AI News
PaperBanana
Jan 30, 2026
Peking University and Google Cloud AI released PaperBanana, a multi-agent system for auto-generating academic diagrams. It improves readability and streamlines the production of publication-ready research figures.
AI-planned Mars Drive
Feb 2, 2026
NASA's Perseverance rover completed a 400m Mars drive using navigation routes planned by Anthropic’s Claude. This application of LLMs to planetary exploration highlights AI’s potential to optimize autonomous pathfinding.
Large Plant Model
Feb 2, 2026
Carbon Robotics unveiled the Large Plant Model, a foundation model trained on 150M images for real-time plant classification. It allows zero-shot weed recognition and removal without the need for manual retraining.
Claude Opus 4.6
Feb 5, 2026
Anthropic released Claude Opus 4.6, featuring multi-agent collaboration and a 1M token context window for advanced coding. The update achieved new highs on agentic benchmarks, showcasing enhanced autonomous capabilities.
Waymo World Model
Feb 6, 2026
Waymo developed a Genie-3 world model to turn real footage into controllable, photorealistic 3D scenarios. This enables robotaxis to safely train for rare, high-risk edge cases like extreme weather or road hazards.
AI Resources
2026 AI Predictions
You.com’s founders predict a shift from prompting to “reward engineering” as the LLM revolution returns to fundamental research. Traditional coding may vanish by 2026, leaving humans to manage AI-generated software.
Paper: Robot World Model
Nvidia unveiled DreamDojo, a generalist robot world model trained on 44K hours of POV human video to simulate real-world physics. This approach enables robots to learn complex tasks with minimal real-world data.
Open Source Model
MiniMax launched M2.5, an open-source model that matches GPT-5 level performance on agentic coding benchmarks at a significantly lower cost. The model currently handles 80% of new code commits within the company.
AI Events
The European Chatbot and Conversational AI Summit
Edinburgh ⏰ Mar 17-19
This summit focuses on the practical application of conversational AI and LLMs within enterprise workflows, featuring case studies on chatbot implementation and customer experience automation.
HumanX 2026
San Francisco ⏰ Apr 6-9
HumanX is an industry-focused gathering that addresses the policy, ethical, and technical challenges of scaling AI across sectors like finance, healthcare, and retail.
What's New at BasicAI
Blog Pick
Computer Vision for Smart Vending Machines: How It Works and What Data You Need
Read: Computer vision enables grab-and-go flow in smart retail. Learn how AI vision works in smart vending machines and the training data needed.
AI Vision in Smart Fridges: Models, Data, and Annotation
Read: Smart fridges identify and log food. Learn how computer vision powers the case, and what models, data and labels needed to work in real fridges.
Social Media Highlights
LinkedIn: YOLO26 by Ultralytics removes NMS to achieve 43% faster CPU speeds. Deployment is now simpler and more predictable.
Facebook: BakeryScan, a bread scanner was retuned to detect cancer with 99% accuracy, which shows the power of AI vision.
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