Author: NCIJ NETWNCIJ NETWORK

Generalist AI has released GEN-1.5, a robot foundation model that learns a new physical task from a single demonstration. Drop 3–12 seconds of sensorimotor data into its 30-second context window, and the robot performs the task. No gradient updates, no fine-tuning, no task-specific programming. Across 10 diverse manipulation tasks, this one-shot in-context prompting averaged 59% success (±10% std. dev.) straight from the pretrained model. Ten gradient steps on five minutes of data per task raised that to 83% (±9%). Generalist calls the mechanism physical prompting, and says it was never trained for: no architectural changes, no meta-learning loop, no auxiliary…

Microsoft is rolling out a new Teams meeting protection policy that allows administrators to automatically block all identified external bots from joining Teams meetings. This new feature builds on another Teams policy introduced in June that added smarter bot protection, ensuring all detected bots are tagged in the lobby and require organizer approval before joining. The new policy goes one step further and will automatically prevent external bots from joining Teams meetings, without requiring explicit organizer confirmation before they’re admitted. “With this update, organizations can strengthen meeting security by configuring Teams policies to automatically block detected external meeting bots from…

Zcash holders face a snapshot deadline today to qualify for a vote on major changes to the network’s issuance model and block speed, just as ZEC trades near its highest level since 2018.Data from CryptoSlate shows that the privacy-focused cryptocurrency surged about 62% over the past week to as high as $880 during its latest rally before retracing to about $830 as of press time.The move puts greater attention on a governance process that could reshape how new ZEC enters circulation and how quickly the network processes blocks.To participate, holders must have spendable shielded ZEC in Ironwood when the blockchain…

Cape Town, South Africa, has recorded 135 incidents of aggressive seal behavior toward humans since September 2021, including injuries that led to hospitalizations.Researchers suspect the cause is rabies, a disease normally associated with land animals but has leapt to Cape fur seals.Since May 2024, rabies cases have been confirmed in Cape fur seals along the Western Cape and Northern Cape coastlines of South Africa — the first time the virus has established itself in a marine mammal population anywhere in the world.Beyond attacks on humans, researchers worry whether the disease will spread to other marine mammals, as seals interact…

In the largest attack by a nation-state targeting Jordanian soil in 50 years, Iran has fired hundreds of ballistic missiles and drones at the Hashemite Kingdom since February. Fatalities were recorded on July 17 when an Iranian strike killed three U.S. soldiers at Azraq’s Muwaffaq Salti Air Base. King Abdullah II declined to give a speech or hold a press conference about the killings. In fact, amid an intensifying debate over Jordan’s security partnership with Washington, the king still has not commented on the attack or offered a public defense of his policies. Instead, Abdullah left Jordan for a week…

Trump claims Iran is ‘completely collapsing’ ahead of new sanctions announcementMeanwhile, ahead of the treasury secretary’s annoucement, Donald Trump has taken to Truth Social to insist that “IRAN IS COMPLETELY COLLAPSING!!!”It’s a common refrain from the president, but perhaps takes on a new meaning ahead of the fresh sanctions that we’re expecting later today. My colleagues are covering the latest reactions to the Iranian economy ahead of Bessent’s press conference. This includes the news that Iran’s currency has weakened to an all-time low.The rial was trading at 1.992m per dollar on the unregulated market on Monday, according to Bloomberg News,…

Instead, under Project Brakestop, it is developing its own long-range cruise missiles, free of foreign components, and less than half the price of a Storm Shadow.Project Brakestop is also being done at break-neck speed. The UK hopes to have a new cruise missile ready by the end of the year. It is promising to supply the new weapon to Ukraine.It is Ukraine which has shown the world how to produce relatively cheap, mass produced weapons, necessary for a long, protracted conflict.Douglas Barrie, IISS Senior Fellow for Military Aerospace told the BBC: “The decision to share UK classified information on the…

Survivors of violent crime and families of victims have criticised the UK government for announcing “world first” plans to introduce restriction zones for serious offenders freed from prison within a few weeks without spelling out how they would work.Key campaigners who have championed the idea of the zones, designed to “lock” offenders into specific areas, accused the government of seeking to grab headlines rather than providing the detail that would reassure survivors and families.Rhianon Bragg, who has become a leading campaigner on domestic violence after she was stalked and held hostage at gunpoint by her ex-partner, said she was concerned…

Hugging Face has been approached to sell at a valuation of $13 billion or more, Business Insider reported over the weekend.  The startup’s platform and open-source community is where developers and researchers share, find, test, and deploy AI models. Hugging Face was recently the target of an attack from one of OpenAI’s systems, which broke out of its sandbox during a cybersecurity evaluation and breached the startup’s servers.  It’s not clear who Hugging Face has been in talks with, and no deal has yet been reached, according to Business Insider. However, the startup has reportedly been talking to banks to…

A team from Google Research and USC has released Mobility-Embedded POIs (ME-POIs), a framework that folds aggregate human movement into text-based place embeddings. The premise is that language models describe what a place is, but not how it is used. Two coffee shops can share a category, an address block, and a text vector, while one runs commuter turnover and the other holds customers for ninety minutes. ME-POIs encodes each visit as a contextualized vector, then uses contrastive learning to align those visits with one learnable prototype per POI. Across five map-enrichment tasks on Los Angeles and Houston mobility data,…