Ad
Short

Tesla has updated its Optimus humanoid robot with a new hand design that features 22 degrees of freedom, plus three more in the forearm. The company added a soft protective layer to the fingers and palm that preserves the hand's tactile sensing capabilities while enabling it to handle delicate objects. All of the hand's actuators now sit in the forearm. Tesla says it plans to finish integrating the tactile sensors, implementing tendon-based fine control, and reducing the forearm's weight by the end of this year. Going forward, Tesla intends to equip all new Optimus robots with this enhanced hand design.

Short

The 7-billion-parameter language model Teuken-7B is now available on Hugging Face, offering support for all 24 official European Union languages. The model comes from the EU's OpenGPT-X research project and is available as open-source. Unlike most AI language models that focus mainly on English, Teuken-7B was built from scratch with about half of its training data coming from non-English European languages. The developers say the model performs reliably across all languages it was trained on. The project team also created the European LLM Leaderboard that measures how well LLM's work across European languages, moving beyond the English-only testing that was standard before.

Ad
Ad
Short

Cradle, a protein engineering AI startup based in Amsterdam and Zurich, has raised $73 million in Series B funding. The round was led by investment firm IVP, with participation from existing investors Index Ventures and Kindred Capital. This latest investment brings Cradle's total funding to over $100 million. The company's AI platform helps researchers accelerate protein engineering by making the process simpler and more cost-effective, reducing the time and resources needed to develop improved proteins, according to Cradle. Cradle plans to use the new funding to expand its wet lab facilities and improve its machine learning systems. The company has already partnered with major biotech companies, including Novo Nordisk and Ginkgo Bioworks.

Ad
Ad
Short

AI startup /dev/agents has secured $56 million in funding to create an operating system for AI agents. The company aims to enable computers to collaborate like humans do, which requires developing new user interfaces, updated privacy protection models, and a simplified developer platform, the company says. The founding team brings together several experienced tech leaders: David Singleton joins as former CTO at Stripe. Ficus Kirkpatrick led AR/VR at Facebook after spending 11 years at Google. Hugo Barra previously held key positions at Google, Xiaomi, Meta and Detect. Nicholas Jitkoff worked on operating system design at Google, Meta, Dropbox, and Figma. Björn Bringert managed Google Search on Android for a decade.

Ad
Ad
Google News