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Robots are nothing new. They build our cars, vacuum our floors, prepare our e-commerce orders, and even help carry out surgeries. But now the sci-fi vision of a general-purpose humanoid robot seems to be edging closer.

While disembodied artificial intelligence has seen rapid improvements in performance in recent years, most robots are still relatively dumb. For the most part, they are used for highly specialized purposes, the environments they operate in are carefully controlled, and they are not particularly autonomous.

That’s because operating in the messy uncertainty of the real world remains difficult for current AI approaches. As impressive as the recent feats of large language models have been, they are dealing with a fairly limited palette of data types that are fed to them in predictable ways.

SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) — Tesla Inc has doubled discounts on some already made new Model 3 electric cars and offered discounts on the Model Y and others in its U.S. inventory to entice buyers amid economic uncertainty, rising competition and the upcoming redesign of its mainstay model.

In California, a Model 3 variant in inventory was priced at $42,060, a discount of $2,680 to the price of newly ordered cars, according to its website. That is double the $1,300 discount on Model 3 cars offered less than two weeks ago.

The advent of autonomous-vehicle (AV) technology promises to upend urban mobility and transportation policy. Yet After years of development, with updates here and there from major players in the autonomous vehicle (AV) industry, we’re beginning to see some significant momentum building behind self-driving cars.

These vehicles are starting to hit the streets in limited pilot programs that test their ability to navigate real-world driving environments. Autonomous city car for taxi-sharing. It is a smart car.

It automatically finds the most successful route and distributes orders in the most profitable way. Designed by Roman Dolzhenko, this futuristic city car concept demonstrates minimalism should be the design language of the future.

Car wrapping services have been around for quite a while. Startups are diving into robot wrapping as a viable form of outdoor advertising. One recent instance is my company’s partnership with Serve Robotics to increase wildfire prevention.

Considering the recent growth in global outdoor advertising and the rising cost of online ads, there’s a growing possibility of autonomous robot controllers integrating with the outdoor advertising market. Also, as Alphabet rolls out Waymo in cities, the opportunity glares at advertising agencies looking to maximize their brand reach.

Advertising with AMRs is similar to other outdoor advertising campaigns. However, you might want to pay a little more attention to mobility, especially if you intend to use road-plying service robots.

The quest to develop hydrogen as a clean energy source that could curb our dependence on fossil fuels may lead to an unexpected place—coal. A team of Penn State scientists found that coal may represent a potential way to store hydrogen gas, much like batteries store energy for future use, addressing a major hurdle in developing a clean energy supply chain.

“We found that can be this geological hydrogen battery,” said Shimin Liu, associate professor of energy and mineral engineering at Penn State. “You could inject and store the hydrogen energy and have it there when you need to use it.”

Hydrogen is a clean burning fuel and shows promise for use in the most energy intensive sectors of our economy—transportation, electricity generation and manufacturing. But much work remains to build a and make it an affordable and reliable energy source, the scientists said.

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Last year generative artificial intelligence (AI) took the world by storm as advancements populated news and social media. Investors were swarming the space as many recognized its potential across industries. According to IDC, there is already a 26.9% increase in global AI spending compared to 2022. And this number is forecast to exceed $300 billion in 2026.

It’s also caused a shift in how people view AI. Before, people thought of artificial intelligence as an academic, high-tech pursuit. It used to be that the most talked-about example of AI was autonomous vehicles. But even with all the buzz, it had yet to be a widely available and applied form of consumer-grade AI.