🍾🍲 Saturday Robotics x IROS 2026 — Robotics Research Night 👉🏻 https://luma.com/tzbw7n61 We’re bringing a high-signal evening of robotics research to Pittsburgh on September 28. After a full day at IROS, we’ll bring together researchers, engineers, founders, students, and investors for technical discussions, networking, and a series of ~10-minute lightning talks. Tentative preview of the current lineup: 🤖 1. PAC-MAN: Perception-Aware CBF-RL for Whole-Body Safety in Humanoid Dodgeball Gary Yang @lzyang2000 (@Caltech) Perception-aware reinforcement learning + Control Barrier Functions for whole-body humanoid safety. Demonstrated on a Unitree G1, with 19/20 successful dodges and zero falls in real-world experiments. 🧠 2. How In-Context Learning Is Reshaping Robot Learning Data at Scale AaronLi (@RhodaAI) Exploring how in-context learning can change the way we think about robot learning data, scaling, and generalization. 🧪 3. X2Real: An eXtensive Simulation Benchmark for Real-World Generalist Policies Liangwang Ruan (@XSquareRobot) A new simulation benchmark built around faithfulness, diversity, and fairness, with 44 hierarchical long-horizon tasks across 10 capability dimensions and a reported 0.84 simulation-to-real correlation. 🦾 4. Rethinking Generalist Robotic Manipulation: Architecture, Data and Inference for Real-World Deployment Peiyan Li (Chinese Academy of Sciences, @CAS__Science) 3D VLA architectures, memory augmentation, ego/UMI human priors, large-scale robot pretraining, and inference-time contextual learning for deployable generalist manipulation. 🎯 5. HiRE: Hindsight Reward Editing for Policy Finetuning Haoyi Niu @t641769919 (@UCBerkeley) Accepted at CoRL 2026. A training-free approach to reward editing that uses successful and failed trajectories to identify “trap states” and provide denser, control-aware feedback for RL. 🔥 6. Lightning Talk — Open Slot We’re opening one additional slot for a technically deep research talk, new project, frontier paper, demo, open problem, or startup technical insight. 10 minutes. A few slides. One sharp technical idea. No fluff. Topics include World Models, Physical AI, Humanoids, VLAs, Robot Foundation Models, Manipulation, RL, Simulation & Sim-to-Real, Spatial Intelligence, Computer Vision, and Embodied AI. 📍 Pittsburgh 📅 September 28, 2026 🕠 5:30–9:30 PM 🍾 Networking + Technical Talks + Research Discussion 📩 junfanzhu98@gmail.com See you in Pittsburgh. 🤖 #IROS2026 #Robotics #PhysicalAI #RobotLearning #WorldModels #HumanoidRobotics #VLA #EmbodiedAI #RobotFoundationModels

We Must Pace the Frontier: I’ve written a new essay on why the AI industry should slow down, with a three-part plan for doing so. Anthropic is unilaterally committing to the first of these steps. We’ll provide third-party evaluators with permanent, employee-level access to our systems, so that they can verify adherence to our safety measures, report on incidents, and assess models’ alignment during training. You can read the full post here: https://darioamodei.com/post/we-must-pace-the-frontier

I agree with Dario that we need to pace the frontier. This has been a primary topic of discussions we've had at OpenAI in recent weeks. Committing to having independent evaluators with employee-like access is a great idea, and we will do the same. We'll have more to share soon.

We Must Pace the Frontier: I’ve written a new essay on why the AI industry should slow down, with a three-part plan for doing so. Anthropic is unilaterally committing to the first of these steps. We’ll provide third-party evaluators with permanent, employee-level access to our systems, so that they can verify adherence to our safety measures, report on incidents, and assess models’ alignment during training. You can read the full post here: https://darioamodei.com/post/we-must-pace-the-frontier

Our own @johnschulman2 talks with Dwarkesh about where human judgment still matters as models improve and self-improve: teaching them to handle messy real-world tasks, applying taste to what works in the long run, and, above all, specifying what we actually want.

New episode with @johnschulman2, @oneill_c and @BerenMillidge. I got together with some of the most insightful AI researchers I know who are at the openish companies, because I wanted to hear the details of what's actually happening at the frontier and what comes next. 0:00:00 – Steelmanning the case against RSI 0:18:39 – What’s driving the Chinese labs’ progress 0:28:06 – How will automated AI researchers be trained 0:33:51 – Will long-horizon RL elicit AGI? 0:45:24 – The sim-to-real gap 1:00:33 – How much progress is explained by data? 1:18:03 – Why is RL working so well? 1:24:54 – Move 37 and entropy collapse 1:28:31 – Rapid-fire timelines

Anthropic's economic scenario analysis is interesting. But this is not something you can ignore, this is the most important consideration! "the model cannot generate the negative feedback in which disruption depresses demand and amplifies its own labor-market consequences"

New from us: Anthropic just published scenarios for AI’s possible economic impacts, which range from minimal, to explosive GDP growth of 15% by 2030 as knowledge-worker unemployment hits 18%. I sat down with their co-founder Jack Clark to pick his brains on how they’re thinking about all of this.

what in the alien architecture is this