17 Jun 2026
Welcome to June 17, 2026
The Singularity has gone open source, and it speaks Mandarin. Z.ai’s GLM-5.2 packs 744 billion parameters (40B active) into MIT-licensed, 1M-context weights built for agentic coding, and Artificial Analysis crowned it the leading open model at 51, past MiniMax-M3 and DeepSeek V4 Pro at 44.
17 Jun 2026
AI's Catastrophic Risk Isn't Rogue Machines, It's Cognitive Surrender
This post is part of a series of student essays produced in collaboration with the Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University. Read more in the series here . In the beginning, the Bible says God created man in His own image. “And the LORD God formed man of the dust of the ground,” Genesis tells us, “and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living…
17 Jun 2026
Why Some U.S. Robot Makers Are Reducing Dependence On China
1X, which makes the Neo humanoid robot, is probably the most vertical-integrated robot manufacturer on the planet. The Washington Post via Getty Images The New York Times says it’s "nearly impossible" to build a humanoid robot without China.
17 Jun 2026
The White House Wants Anthropic to Block All Jailbreaks. That May Not Be Possible
The Trump administration’s disagreement with Anthropic over its most advanced AI models appears to be fast coming to a head.
17 Jun 2026
Optical metasurfaces for general vision processing on the edge
By embedding core computer vision principles into a large-scale optical metasurface, an efficient vision processing system using far fewer parameters is demonstrated to outperform many digital models and enables deployment on edge devices.
17 Jun 2026
XDOF Raises $70 Million: The Growing Market for Robot Data
Startup XDOF has raised $70 million to build infrastructure for collecting and labeling data for physical robots. As AI moves from screens into real-world machines, the scarcity of high-quality training data has become a major industry bottleneck. This trend highlights the increasing value of specialized data collection and annotation services, a crucial monitorable for investors tracking the…
17 Jun 2026
Collecting robot training data is dirty, unglamorous work. Some AI labs are already paying XDOF to do it.
Two weeks ago, OpenAI said it would relaunch the robotics program it shuttered in 2021 — the latest signal that the biggest AI labs are racing to teach machines to operate in the physical world. But building capable robots requires something the AI industry doesn’t yet have, which is the training data to match that used for language models. That gap is creating a new kind of infrastructure…
17 Jun 2026
SpaceX alum nabs $22M to turn rocket engines into geothermal power plants
Few energy sources can top geothermal’s potential, with at least 42 terawatts of capacity available worldwide, according to the IEA, more than twice the world’s energy use last year. The technology is shaping up to be the energy world’s dark horse, even though investment in the tech pales in comparison to startups in advanced nuclear fission and fusion power.
17 Jun 2026
EarnOS Launches ero with $30M in Brand-Backed Rewards to Make the Internet Pay You Back
EarnOS Launches ero with $30M in Brand-Backed Rewards to Make the Internet Pay You Back
