Self-driving taxis without steering wheels, new AI vulnerabilities, and new records for autonomous agent work. Collected the top tech news from the second half of the week.
AI
Gemini 3.1 Pro dominates benchmarks. Google released the updated Gemini 3.1 Pro model, which scored 77.1% on the ARC-AGI-2 test, more than doubling the logic performance of the previous generation.
$1 billion for 3D worlds from World Labs. AI legend Fei-Fei Li's startup raised $1B in fresh investment (including $200M from Autodesk) to teach neural networks to understand real-world physics and create editable 3D environments.
Offline agent for paperwork. Developers presented a free desktop app Interpreter that can locally fill PDFs, edit Excel files, and work with Word documents without an internet connection.
Anthropic measured AI autonomy. A study of millions of sessions showed that AI agents (e.g., Claude Code) now work without human intervention for up to 45 minutes, and half of API requests are now for writing and debugging code.
Neural networks vs taxes. Startup Ownwell raised $50M to develop a system that automatically contests property taxes and has already saved homeowners over $400M.
Robots and Hardware
Robot battles in real life. China launched the world's first free combat league for humanoid robots with a $1.44M championship prize pool.
Unitree humanoids go mass-market. After the viral kung-fu robot performance on Chinese TV, the company announced plans to produce 20,000 humanoid machines this year — nearly 4x more than last year.
First Tesla Cybercab rolls off the line. The first fully autonomous robotaxi rolled off the assembly line ahead of mass production in April, though the company still needs US regulatory approval for vehicles without pedals and steering wheels.
Eternal glass storage. Microsoft demonstrated Project Silica — laser data writing technology on quartz glass plates capable of storing terabytes for over 10,000 years without energy costs.
AI smartwatch from Meta. Mark Zuckerberg plans to release the Malibu 2 smartwatch by year-end, with a built-in Meta AI assistant and gesture recognition for seamless smart glasses control.
Software
GitHub automated routine with agents. The platform launched GitHub Agentic Workflows, letting developers delegate bug triage, reviews, and documentation to AI using simple Markdown instructions.
Hack via bug report. Researchers discovered a new attack vector targeting AI developers: attackers can hijack tokens and execute arbitrary code by feeding malicious prompts to the Cline bot directly in GitHub issue titles.