When we met Sterling Anderson in 2024 , he was the chief product officer of Aurora, the self-driving startup he cofounded in 2016 after several years at Tesla. Just over a year ago, though, Anderson decamped from the startup world for something a little more established, taking over as chief product officer at General Motors, the nation's largest automaker. Since then, he's had a good view of how GM is entering what he calls the third epoch of engineering and design.

"There was a time when humans looked at birds and were like, 'OK, those wings seem to work pretty well. Let's go and design something that looks like them.'" Anderson said, describing the first age of engineering. "And they just kind of iterated their way to something that was marginally feasible."

The first few hundred years of inventing "was this era of highly empirical iterative design development and engineering," he said. "And by that I mean humans largely started with what we know or had seen, built prototypes of something that kind of looked like it and maybe tweaked some things, hoping to make it perform better, tested it, iterated, and kind of went through this slow guess-and-check process until we got to something that marginally worked."

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A San Francisco robotics startup is being taken to court by an Airbnb host who claims the company’s “robotic prototype testing” caused extensive damage to his home.

In the lawsuit filed on May 26, 2026, Sean Donovan is seeking more than $12,000 in damages from the Bay Area startup The Bot Company. The court case was first reported by SFGate , which also interviewed Donovan about the unprecedented mess he encountered after the startup’s employees supposedly rented his former childhood home through Airbnb.

The first clue that the guests were not typical tech startup employees needing a temporary crash pad came when Donovan was taking care of the trash during the guests’ stay. He told SFGate about seeing “bundles of wires” throughout the house and a robot he described as a 6-foot-tall “Roomba with treads” that also resembled the cybernetic Borg from the Star Trek universe.

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One of the benefits of building an AMD PC is that AMD has historically supported its processor sockets for longer than Intel does, allowing the same motherboard (and RAM kit, if you want) to power your PC through multiple CPU upgrades. Today at Computex, AMD announced chips for the current AM5 socket and the improbably-still-around AM4 socket that will help extend their lives a little further, a nod to just how expensive it has become to build a new PC or perform a major upgrade these days.

The first of these announcements is something we knew about already : the re-launch of 2022's Ryzen 7 5800X3D , the first of AMD's commercially available 3D V-Cache processors. Dubbed a "10th Anniversary Edition" in reference to how long Socket AM4 has been around, the re-released chip is slower than regular 8-core Ryzen 5000-series CPUs in general productivity tasks, but comes with 64MB of extra L3 cache that disproportionately benefits games. If you're trying to use a high-end GPU with an AM4 motherboard, it could help keep your CPU from being a performance bottleneck. The 5800X3D (re-)releases on June 25 for a suggested retail price of $349, which is less than it currently costs to buy secondhand.

As for the current AM5 socket, AMD officially announced that it was extending its support to at least 2029—it was originally planned to last until 2025 , and then until " 2027+ ," so this means between two and four years of additional support, depending on how you're counting.

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When the Steam Deck OLED launched three years ago, we were glad to see that the new, more brilliant screen fixed the biggest flaw of Valve's original handheld hardware. So we're unsurprisingly excited about today's announcement that Asus is preparing a new, OLED-equipped ROG Xbox Ally X20 for the coming holiday season. Still, it's a bit worrying that Asus is positioning the new upgrade as a niche collector's item rather than its new handheld gaming standard.

The X20 expands the 7-inch screen found on last year's ROG Xbox Ally line to 7.4 inches, matching the display on the Steam Deck OLED and approaching the 7.9-inch screen on the Switch 2. The 1080p HDR panel also increases the maximum brightness from 500 nits on original Xbox Ally models to a full 1400 and adds some new anti-glare coating that should help when playing in direct sunlight. The X20's 120 Hz display now supports Dolby Vision HDR colors and FreeSync Premium Pro to help smooth frame rates while still providing a larger color gamut.

On the control front, the X20 introduces magnetic TMR thumbsticks , replacing the carbon-film potentiometers that made the original Xbox Ally more prone to stick drift and physical wear. A new d-pad on the X20 also introduces a neat little lift-and-twist design that can transform it from a four-direction cross to a more circular eight-direction pad, similar to the convertible d-pad found on some now-classic Xbox 360 controllers .

