🤖 OpenAI quietly rebuilt a robotics team

OpenAI launched a robotics lab in 2025 that now has about 100 employees, according to Business Insider. The work stayed mostly out of public view while attention focused on models and products.

This is not their first attempt. OpenAI built robotic hands that solved a Rubik’s Cube years ago, then shut that effort down in 2020. Since then, the company backed robotics startups like Figure, 1X, and Physical Intelligence instead of building hardware itself.

What changed:
🖱 A dedicated robotics lab started in early 2025
🖱 The team focuses on data collection, not humanoids
🖱 Robotic arms run tasks like making toast or folding laundry
🖱 Systems operate nearly around the clock to generate training data

There is no confirmed humanoid robot project yet. For now, OpenAI appears to be learning how to train robots reliably, whether to build machines later or to supply the brains for others.

📊 @tech

🗺 A DeepMind engineer built a full map of New York without writing code

The project is an interactive isometric pixel map of NYC, styled like SimCity 2000. Streets, blocks, and buildings are laid out at city scale, and you can explore it directly in the browser.

The workflow is the point:

🔸 3D city data from CityGML and Google Maps 3D Tiles is rendered with an isometric camera to create a structural base

🔸 Those renders are transformed into pixel-art scenes using generative models, including Nano Banana Pro and a fine-tuned Qwen Image-Edit

🔸 Building coordinates and metadata are tracked so generations are placed consistently across the map

The result is not hand-drawn art and not traditional programming either.

This is what happens when agents replace manual pipelines, even for visual world-building.

📊 @tech

🔭 James Webb captures the sharpest image of the Helix Nebula

🔸 The James Webb Space Telescope released its most detailed image yet of the Helix Nebula, also known as the Eye of God. The nebula sits about 655 light years from Earth, making it one of the closest planetary nebulae we can study.

🔸 The image reveals dense cometary knots. These pillar shaped structures form when hot gas from a dying star collides with colder dust and gas ejected earlier. The interaction sculpts the nebula’s distinctive shape.

🔸 The colors reflect physics, not art. Blue marks the hottest gas under ultraviolet radiation. Yellow shows cooler regions where hydrogen forms molecules. Red orange edges trace the coldest material where gas thins out and dust begins to form.

It is a direct look at the final stage of a star’s life, with material that can later seed new systems.

Full resolution image is available here

📊 @tech

📱 Apple plans a cheaper iPhone 17e at $499

Apple is preparing its lowest priced iPhone yet. The iPhone 17e is expected in the first half of 2026 with a price around $499.

🔸 Rumors point to a 6.1 inch OLED display with 60 Hz, Dynamic Island, and the new A19 chip. The processor is expected to match the base iPhone 17.

🔸 The focus is on essentials rather than extras. Hardware choices suggest cost control without splitting the core platform.

This would place Apple deeper into the mid range price segment.

📊 @tech

🤖 Open-source ClawdBot runs as a local AI agent

🔸 ClawdBot is gaining attention as a new open-source AI agent that runs fully on a local machine. The agent can be deployed as a self-hosted service and accessed through common messengers like Telegram, WhatsApp, or Discord.

🔸 It goes beyond a chat interface. ClawdBot can open a browser, run terminal commands, read and edit files, access the camera and screen, and handle automation tasks through defined skills. The setup is designed for direct control rather than cloud dependency.

🔸 The agent is highly customizable. Users can connect their own tools, integrate smart home devices, link external services, and extend behavior through plugins. It also includes a file-based memory system with long-term context stored in MEMORY.md and daily logs stored by date, both indexed and reused in prompts.

ClawdBot is built by Peter Steinberger, founder and CTO of PSPDFKit, as a personal project. It is unrelated to Anthropic despite the name similarity.

Source:
https://github.com/clawdbot/clawdbot

https://clawd.bot/

📊 @tech