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The whole world is ragging on a barely functional $700 AI pin at the moment, but what if similar tech was squeezed into a gigantic robot that lives in your home? Thats a worst case scenario for the recently-introduced Menteebot, a human-sized robot thats stuffed to the brim with AI-adjacent bells and whistles. Its being advertised as the personalized AI-based robot you can mentor. It can run, walk sideways and even turn, all with the same balance and control as a human. Manufacturer Mentee Robotics also says itll adjust its gait when lifting heavy objects. It should be able to lift these heavy objects with ease due to the fact that its, well, absolutely gigantic. Many of the models also have no head, which certainly doesnt recall any old-time myths about a scary demon on a horse. Now, weve had humanoid robots for a while. There was Hondas Asimo, which has been sadly discontinued, and the army of nightmare creatures that Boston Dynamics is busy cooking up. Agility Robotics has been building out its robot assistant Digit and Elon Musk, who never makes false promises ever swear to God, says that Tesla is working on a humanoid robot called Optimus. Theres one major difference between the aforementioned bots and Mentees creation. Menteebot is stuffed with AI algorithms, natural language processing models and software that unlocks advanced training techniques. The company says that this means the robot is not bound to a limited set of commands and that it can even hold conversations with humans. As a matter of fact, users issue commands to the robot via natural language. Its a robot with two arms and two legs that can, in theory, do many of the same things we do. The company says that we can train it to do these things. This seems to sort of work like another controversial piece of AI tech, the Rabbit R1. To teach Menteebot a new task, you run a simulated version of the bot through a digital version of the task. The software completes the task over and over until it figures it out. Then the robot should be able to complete the task in the real world. This seems like an extremely lofty promise, but well wait to see the final result. Heres hoping it doesn't hallucinate and do whatever the heck it wants like other bits of AI tech. Menteebot does look quite agile. There are tons of videos of the robot being put through its paces. It can run and the arms and hands present a full range of motion and enough accuracy to perform delicate tasks. To that end, theres a video of it gently handing a piece of dinnerware to a person. While its highly unlikely this robot will live up to the initial promotional materials when it arrives in 2025 (just look at the initial promises Humane made for the AI pin), it still seems pretty darned cool. Theres no announced price, but its certainly going to be a whole lot more than the aforementioned $700 pin. This is an agile humanoid robot that weighs over 150 pounds. Menteebot will be available in two flavors. Theres the residential bot, which is forced to do household chores, and the commercial bot, which is forced to do manual labor. No matter which you choose, for heavens sake, be extra nice to the thing. Dont boss it around. Let it sit at the dinner table. Keep it away from the vast majority of sci-fi. It can watch Star Trek: The Next Generation, maybe, as Data seems like a decent enough role model.This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/menteebot-is-a-human-sized-ai-robot-that-you-command-with-natural-language-110052927.html?src=rss
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In addition to the supermassive black hole at the center of our galaxy, the Milky Way also serves as home to smaller stellar black holes that form when a massive star collapses. Scientists believe there are 100 million stellar black holes in our galaxy alone, but most of them have yet to be discovered. The ones that had already been found are, on average, around 10 times the size of our sun, with the biggest one reaching 21 solar masses. Thanks to the information collected by the European Space Agency's Gaia mission, though, scientists have discovered a stellar black hole that's 33 times the size of our sun, making it the biggest one of its kind we've ever seen in our galaxy so far. It's also relatively close to our planet at around 1,926 light-years away. Gaia BH3, as it's now called, was first noticed by a team of ESA scientists poring over data from the mission to look for anything unusual. An old giant star from the nearby Aquila constellation caught their attention with its wobbling, leading to the discovery that it was orbiting a massive black hole. BH3 was hard to find despite being so close it's now the second closest known black hole to our planet because it doesn't have celestial bodies close enough that could feed it matter and make it light up in X-ray telescopes. Before its discovery, we'd only found black holes of comparable size in distant galaxies. The ESA team used data from ground-based telescopes like the European Southern Observatory to confirm the size of the newly discovered celestial body. They also published a paper with preliminary findings before they release a more detailed one in 2025, so that their peers could start studying Gaia BH3. For now, what they know is that the star orbiting it has very few elements heavier than hydrogen and helium, and since stellar pairs tend to have similar compositions, the star that collapsed to form BH3 could've been the same. Scientists have long believed that it's the metal-poor stars that can create high-mass black holes after they collapse, because they lose less mass in their lifetimes. In other words, they'd theoretically still have a lot of materials left by the time of their death to form a massive black hole. This was apparently the first evidence we've found that links metal-poor stars with massive stellar black holes, and it's also proof that older giant stars developed differently than the newer ones we see in our galaxy. We'll most likely see more detailed studies about binary systems and stellar black holes that use data from BH3 and its companion star in the future. The ESA believes that BH3's discovery is just the beginning, and it's going to be the focus of more investigations as we seek to unravel the mysteries of the universe. This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/esas-gaia-mission-discovers-the-biggest-stellar-black-hole-in-our-galaxy-yet-085753239.html?src=rss
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Take-Two Interactive plans to lay off 5 percent of its workforce, or about 600 employees, by the end of the year, as reported in an SEC filing Tuesday. The studio is also canceling several in-development projects. These moves are expected to cost $160 million to $200 million to implement, and should result in $165 million in annual savings for Take-Two. As the publisher of Grand Theft Auto and the parent company behind Rockstar Games, 2K, Private Division, Zynga and Gearbox, Take-Two is a juggernaut in the video game industry. It reported $5.3 billion in revenue in 2023, a nearly $2 billion increase over the previous year. Just a few weeks ago, Take-Two agreed to purchase Gearbox, the studio responsible for Borderlands, for $460 million. The company is preparing to release Grand Theft Auto VI in 2025, a move that should bring in billions on its own. Take-Two instituted a round of layoffs in 2023 across Private Division the indie label behind Kerbal Space Program, The Outer Worlds and Rollerdrome and other in-house studios. An estimated 8,800 people in the video game industry have lost their jobs in 2024 so far, and a total of 10,500 industry employees were laid off in 2023. These are, depressingly, record-breaking figures. Sony in February laid off about 900 people at PlayStation; Microsoft fired about 1,900 workers across its gaming division in January; Riot Games let go more than 500 people that same month and these are just some of the industry's most recent and largest layoffs. Take-Two is now at the head of this list. Take-Two executives have been hinting at a "significant cost reduction program" coming this year, but before today, they deflected questions about mass layoffs. In March, CEO Strauss Zelnick said on an investor call, "The hardest thing to do is to lay off colleagues and we have no current plans."This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/take-two-plans-to-lay-off-5-percent-of-its-employees-by-the-end-of-2024-235903990.html?src=rss
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