winners in the small, middle, and large humanoid divisions decided. Congratulations to the following teams, who finished in the top three positions in each size class: Small division Invic, Wuhan University, China Hamburg Bit-Bots, Universität Hamburg, Germany […]
Agility Robotics 将通过与 Churchill Capital Corp XI 的 SPAC 合并上市,估值约 25 亿美元、预计募资超 6.2 亿美元,为人形机器人领域史上最大融资;CEO 称这是先发优势与产能扩张的故事。AI summary
“In the future, the relationship between humans and robots will deepen, and the distinction between them will probably disappear.” This prediction, from one of the attendees at the recent Humanoids Summit in Tokyo, might have been unremarkable had it not come directly from an android that was first introduced to the world 20 years ago. Geminoid HI-6 is the sixth-generation of a robot originally designed in 2006. The mechanical twin of Osaka University professor Hiroshi Ishiguro, Geminoid HI-6 is…
The second day’s play at RoboCup 2026 has drawn to a close with another bumper set of matches. Teams have come from far and wide to take part in the humanoid soccer competition this year, with 17 different countries represented. China is the most represented country, boasting 15 teams across the three divisions. Other countries […]
Video Friday is your weekly selection of awesome robotics videos, collected by your friends at IEEE Spectrum robotics. We also post a weekly calendar of upcoming robotics events for the next few months. Please send us your events for inclusion. RSS 2026: 13–17 July 2026, SYDNEY Summer School on Multi-Robot Systems: 29 July–4 August 2026, PRAGUE Actuate 2026: 18–19 August 2026, SAN FRANCISCO IROS 2026: 27 September–1 October 2026, PITTSBURGH Enjoy today’s videos! NASA is considering a mission con…