Enrique Abeyta:

Figure’s Robots Just Sorted Packages for 200 Hours Straight

Last week, Figure, a robotics company based in San Jose, California, completed a feat of economically valuable work: its Figure 03 robots worked a demonstration package-sorting line for 200 hours straight. In a post on X, Figure founder and CEO Brett Adcock said that what started as a planned eight-hour challenge turned into a marathon sorting shift spanning nine days.

The livestreamed video showed a count of 249,560 packages sorted over 200 hours – that’s eight days and eight hours – the equivalent of 25 human eight-hour shifts. All with no bathroom or meal breaks.

To be fair, this wasn’t one robot standing in place the entire time. A series of robots working in concert and communicating together took turns swapping out when the working robot’s battery was low (which Adcock said was about every three to four hours). Then the active robot would step back and walk away to recharge, and the next robot would step in and pick up where the first robot left off.

Adcock said in a post that the task was completed autonomously by the team of robots, with “no humans in the loop.”

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Ari Goldschmidt:

Ferrari’s First EV Is Not for You

Everyone seems to be mad about Ferrari’s first electric vehicle, called Luce, which was revealed on Monday. While it ticks a lot of spec sheet boxes – it boasts 1,000 horsepower and the ability to hit 60 miles per hour in just over two seconds – it’s tracking to be the most mocked new vehicle since the Cybertruck.

This widespread rejection of the wedge-shaped, Nissan-resembling car covers seemingly the whole spectrum, too, from the typical flimsy knee-jerk reactions, to the positively vitriolic. The company’s stock price is down, and even some of the most down-the-middle news outlets are admitting it in their own ways.

The question underneath all of this immediate backlash is singular: Who is the Luce for?

The answer could be China. While Chinese buyers have typically only made up around 10% of Ferrari’s overall sales, those numbers have declined in recent years, and the automaker’s executives haven’t been shy about wanting their first EV to turn things around in the largest market for battery-powered vehicles in the world.

But will Chinese buyers, who are currently awash in high-performance, high-tech, affordable options, care to pay up for the prestige of a prancing horse on the hood?

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Chris Campbell:

The Pope Just Low Key Declared Holy War on Artificial Intelligence

As the AI backlash continues to grow, critics of the tech have found an unlikely voice of support: the Catholic Church.

In perhaps his strongest rebuke of the tech industry’s rampant obsession with AI yet, Pope Leo called for the tech to be “disarmed” in his first encyclical, which is a special letter sent to bishops to outline the Catholic Church’s perspective on a topic.

“The word is strong, I know, but deliberately chosen because this moment needs words capable of attracting attention,” the Pope said in an accompanying statement.

In his letter, titled “Magnifica Humanitas,” or “Magnificent Humanity,” the bishop of Rome did not beat around the bush. Despite being a “valuable tool,” Pope Leo slammed AI as “merely” imitating “certain functions of human intelligence,” contradicting tech leaders’ claims that AI might be gaining sentience or consciousness.

Pope Leo’s AI skepticism hasn’t exactly endeared him to tech leaders and politicians. Trump-nominated secretary of the Interior Doug Burgum accused the pope of “tech editorializing."

Meanwhile, Claude developer Anthropic has chosen to throw its weight behind the pontiff, with cofounder Chris Olah calling for a “collaboration between those of us who are building this and those who can see what we, from inside, cannot.”

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