Big thing
What's new since LeCun said the thrusters give under 10 seconds of thrust: Musk's Monty Python line, then a claim that the Roadster "accelerates faster than a fighter jet taking off from an aircraft carrier". LeCun replied that the thrusters "might even make your car hover for a couple of seconds if you accept replacing the passenger seat by a 400 liter high-pressure air tank. But they are not a path to actual flying cars." Tesla also put out a new cut of its video with a closer look at the cold-gas tank (@TeslaNewswire).
Musk's side won the memes on X, LeCun's side won r/singularity. "Never deleting this app" (@Yuchenj_UW, 368K). @yunta_tsai: LeCun reminded him of a professor who "can't turn numbers into coordinated atoms". @SamCKx: LeCun "has been torn to pieces today by Elon Musk fans for daring to inject some reality". r/singularity, in reply: "This thing has been in development for nine years, has no specs, and no production date."
On the physics they agree (Tesla told Top Gear it's 5-6 seconds of thrust per fill, and LeCun guessed "probably more like 5"), so Elon quoted Monty Python's French soldier at the real Frenchman. Bad scene to pick: a few minutes later the English roll a giant wooden rabbit up to the French castle, forget to hide inside it, and the French throw it back at them (a big hollow vehicle, which is exactly what LeCun says the Roadster is).
Labs news & launches
On the Chinese podcast Silicon Valley 101, co-founder Jason Ma said folded napkins are graded on five levels and the restaurant takes only the top two, where a few millimetres can decide a pass. Speed went from 35 napkins an hour to 1,590 a day, against an ask of 1,500 a shift.
None yet beyond the recap.
Heat: low · 2.2K views, 1 post · quiet on Reddit
2. A drone that flies and steers with a single motor
Its 3D-printed propeller hub is hinged, so pulsing the motor's torque 300 times a second, timed to the rotor angle, tilts the blades and gives pitch and roll as well as thrust. An infrared beacon in the room gives it a heading. Code and CAD are open source.
r/robotics loved it. "I was working on acrobots and pendubots in the 90s and never imagined something like this would be possible" (reply). "That's a smart solution to countertorque!" (reply).
Heat: low on X · 566 pts on r/robotics
Key research
HexaShell: a coding agent with a thin harness edges the RoboDojo leaderboard
HexaFuture had Codex with GPT-6 Astra drive a two-arm robot from one command line, writing its own camera tools after each failure. On its own retests it reached 39.7% success on RoboDojo's 42 tasks, a hair above the leaderboard's best (39.35%) and above learned policies like VPP2 (32.26%), but 8.3% on tight insertion: "The limit is contact, not reasoning." It matters because the agent usually sees why it failed but can't make the motion work, so the next gains are in contact, not reasoning.
Has GPT-6 Astra achieved embodied intelligence?
A report tests GPT-6 Astra on 12 robot benchmarks: with in-context demos and more steps it reaches 81.9% on RoboDojo and nearly doubles the best published results on LIBERO-Ultra-Long and DexJoCo. On eight real robots it went 17/18 on rigid pick-and-place but 0/11 on plug insertion, and a single humanoid trial took over an hour. It matters because the sim scores lean on demos of the same task and up to 10x more steps, and real robots rarely get either.