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These days, Nvidia primarily sells AI data center products, and its traditional consumer devices feel like more of a side project. But the company occasionally still releases something designed for consumers. After a couple of years of rumors, Nvidia has announced an Arm-based chip designed to power Windows PCs. Dubbed RTX Spark, the new chip combines a 20-core Nvidia Grace CPU co-developed with MediaTek, up to 6,144 Blackwell-based GPU cores (the same architecture as the RTX 50-series GPUs), and support for up to 128GB of unified LPDDR5x memory.

Nvidia and its partners offered nothing about expected pricing, but both "slim Windows laptops with all-day battery life and premium displays" and "compact desktop PCs" are slated to be "available this fall" from partners including Asus, Dell, HP, Lenovo, Microsoft, MSI, Acer, and Gigabyte.

This isn't Nvidia's first chip for Windows PCs; earlier chips in the Tegra series powered several of the short-lived Windows RT tablets . But Tegra chips largely stopped appearing in consumer devices following the Tegra X1 in the late 2010s (variants power the original Nintendo Switch and the apparently unkillable Nvidia Shield TV box ). Modern Arm-based PCs in the Windows 10 and Windows 11 eras have all used processors from Qualcomm.

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Intel plans to ship an AI chip by the end of this year that uses cheaper memory and cooling technology than rival offerings from Nvidia and AMD, as the US chipmaker seeks to capitalize on a sharp turnaround in its fortunes.

Kevork Kechichian, who leads Intel’s data center group, told the FT that the company is “starting with the basics” as it tries to challenge its rivals in the booming market for semiconductors that power AI.

Its new “Crescent Island” graphics processing unit is designed to speed up “inference” tasks, the stage when a user makes their request, rather than the training of models, an area where Nvidia’s processors are dominant.

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In mid-May, OpenAI announced that an internal AI model had disproved the Erdős unit distance conjecture, a famous problem in discrete geometry that had stumped human mathematicians for the last 80 years.

OpenAI gave several mathematicians early access to the result and published their reactions . Tim Gowers —who won the Fields Medal, the most prestigious prize in mathematics—wrote that “there is no doubt that the solution to the unit-distance problem is a milestone in AI mathematics.”

University of Toronto professor Daniel Litt wrote that “this is the first example of a result produced autonomously by an AI that I find exciting in itself, as opposed to as a leading indicator.”

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Forty years ago, the future seemed just around the corner—and the vehicle that was going to take us there was NASA's Space Shuttle. Originally envisioned as part of a larger integrated space transportation system , the shuttle was billed as a fully reusable vehicle, totally unlike the one-and-done capsules of the fading Apollo era, capable of making monthly (and perhaps even weekly) ferry flights to low Earth orbit.

The shuttle, it was hoped, would transform human space flight from extraordinary to mundane. Brands like Coke and Pepsi were quick to hop aboard and expand the Cola Wars into space , and there were even plans to blast Sesame Street's Big Bird into orbit .

The loss of Challenger in January 1986—carrying educator Christa McAuliffe, who would have been the first private citizen in space—put the kibosh on all of that. The shuttle, while fantastically advanced, would never be the vehicle to help humankind slip all of our surly bonds, so to speak. Even operating at its most frantic peak in 1985 just before Challenger's loss, the shuttle hardware managed a maximum of nine flights in one calendar year; for most of the 1990s, it performed at five or six flights per year. Civilians in space—to say nothing of Big Bird—would have to wait.

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On a blazing hot day in South Africa, female southern pied babblers can’t think straight. The medium-sized black-and-white birds are trying to get at tasty mealworms behind a see-through barrier. On cooler days, the birds can quickly figure out that all they have to do is go around the small wall of plastic. But when the mercury goes up, the birds just keep stubbornly pecking at the barrier.

That experiment is part of a growing body of research showing that animals get their minds muddled during heat waves. When it’s hot outside, birds struggle to learn, dogs bite more often, goat-like chamois pick fights. This is bad news not just for those who get on Fido’s toasted nerves. If the animals can’t stay alert enough to find food or avoid predators, their chances of survival go downhill, says Amanda Ridley , a behavioral ecologist at the University of Western Australia who coauthored the pied babbler study.

With climate change making heat waves more common, such cognitive impairments across the animal kingdom could ripple through entire ecosystems, putting already fragile species at greater risk. If pollinators forget which flowers to visit, crops and wild plants may fail. If birds can’t find food as easily, their young may not survive. And on a warming planet, a sharp mind is particularly vital. “A changing climate means that your ability to behaviorally adapt is even more important,” Ridley says.

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