AI News — Thursday, May 21, 2026

The Future of Physical AI Isn’t Smarter Robots, It’s Smarter Interfaces

Climate tech companies are pivoting to critical minerals

Meta lays off thousands of employees to offset AI investments

Tech researchers are suing the Trump administration over the future of online safety

In SpaceX’s IPO, Elon Musk is a risk factor

SpaceX Listed Grok’s ‘Spicy’ Mode as a Risk in Its IPO Filing

Jensen Huang says he’s found a ‘brand new’ $200B market for Nvidia

Anthropic says it’s about to have its first profitable quarter

SpaceX Is Spending $2.8 Billion to Buy Gas Turbines for Its AI Data Centers

Clouted wants to take the guesswork out of making short videos go viral

xAI burned $6.4B last year — SpaceX’s IPO filing shows why the spending is far from over

‘Solve all diseases,’ you say?

I Gave My OpenClaw Agent a Physical Body

Vibe coding is coming to your phone

Buckle up: Google is set to remake search with agentic AI in 2026

Green steel startup Boston Metal is doubling down on critical metals

The Download: fully artificial chicken eggs and why Musk lost

The Internet can't stop watching Figure AI's humanoid robots handling packages

Literary Prizewinners Are Facing AI Allegations. It Feels Like the New Normal

Two AI-based science assistants succeed with drug-retargeting tasks

OlmoEarth v1.1: A more efficient family of Earth observation models

Google's SynthID AI watermarking tech is being adopted by OpenAI, Nvidia, and more

Google just redesigned the search box for the first time in 25 years — here’s why it matters more than you think.

Introducing the Ettin Reranker Family

Fine-Tuning NVIDIA Cosmos Predict 2.5 with LoRA/DoRA for Robot Video Generation

PaddleOCR 3.5: Running OCR and Document Parsing Tasks with a Transformers Backend

Agentic AI for Robot Teams

How Melbourne’s AI and Data Center Flywheel Is Accelerating Research Innovation

Voice AI Systems Are Vulnerable to Hidden Audio Attacks

Railway secures $100 million to challenge AWS with AI-native cloud infrastructure

Claude Code costs up to $200 a month. Goose does the same thing for free.

Listen Labs raises $69M after viral billboard hiring stunt to scale AI customer interviews