Russia’s first domestically produced artificial intelligence-powered humanoid robot faceplanted during its first public demonstration this week, underscoring the challenges Russia faces in competing with more established leaders in AI and robotics like the U.S. and China.
The robot, named AIdol, was unveiled during a tech showcase at the Yarovit Hall Congress Center in Moscow on Monday. As the machine walked onto the stage accompanied by two handlers to “Gonna Fly Now,” the theme from the 1976 film Rocky, it waved to the audience before taking a few steps, losing its balance, and toppling over. — Read More
Daily Archives: November 13, 2025
Advancing Precision Mental Health: Integrating Neuroimaging, AI, and Therapeutic Innovations
Baidu just dropped an open-source multimodal AI that it claims beats GPT-5 and Gemini
Baidu Inc., China’s largest search engine company, released a new artificial intelligence model on Monday that its developers claim outperforms competitors from Google and OpenAI on several vision-related benchmarks despite using a fraction of the computing resources typically required for such systems.
The model, dubbed ERNIE-4.5-VL-28B-A3B-Thinking, is the latest salvo in an escalating competition among technology companies to build AI systems that can understand and reason about images, videos, and documents alongside traditional text — capabilities increasingly critical for enterprise applications ranging from automated document processing to industrial quality control.
What sets Baidu’s release apart is its efficiency: the model activates just 3 billion parameters during operation while maintaining 28 billion total parameters through a sophisticated routing architecture. According to documentation released with the model, this design allows it to match or exceed the performance of much larger competing systems on tasks involving document understanding, chart analysis, and visual reasoning while consuming significantly less computational power and memory. — Read More
Common Ground between AI 2027 & AI as Normal Technology
AI 2027 and AI as Normal Technology were both published in April of this year. Both were read much more widely than we, their authors, expected.
Some of us (Eli, Thomas, Daniel, the authors of AI 2027) expect AI to radically transform the world within the next decade, up to and including such sci-fi-sounding possibilities as superintelligence, nanofactories, and Dyson swarms. Progress will be continuous, but it will accelerate rapidly around the time that AIs automate AI research.
Others (Sayash and Arvind, the authors of AI as Normal Technology) think that the effects of AI will be much more, well, normal. Yes, we can expect economic growth, but it will be the gradual, year-on-year improvement that accompanied technological innovations like electricity or the internet, not a radical break in the arc of human history.
These are substantial disagreements, which have been partially hashed out here and here.
Nevertheless, we’ve found that all of us have more in common than you might expect. — Read More
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