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- Scalpel without a surgeon: Robot nails first solo surgery
Scalpel without a surgeon: Robot nails first solo surgery
PLUS: Waymo eyes East-Coast streets & humanoids throw cage-fight haymakers
Helena Liu
July 13, 2025
Good morning, AI enthusiasts. Surgery without surgeons, driverless cars on East-Coast cobblestones, and an underground “Fight Club” for Chinese humanoids all broke cover this week, proving that robots now want your organs, your commute and your pay-per-view dollars.
In today’s TLDR AI:
Experimental robot removes a gallbladder with zero human hands on the controls
Waymo starts mapping Philadelphia & NYC for the next robo-taxi rollout
Chinese humanoids square off in San Francisco’s first Robot Fight Club
UN research team builds an AI refugee avatar and critics call it empathy theater
LSE launches a £4 million centre to help humans “speak” with their pets
LATEST DEVELOPMENTS
TLDR: Johns Hopkins’ AI-guided SRT-H completed the most delicate phase of cholecystectomy on eight pig organs with 100% accuracy, no joystick surgeon needed.
Trained with language-guided imitation learning on hours of surgical video; adapts to surprise bleeding like a self-driving car handles potholes.
It was slower than a human but marked a leap from “remote-controlled tool” to decision-making surgical partner.
Analysts peg the surgical-robotics market at $10B and rising; autonomy could unlock rural and under-staffed hospitals.
Why it matters: From Tesla-style autopilot to literal auto-scalpels, AI just took a step toward the operating room of one robot.
TLDR: Alphabet’s self-driving arm kicked off two “road-trip” mapping missions, sending sensor-packed Jaguars to Philly’s gritty streets and Manhattan’s snarled avenues.
After mapping comes supervised autonomy, then (if the city loosens rules) fully driverless rides; NYC still bans empty front seats, a law Waymo is lobbying to change.
Waymo’s current paid service spans Phoenix, LA, Austin, the Bay Area and soon Miami; Philly & New York would be its first dense, cold-weather markets.
Why it matters: The Northeast’s maze of one-way lanes, cyclists and blizzards is a torture test. Crack it, and robo-taxis graduate from sunny-city novelty to true urban transit.
TLDR: A viral blog post shows Booster T1 and Unitree G1 humanoids trading MMA-style blows in an underground cage match—organisers bill it as “proof-of-agility,” not blood sport.
China-built bots priced under $20K are flooding Western dev labs; promoters say combat accelerates balance, grip and recovery research.
Critics see a publicity stunt and worry the spectacle normalises violence for general-purpose robots headed to factories.
Why it matters: Whether stunt or science, the cage match hints at a future where humanoids train like UFC fighters before walking your warehouse floor.
TLDR: OpenAI Public Sector LLC will develop “frontier AI” for both war-fighting and enterprise use under a Chief Digital & AI Office OTA.
Timeline & scope: Work runs through July 2026 in the National Capital Region, with $2M obligated up-front.
Why it matters: It’s OpenAI’s first formal DoD award, cementing that frontier models will increasingly sit at the core of U.S. defense modernization.
TLDR: The LSE’s Jeremy Coller Centre for Animal Sentience opens in September to study consciousness across species—from dogs to cuttlefish—and to prototype pet-translation tools.
Director Prof Jonathan Birch warns that unregulated “feel-good” apps could hallucinate happy pets, warping care decisions.
The centre will draft global ethics guidelines for animal-facing AI and push regulators to include pets in driverless-car safety rules.
Why it matters: If AI claims to decode your cat’s meows, someone needs to check the math—before roadkill or false reassurance become features.
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