AI breakthroughs are accelerating progress across science, robotics, and entertainment, showing how intelligence can transform discovery, action, and creativity.

🌌 RIKEN Milky Way Simulation – Scientists at RIKEN, led by Keiya Hirashima, have simulated over 100 billion stars in the Milky Way using AI and high-performance computing. The model compressed a billion years of galactic evolution into 115 days, setting a new benchmark for large-scale scientific simulations with potential beyond astronomy.

🦾 Boston Dynamics Atlas Upgrade – Boston Dynamics’ Atlas now features dexterous three-fingered hands, tactile sensors, and an AI system that learns tasks from human motion. Built with Toyota Research Institute, the humanoid’s improved coordination and adaptability move it closer to real-world industrial use.

🎬 Disney Plus Canvas Launch – Disney+ is rolling out Disney Plus Canvas, a generative AI tool letting users create short-form content with iconic characters. Designed for accessible fan creativity, it blends storytelling tools with curated assets, signaling a new era of interactive entertainment.

Together, these advances highlight AI’s expanding role in understanding the universe, enhancing robotics, and reshaping digital storytelling.

AI Unlocks Milky Way’s 100 Billion Stars

Researchers led by Keiya Hirashima at the RIKEN Center for Interdisciplinary Theoretical and Mathematical Sciences have achieved the world’s first simulation of the Milky Way that models over 100 billion individual stars, thanks to the novel integration of artificial intelligence with high-performance computing. This breakthrough, which surpasses prior attempts in both resolution and speed, relied on a deep learning surrogate model trained on supernova simulations to efficiently represent both large-scale galactic dynamics and smaller phenomena like stellar explosions. Running on 7 million CPU cores, their method reduced the computational time needed to simulate 1 billion years of galactic evolution from decades to just 115 days, setting a new benchmark that could impact not only astronomy but also climate and environmental modeling across scientific fields.

Atlas Robot Gains Human-Like Hands and AI Smarts

Boston Dynamics has significantly enhanced its Atlas humanoid robot by equipping it with new three-fingered hands featuring tactile sensors and thumb articulation, enabling delicate and heavy object manipulation with unprecedented dexterity. The design strikes a balance between simplicity, reliability, and flexibility, featuring seven degrees of freedom and integrated cameras to improve spatial awareness. Complementing the hardware upgrades is a Large Behaviour Model (LBM) AI system developed with Toyota Research Institute, which allows Atlas to learn new tasks quickly by mimicking human actions from motion data. These improvements mark a major step toward practical, human-like robots capable of working in industrial and real-world settings with both strength and precision.

Disney+ To Launch AI-Powered User Content Creation Tool

Disney+ is introducing generative AI-powered tools to enable user-generated content (UGC) on its platform, allowing subscribers to create and share short-form AI-generated content featuring beloved Disney characters and worlds. This new initiative, part of a broader strategy to enhance user engagement, includes AI interfaces that make content creation accessible without professional skills, with features for animation, storytelling, and fan art. The platform, tentatively named Disney Plus Canvas, will provide curated Disney assets to ensure content aligns with brand standards. Monetization options for creators are being explored, including revenue sharing and exclusive contracts. Disney plans a phased rollout starting in select markets with beta testing underway. This move represents a major shift for Disney from passive content consumption to active user participation, aiming to democratize storytelling while protecting intellectual property and maintaining brand integrity.

In this video, we'll look at what agentic AI actually is and why it's completely different from everything you've seen before. We'll explore AI agents like Comet Browser, ChatGPT Agent Mode, Browser Use, and Olly Socials to understand how autonomous AI is transforming web automation and productivity.

Top AI Products from this week

• Sendr - An AI-powered platform that enriches contacts, finds leads, and enables personalized outreach at scale with features like dynamic videos, voice messages, lip-sync personalization, and customizable landing pages.

• OpenMusic AI - An AI-powered music generator offering studio-quality, royalty-free tracks across all genres, with tools for lyrics, vocal removal, mastering, and video generation, designed for creators to quickly produce commercial-ready music.

• YourGPT - An AI platform for building intelligent autonomous agents tailored for customer support, sales, and operations automation, improving efficiency by handling complex queries and real-time data analysis securely.

• Dialnexa - An advanced AI voice agent designed for customer support, sales, and engagement, offering intelligent, human-like voice conversations to automate and enhance interactions.

• Sleek Design - A platform focused on delivering high-quality, minimalist web design and development services, helping businesses create visually appealing and user-friendly digital experiences.

This week in AI

• Anthropic Political Even-Handedness Evaluation – The initiative introduces an automated “Paired Prompts” method that tests how evenly models respond to opposing political perspectives across thousands of prompts and hundreds of topics.

• eBay AI Comeback Surge – eBay is staging a major comeback through AI-driven innovations, rolling out five new AI features in 2025 including Magical Listings, AI-powered shipping estimates, and a shopping chatbot, signaling renewed growth momentum for the 30-year-old platform.

• China Quantum Chip Breakthrough – China has developed a photonic quantum chip delivering a 1,000-fold speed increase for AI data centers and supercomputers. The chip, created by CHIPX and Turing Quantum, integrates photons and electronics at the chip level, achieving wafer-scale mass production, claimed as a world first.

• Baidu ERNIE Multimodal AI – Baidu has launched its latest multimodal AI model, ERNIE-4.5-VL-28B-A3B-Thinking, surpassing GPT and Gemini on several key AI benchmarks, like complex visual data analysis, and can autonomously zoom in on images or trigger external image searches.

• OpenAI Fixes the Em Dash Problem – Users can now instruct ChatGPT via custom instructions not to use em dashes, and the model will comply, marking a “small-but-happy win,” according to OpenAI CEO Sam Altman.

• Moonshot AI Kimi K2 Thinking – Chinese startup Moonshot has released the open-source Kimi K2 Thinking model, outperforming OpenAI’s GPT-5 and Anthropic’s Claude Sonnet 4.5 on key reasoning and coding benchmarks.

Paper of The Day

This paper reviews how multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL) systems can communicate effectively under real-world challenges like message noise, delays, and limited bandwidth. It discusses how unreliable communication can hurt coordination and presents ways to make message sharing more robust and efficient. The paper also covers methods to handle delays in communication and reduce the amount of data agents need to exchange while keeping good teamwork. Finally, it highlights applications like autonomous driving and distributed learning, and points to future research that combines communication, learning, and reliability to make MARL work better in practice.

To read the whole paper 👉️ here