Waymo Announces 2026 London Launch for Autonomous Ride-Hailing Service Waymo, Alphabet’s autonomous driving division, has officially announced its plan to launch a fully driverless ride-hailing service in London by 2026. This strategic move represents a major international expansion for the company, which currently operates in several U.S. cities. Waymo will initiate testing with safety drivers on London’s complex streets before transitioning to fully autonomous operations. The company is partnering with vehicle financing firm Moove for its fleet operations and is actively working with UK regulators to secure all necessary approvals. The service will feature an all-electric fleet of Jaguar I-PACE vehicles equipped with Waymo’s advanced autonomous driving technology, signaling significant growth in the global autonomous vehicle industry. ...

Breakthrough in Soft Robotics: Shapeshifting Robot Moves Using Electric Fields In a significant advancement for soft robotics, researchers from the University of Bristol and Queen Mary University of London have created a highly agile, shapeshifting soft robot. According to a study in Advanced Materials, the innovation lies in an electro-morphing gel (e-MG) that enables the robot to bend, stretch, and perform complex movements by manipulating electric fields. This new material allows the jelly-like humanoid gymnast to swing its body and limbs to move from one location to another. ...

Today’s Top Tech Stories: Waymo, NASA, Oracle, and Quantum Breakthroughs Here’s a summary of the most significant developments in AI, autonomous driving, cloud infrastructure, and quantum computing for October 15, 2025. Waymo Announces 2026 London Robotaxi Service Launch Waymo, the autonomous driving technology company under Alphabet, has officially announced its plan to launch a driverless robotaxi service in London. The full rollout is scheduled for 2026, making London the first European city to host Waymo’s autonomous ride-hailing service. Initial vehicle testing with safety drivers will commence in the upcoming weeks. The service, accessible via the Waymo app, will directly compete with established ride-hailing platforms. This expansion represents Waymo’s second international market after Tokyo. UK Transport Secretary Heidi Alexander voiced support, emphasizing the initiative’s potential to advance the UK’s autonomous vehicle sector and enhance transportation accessibility. ...

NVIDIA Unveils RLP: A New Era of Reinforcement Learning for AI Pretraining NVIDIA researchers have developed a groundbreaking training objective called Reinforcement Learning Pretraining (RLP), which integrates reinforcement learning directly into the pretraining stage of AI model development. The core concept of RLP treats a short chain-of-thought as an action that is rewarded based on the information gain it provides for the model’s next-token prediction. This innovative method creates a verifier-free and dense reward system that can be applied at scale to standard text streams. Unlike previous methods that depend on sparse signals or external verifiers, RLP’s approach allows for updates at every single token position. Experiments demonstrate that RLP can yield significant improvements in a model’s reasoning capabilities, with one model showing a substantial increase in its average score on scientific reasoning benchmarks. ...

OpenAI & Broadcom Announce Landmark 10GW Custom AI Accelerator Partnership OpenAI and Broadcom have announced a strategic multi-year collaboration to develop and deploy 10 gigawatts of custom AI accelerators. Under this partnership, OpenAI will lead the design of the AI accelerators and systems, while Broadcom will be responsible for their development and deployment. This collaboration will also involve the co-development of systems incorporating Broadcom’s Ethernet and other connectivity solutions to enhance the scalability of next-generation AI clusters. The deployment of these AI accelerator and network system racks is scheduled to commence in the latter half of 2026, with a target completion by the end of 2029. Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI, stated that this partnership is a crucial step in building the necessary infrastructure to unlock the full potential of AI. ...

Ant Group Challenges OpenAI with Ling-1T, a Trillion-Parameter Open-Source AI Model Ant Group has announced the release of Ling-1T, a new trillion-parameter large language model, intensifying the global competition in artificial intelligence. This general-purpose model is engineered for complex reasoning and logic-based tasks, demonstrating strong performance in code generation, software development, and competition-level mathematics. According to Ant Group, Ling-1T has shown superior problem-solving skills compared to rivals from DeepSeek, Moonshot AI, and OpenAI. The company reported that Ling-1T achieved high scores on benchmark platforms such as LiveCodeBench and the American Invitational Mathematics Examination (AIME). On the AIME benchmark, the model reached an accuracy of 70.42%, a result comparable to Google’s Gemini-2.5-Pro. Ling-1T is the second trillion-parameter model from Ant Group and is part of the company’s Ling AI model family. The release of Ling-1T as an open-source model is a strategic move to promote transparency and collaboration in AI development. ...

Robotics in Action: Midlakes Schools Automate Field and Pool Maintenance Midlakes Schools are leveraging robotic technology to enhance the efficiency of maintaining their athletic fields and swimming pool. A Tiny Mobile Robot Pro X now paints lines on sports fields using precise GPS-guided templates, while a Wave 200XL robotic vacuum handles the cleaning of the new pool surface. Ryan Tilburg, the Director of Facilities, notes that these robots are generating significant time savings on the athletic fields and conserving water in the pool. This implementation of automation helps the maintenance staff better manage their workload, especially during peak summer months, ensuring maximum availability of the school’s facilities. ...

Google Launches Gemini Enterprise: AI Agents for the Workplace Google has officially launched Gemini Enterprise, a new platform designed to integrate powerful AI agents into workplace workflows. This new offering consolidates Google’s AI models, including the new Gemini 2.5 Flash Image, with a no-code workbench for building and managing these agents. The platform aims to automate complex business processes and significantly increase productivity across organizations. Gemini Enterprise will feature pre-built agents for specialized tasks and will integrate with company data through connectors for systems like Microsoft Teams and Salesforce. The service is priced starting at $30 per user per month. To support adoption, Google is also launching a free learning platform, Google Skills, with a program that aims to enable one million developers to build and deploy agents. ...

Infineon Launches Advanced Power Protection for AI Data Centers Infineon Technologies AG has introduced a new line of power path protection solutions engineered for the increasing demands of AI data center infrastructures. The new products include a family of 48-volt smart eFuses and a reference board for hot-swap controllers for 400V and 800V power architectures. These components are designed to improve the reliability, scalability, and monitoring of energy flow in high-performance computing environments. The company stated that these solutions aim to maximize server uptime, reduce operational costs, and extend the lifespan of critical equipment in AI data centers. ...

S&P Global and IBM Launch Agentic AI to Revolutionize Supply Chains S&P Global and IBM have announced a partnership to integrate IBM’s watsonx Orchestrate agentic AI framework into S&P Global’s offerings, starting with supply chain management. This collaboration aims to provide businesses with AI-powered tools to address global supply chain challenges by enhancing visibility and insights into vendor selection. S&P Global will develop new AI agents for IBM’s watsonx Orchestrate Agent Catalog, utilizing its proprietary data and analytics to help accelerate decision-making. The partnership is a key part of S&P Global’s strategy to use trusted AI agents to transform its enterprise services. Beyond the initial supply chain focus, S&P Global intends to integrate IBM’s AI technology into other risk intelligence services. ...