TL;DR Rhoda AI is betting that predicting short sensory futures can organize robot behavior, with a separate inverse dynamics model turning each predicted future into movements. Its September scaling report ties better video prediction to stronger bearing-unpacking performance, and its October tactile report extends the loop to touch. The open question is whether these company-reported results, from one task and embodiment, carry over to other workflows, repeated training runs, and sustained factory operation. Watch someone empty a cardboard box and your brain fills in what comes next. The lid opens, the bag rises, the contents fall. For a robot, however, recognizing that sequence leaves a rather inconvenient problem: which motors should move, and what happens when the bag snags' A convincing movie of successful work does not automatically become successful work. Rhoda AI is building a company around that translation. Its bet is that predicting short sensory futures can organize robot behavior, while a separate model converts those futures into movements. The attraction is a vast supply of training videos. The challenge is making their lessons survive contact with an actual factory....

For decades, scientists have been able to look at individual moments in the development of an embryo: a snapshot of a developing brain, a picture of how the heart takes shape, or a glimpse of cells beginning to form the nervous system. A new study out of the lab of MIT Professor Jonathan Weissman, a member of the Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research and a Howard Hughes Medical Institute investigator, offers one of the most detailed views yet of how a mammal is built, cell by cell. By following the family history of over a million cells as a mouse embryo develops, the researchers have created a kind of developmental blueprint, or movie, showing how cells divide and ultimately become the tissues and organs in the body. This open-access work, published Oct. 8 in the journal Cell, in collaboration with Zachary Smith's group at Yale University and the Max Planck Institute for Molecular Genetics, provides a comprehensive view of a process that has long been studied in pieces: how a single fertilized egg gives rise to hundreds of different kinds of cells, arranged in the right places and at the right times to build an animal....

Some interface changes and nudges, like bright buttons urging you to subscribe in apps, are mildly annoying but easy to ignore. Others are so in your face that you want to throw your phone in a river. X's new push to get users to promote their posts is firmly in that category. Over the last 24 hours, a growing number of users have posted that a mysterious hand pointing to the 'promote' button suddenly showed up while they were writing a post. This has irked people across the board. With Halloween around the corner, it could be a prank meant to spook users, though X hasn't said so. And even users who wanted to promote a post and spend money might be scared off after seeing the hand. WTF @elonmusk, if I wanted jump scares I would've watched a horror movie instead. P.S. this hand popped out of nowhere and conveniently when the words "engagement farming" are in the tweet. pic.twitter.com/NWxt81AYie TBPN podcast's president Dylan Abruscato said that this engagement trick was the 'most Nikita-coded thing I've ever seen,' a nod to the growth tactics associated with Nikita Bier, X's former head of product....

Three months after Elon Musk declared that Grok would release a full-length, 'historically accurate' movie version of 'The Odyssey,' Grok has published a whole seven minutes ' what the company is now calling 'Episode 1 of our Odyssey series.' Musk had previously lashed out at Christopher Nolan's version of 'The Odyssey' because Nolan cast nonwhite and transgender actors. And Nolan is, in many ways, a perfect foil for Musk ' while SpaceX and Tesla CEO hypes up data centers in space and posts an unending stream of AI-generated content, Nolan has described himself as 'a techno-skeptic' and said that before AI, he'd never seen a technology 'so completely rejected by the public.' And while Nolan's version of 'The Odyssey' certainly used plenty of visual effects, it's primarily a feat of practical filmmaking, with a shoot spanning six countries and a cast and crew of thousands. After its release in July, the film became an extraordinary box office success, selling out Imax screenings for months and becoming the likely front-runner at the next Academy Awards....