26 May 2026
This startup is betting India’s gig economy can train the world’s robots
In the last few years, India’s online food delivery market has grown significantly, with both Zomato and Swiggy going public and an increase in the number of cloud kitchens. Meanwhile, startups working on home services, such as on-demand household staffing platforms, including Urban Company, Snabbit , and Pronto , have gained popularity.
26 May 2026
Sundar Pichai on AI, the future of search, and what’s happening to the web
Today, I’m talking with Google and Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai, in a conversation we recorded just after the Google I/O developer conference. This is the fifth year Sundar and I have sat down after I/O, and it’s become one of my favorite Decoder traditions. There’s always a lot of news at I/O, and this year was no exception — Google has powerful new Gemini models, it’s putting AI agents in…
26 May 2026
China: ENGINEAI’s 129,000 sq ft factory claims to build one humanoid robot every 15 mins
A Chinese robotics company, ENGINEAI, has opened a large smart manufacturing facility in Shenzhen to begin mass-producing humanoid robots. The first batch of its T800 humanoid robots has already come off the assembly line at the new plant in the Honghualing district. This launch comes as China increases its investments in humanoid robotics and automated manufacturing.
26 May 2026
AI warfare is already here
The Convention on Certain Conventional Weapons, an international forum that focuses on lethal autonomous systems, is hosted twice a year at the United Nations in Geneva. When Branka Marijan attended in November 2017, she thought the five-day sessions — which dealt largely in hypotheticals, speculating on a world where warfare was fought with killer robots — would be business as usual. After all,…
26 May 2026
Inside The Murky Market Selling Pre-IPO SpaceX And OpenAI Shares
In the summer of 2020, former Morgan Stanley trader Adam Crawley was wandering through Indonesia, Thailand and Australia, perfecting his qigong with a man called Master YanG, when a cold message on LinkedIn jerked him back to reality. The sender was Noel Moldvai, a crypto enthusiast with a fondness for early-2000s Canadian rock and a pitch about the hottest corner of the private markets. Crawley…
26 May 2026
I Spent a Week Recording Myself Doing Chores for Money. Who's the Robot Now?
I am no longer a mere human being. I am a conduit of reality, a medium of messages. I hold a knife in my hand and slice into an organic cucumber, hunching so the iPhone strapped to my forehead can capture all 10 fingers. I throw the slices into a salad bowl and end the recording. Somewhere, a baby robot is a tiny bit smarter.
26 May 2026
Workers are relying on AI more and coworkers less. It's unraveling the social fabric of work.
Daniel Deceuster used to go to his colleagues for all manner of things big and small. If he needed to convert a rectangular logo into a square, he'd message one of the designers. If he wanted a new dashboard built, he'd set up a meeting with the engineers. These days, all Deceuster needs is to open up Claude or ChatGPT — and often within seconds, he gets what he needs.
25 May 2026
Anthropic’s restricted Claude Mythos model may be coming to Claude Code
Anthropic appears to be preparing for the public rollout of "Mythos," which was announced in April as a restricted model that poses major security risks to private and public software.
25 May 2026
Chinese firm launches a humanoid robot for daily house chores
Chinese tech firm GigaAI has unveiled what it describes as the first commercial robotic butler, the SeeLight S1. The company says the initial 100 pilot units will be deployed at the end of this month in employee homes. It plans a wider rollout in Wuhan, offered free of charge, in the first half of 2027.
