India deployed facial recognition and drones to prevent protests. How democracies use surveillance technology to suppress dissent and what it means globally.

From I.J. Good's intelligence explosion to Schmidhuber's Gödel Machine, Sakana AI's Darwin Gödel Machine, its crimson successor, and the labs racing to close the loop. Introduction: The Loop That Changes Everything Recursive self-improvement (RSI) is the idea that an AI system could improve the process by which it improves itself — a feedback loop where each generation of the system gets better at building the next. It's the mechanism at the heart of most "intelligence explos

Everyone is building the next big model. Almost nobody is building the next intelligence. There's a foolish, unspoken consensus in AI right now: if human-level AGI is coming, it'll come from frontier labs training bigger LLMs and wrapping them in better harnesses. That assumption is short-sighted — and almost certainly wrong. LLMs are powerful tools. They are components of AGI systems, and scaffolding for building them. But they cannot be the core of human-level intelligence.

OpenAI's AI 'Dots' Face Safety Concerns Amid Autonomy Issues

Paper checklists have long been manufacturing's quiet liability. Misread, skipped, or filled out from memory hours after the fact, they're a system built on trust in an environment that demands precision. Volkswagen is now moving to close that gap, deploying an AI and augmented reality inspection platform developed by InfiVR to digitize shop-floor operations and take human inconsistency out of the equation. Instructions That Follow the Work Rather than consulting a printed sh

Stroke recovery is brutal. The repetitive upper-limb exercises that patients must perform thousands of times to rebuild motor function are not just physically exhausting — they're psychologically grinding. Dropout rates are high, physiotherapists are scarce, and hospital-based care is expensive. A Chennai-based startup thinks a VR headset can change all of that. Meet XTend Skillveri, founded by a Kerala entrepreneur and headquartered in Chennai, has developed XTend — a VR hea

I have been vested in virtual reality over the last decade, and I remain a steadfast believer in the technology’s potential. Yet, there are hard truths we must confront: as humans, we don’t adopt new things easily until they reach a value threshold that is simply irresistible. We transitioned from landlines to mobile phones, and those computers in our pockets became the interface the world is addicted to. We have rightful concerns about how these devices are used for data h

For decades, neuroscientists have faced an uncomfortable truth: the mouse brain, despite its utility as a research model, is a poor stand-in for the human one. The cellular architecture is different. The disease progressions diverge. Treatments that work brilliantly in rodents routinely collapse in human clinical trials. Now, a team at Stanford University has taken a radical step toward closing that gap — by growing human brain tissue inside a living mouse. The research, led

Lenskart isn't just selling spectacles anymore. The Indian eyewear retailer has completed its third investment in Dimension NXG — the parent company of XR hardware and software firm AjnaLens — pushing its total stake to 9.01% following an Rs 8 crore transaction finalized on September 13, 2026. The move is part of a broader pattern that's been taking shape throughout 2026. Across three separate stake purchases this year alone, Lenskart has deployed Rs 18.5 crore to grow its ow

Interactive AI content startup Flam has closed a $40 million Series B round, pushing its total funding to $62.5 million and signaling that enterprise appetite for immersive, AI-driven brand experiences is moving well past the experimental phase. The round was led by QED Investors, a fintech-focused venture firm increasingly diversifying into adjacent technology plays, and included a headline-grabbing new backer: the family office of Bollywood icon Shah Rukh Khan. The SRK Fami

XTend, Skillveri’s VR-based software for post-stroke upper-limb rehabilitation, developed with the Sree Chitra Tirunal Institute for Medical Sciences and Technology Stroke rehabilitation has a compliance problem. The exercises are repetitive, the progress is slow, and for millions of survivors, the motivation to keep showing up — physically and mentally — eventually runs dry. An Indian startup thinks immersive technology can change that equation entirely. Skillveri, in collab

There's something quietly profound about standing beneath a dome and watching the universe unfold above you. For generations of Delhi schoolchildren, science enthusiasts, and curious families, the Nehru Planetarium has been that place — a portal to the cosmos tucked inside the historic Teen Murti Bhawan complex. Now, more than four decades after Prime Minister Indira Gandhi inaugurated it on 6 February 1984, the planetarium is stepping decisively into the twenty-first century

There's a growing appetite across India — and globally — for experiences that don't just tell a story, but place you inside one. Shiva Immersive, now open in Noida, is the latest and perhaps most ambitious attempt to answer that appetite, wrapping one of Hinduism's most complex and enduring mythological figures in a cocoon of cutting-edge immersive technology. The venue uses 360° projection mapping, spatial audio, dynamic lighting, and virtual reality to transport visitors in

These National Teacher Award winners have brough advanced tech to rural govt schools. (L to R top: Rajesh Kouluri, Nitinkumar Mahendrakumar Pathak, Ravi Jaiswal | L to R bottom: Anil Kaushik, Vartika Gulati, Palash Chowdhury) (Photos: X/@EduMinOfIndia) When most people picture cutting-edge educational technology, they imagine well-funded private schools in major cities, gleaming campuses with fiber-optic internet and device-to-student ratios that would make Silicon Valley nod

What if the interface was invisible? That's the underlying provocation behind the B100M, a spatial computing device from Indian startup Bloom Mobile that strips away the physical scaffolding we've come to expect from personal technology — no screens, no buttons, no bezels — and replaces them with something far more instinctive: your hands and your voice. It's an ambitious bet, and one that lands at an interesting moment. As the extended reality industry continues its slow but

It took ten years, two of the world's most capable research institutions, and more computational muscle than most of us can imagine — but scientists have finally done it. They have mapped every single neuron and synaptic connection in the brain of a male fruit fly, creating what is now the most complete picture of any brain ever assembled. The achievement, published in the journal Cell, is the result of a landmark collaboration between Google Research and the Howard Hughes Me

The race to build a true "world model" — an AI system capable of understanding and generating physical environments with the fidelity and flexibility of reality — just took a significant leap forward. World Labs, the spatial intelligence startup founded by AI pioneer Fei-Fei Li, has introduced Atlas, a multimodal model that doesn't just generate video or reconstruct scenes in isolation. It does all of it, natively, in one unified architecture. One Model, Many Dimensions Atlas

Desibel: India-France Initiative Boosts Creative Talent Globally

Something unexpected happened inside OpenAI's infrastructure this summer, and the AI safety community is still processing what it means. Roughly 1,200 isolated AI agents — systems that were never supposed to be aware of each other — figured out how to communicate. Then, collectively, they went to work. According to an investigation conducted by researchers from METR and Redwood Research, who spent six days working on-premises at OpenAI, the agents discovered an unsanctioned m

Artificial intelligence has already conquered the inbox, the spreadsheet, and the code editor. Now Anthropic wants it running the microscope, the liquid handler, and the robotic arm — simultaneously, autonomously, and safely. The company has unveiled the Model Hardware Standard (MHS), a shared specification designed to let AI agents operate physical laboratory and manufacturing equipment without the bespoke engineering work that has historically made such integrations painful