Runway’s AI Video Game Generator

This follows earlier reports of Meta hiring Trapit Bansal and three others, bringing the entire to a minimum of eight high-profile hires in recent weeks. These defections follow earlier departures by Zurich-based researchers Lucas Beyer, Alexander Kolesnikov, and Xiaohua Zhai, who had been instrumental in expanding OpenAI’s European research hub. Internally, the losses have sparked concern, with one OpenAI engineer calling them a “huge loss” in a now-deleted tweet.

The exodus prompted an urgent response from OpenAI’s leadership. In a Slack memo obtained by WiredChief Research Officer Mark Chen compared the situation to a break-in, writing: “I feel a visceral feeling without delay, as if someone has broken into our home and stolen something.” In an internal memo, he confirmed the corporate is recalibrating compensation and scrambling to retain talent.

To mitigate burnout and retain morale, OpenAI will implement a full company-wide shutdown this week after prolonged 80-hour workweeks. Nevertheless, leadership warned that Meta may use the recharge period to pressure remaining researchers with time-sensitive offers.

Amid these defensive efforts, the corporate has hired the core team behind Crossing Minds, an AI startup backed by Shopify and Index Ventures. Co-founder Alexandre Robicquet has joined in a research role focused on AI agents and post-training, an increasingly necessary area for fine-tuning model behavior.

While it’s unclear whether OpenAI has acquired the startup’s proprietary advice systems or developer tools like RAGSys, the move follows recent high-profile acquisitions of io Products and Windsurf, suggesting a deliberate buildout of capabilities in personalization, retrieval-augmented generation, and developer tooling. Read more.

China just turned a careless robot soccer match right into a showcase for serious AI progress. In Beijing, fully autonomous humanoid robots battled it out in a 3-on-3 game, falling, colliding, and even getting stretchered off the sector. Despite the bloopers, the underlying tech hit a milestone: AI agents operating in real-time physical environments, with zero human input.

The bots, built by Booster Robotics, used onboard sensors and software to trace the ball, navigate, and get well from falls. The match was a testbed for embodied AI, an area where China is sprinting ahead. With a $108B robotics market projected by 2028 and over 300 million humanoids expected in operation by 2050, China’s investment is aggressive and strategic.