State of the Bots 2026 Q1 & Q2, The Bad Bots

Insider Brief Aether AI has closed a $20M seed round led by MPCi, with participation from Inno Angel Fund, SWC Global, Unity Ventures, and others, to accelerate research and development of its causal world model technology and support initial commercial deployments in Physical AI and robotics. Founded by Prof. Biwei Huang, an Assistant Professor at […]

Microsoft will deploy AMD Helios on Azure. Azure will add AMD EPYC VMs and Pensando networking.   Microsoft plans to deploy AMD’s Helios rack-scale computing platform on Azure under an expanded infrastructure partnership covering processors, graphics chips, networking hardware, and software. The systems will support AI inference for Microsoft, Azure customers, and Azure AI services. […]

Some 159 plants and seedlings, worth nearly $200,000, were found in a Pukekohe house.

New evidence suggests a massive centuries-long drought may be part of the answer.