News

This post collects links to other interesting news that we have considered but not included in our regular news this week.

Zhang Yunhan, founder of Chinese robot brain startup Spirit AI, predicts humanoid robots will handle most general-purpose tasks from verbal instructions by 2027. The Beijing-based company, known for partnerships with Xiaomi and Qualcomm, sees this as a ChatGPT-like moment for embodied AI, though practical household applications remain further out.

Google will launch a prototype satellite on October 1 to test its Tensor Processing Units in space as part of Project Suncatcher. The mission will evaluate how AI chips perform under radiation, thermal extremes, and the physical stresses of spaceflight, marking the tech giant's first step toward potential orbital computing infrastructure.

Stanford researchers have recorded the first real-time quantum jumps of sound, watching single phonons abruptly vanish from one energy state to another. The breakthrough could open new paths for quantum computing, error correction, highly sensitive biological sensors, and next-generation sound-based devices.

Lumentum, Qualcomm, and Corning will showcase a high-density optical die-to-die interconnect designed to extend AI system bandwidth beyond electrical limits. The demonstration at ECOC 2026 features VCSEL-based optical engines and aims to support roughly 1 Tb/s/mm of bandwidth density with a path to 4 Tb/s/mm.

Anthropic reports that language-model agents flagged a reverse transcriptase beside a DNA repeat array, a pattern later checked in a Bay Area laboratory.