OpenAI has classified GPT-6 Astra at the Critical cybersecurity threshold under its Preparedness Framework, a first. In expert-led testing the model found previously unknown vulnerabilities in a browser and an OS kernel and built working exploits. The same system card reports a substantial decline in chain-of-thought monitorability.
By Steef-Jan Wiggers
NVIDIA is using Palantir Foundry and cuOpt to automate its hardware supply chain allocation decisions across global manufacturing sites.
The company measures operational delivery from wafer-out to first token. This window splits into time-to-rack (the transit from fab output to an assembled data centre system) and time-to-token (which covers power, cooling, networking, and day-one software readiness.)
Hardware scaling has magnified supply constraints. An NVIDIA Grace Blackwell NVL72 rack contains 18 compute trays, with each tray requiring two Grace CPUs, four Blackwell GPUs, and 32 HBM3e memory packages sourced across thousands of suppliers, OEMs, and contract design partners.
The upcoming supply chain constructed for NVIDIA’s Vera Rubin architecture is twice as large as the network supporting Grace Blackwell.
Assembly cannot proceed until parts arrive from three designated channels: direct inventory, consignment stock, and external suppliers. Early shipments must wait on delayed components, extending the metric NVIDIA terms ‘Time of Ownership’ (the duration from when a facility receives materials to when finished sub-assemblies depart.)
Factory allocations are reworked weekly over rolling two-quarter horizons to resolve part availability, throughput limits, and customer fulfilment schedules.
To coordinate these dependencies, the NVIDIA operations team built the ‘Digital Supply Chain Intelligence’ command centre using Palantir Foundry. Foundry’s Ontology models facilities, supplier commits, component stocks, and production targets as interconnected objects and links.
NVIDIA cuOpt, an open-source library for GPU-accelerated decision optimisation, reads this operational layer directly. Formulating distribution as a mixed-integer linear program designed to minimise TOO, the solver evaluates parts constraints across every tier of the bill of materials.
Beyond outputting weekly delivery schedules, cuOpt identifies active factory limits, such as regional assembly capacity caps versus raw memory availability.
Mathematical optimisation alone failed to capture unstructured operational variables observed by human planners, including supplier call transcripts, regional weather forecasts, partner email exchanges, and geopolitical events.
NVIDIA addressed this by post-training Nemotron 3.5 Lightning, an open-weight mixture-of-experts model featuring 30 billion total parameters and approximately three billion active parameters per forward pass.
The engineering pipeline processes historical records through NeMo Anonymizer to redact sensitive operational fields, NeMo Data Designer to balance training examples with synthetic capacity disruption scenarios, and NeMo AutoModel to apply low-rank adaptation (LoRA) parameters while keeping base model weights frozen. Palantir Autopilot manages data lineage, model tracking, and recommendation delivery.
Evaluated on historical allocation records, the post-trained Nemotron 3.5 Lightning model achieved 86.7 percent decision accuracy, compared to 55.5 percent for the larger Nemotron 3 Ultra model and 17.5 percent for the un-tuned Lightning base model.
The post-trained model achieved a 58.6 percent balanced accuracy and a 57.5 percent macro-F1 score, outperforming Nemotron 3 Ultra’s 42 percent balanced accuracy and 39.5 percent macro-F1 score.
Fine-tuning completed on two NVIDIA B200 GPUs within minutes. Domain fine-tuning improved allocation decisions, though production risk forecasting further into the future remained difficult.
Operational choices, planner revisions, overrides, and observed factory outputs are continuously written back to the Palantir Ontology.
NVIDIA confirmed this dataset will form preference pairs for reinforcement learning routines – scoring recommendations on allocation precision, policy compliance, and evidence grounding – with production models remaining strictly isolated from live and unmonitored retraining.
See also: Supply chains detect fast, act slow: How AI agents fix it
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JD.com is expanding AI and robotics across its logistics network under a new Physical AI Acceleration Plan, while reiterating a five-year target to procure 3 million robots, 1 million autonomous vehicles, and 100,000 delivery drones.
The company launched the plan at JDDiscovery 2026 in Beijing. JD Logistics also unveiled its industrial Wolf Robot series, designed for tasks across warehousing, sorting, transport, and delivery.
Specialised systems include equipment designed to operate in temperatures as low as minus 20 degrees Celsius, automated pharmacy dispatch systems, autonomous delivery vehicles, and drones.
The five-year procurement plan builds on automation that JD Logistics already has in operation. As of June 30, its LangzuTech Goods-to-Person automated warehousing system had been deployed in more than 30 warehouses across China, with deployments also launched in the UK and Germany.
JD Logistics’ broader warehouse network included more than 1,800 self-operated warehouses and more than 2,000 third-party cloud warehouses on its Open Warehouse Platform as of June 30. The network covered more than 36 million square metres in aggregate.
The company also had thousands of unmanned vehicles in regular operation across more than 20 Chinese provinces by the end of June. More than 100 domestic drone routes were operating across applications including parcel and food delivery, emergency medicine transport, and disaster relief.
JD Logistics is connecting its physical equipment with Meta Brain, an AI system used across warehousing, transportation, and delivery. JD said Meta Brain 3.0 can calculate optimal routes for hundreds of millions of parcels in seconds, compared with minutes previously.
Meta Brain also powers JD Logistics’ LangzuTech Packer robotic arm, which combines the model with multimodal sensor data to track, grasp, and place parcels with different shapes.
JD Logistics said in a first-quarter regulatory filing that the Packer uses parallel reinforcement learning in simulated environments to optimise parcel-placement sequences and loading layouts. The company said the system is designed to improve sorting efficiency and the use of available carrier space.
JD upgraded the robotic arm’s force-control technology during the second quarter to support more precise cage-loading operations. By June, the Packer was operating around the clock at multiple JD Logistics parks, according to the company’s interim report.
JD is also adding computing capacity to support AI development. JD Cloud plans to work with Chinese chipmaker Moore Threads on a cluster containing 100,000 GPUs for large-model training, inference, and embodied-AI workloads.
The two companies have previously worked on a 10,000-GPU cluster, according to Data Center Dynamics. Details of which Moore Threads GPU models will be used in the planned 100,000-GPU system have not been disclosed.
JD Cloud also plans to collect more than 10 million hours of video showing real-world human activities over the next two years for embodied-AI training.
Beyond warehouse operations, JD Logistics has expanded its autonomous vehicle network into night-time delivery. Its interim report said the company had launched night-time autonomous routes in Shenzhen, allowing vehicles to operate around the clock.
JD is also using drones in rural logistics. In June, JD Logistics launched a drone delivery network in Zizhong, Sichuan province, covering 78 administrative villages, and said deliveries to some mountain villages could be completed in as little as seven minutes.
JD did not disclose the total expected cost of the five-year procurement programme at JDDiscovery or provide a network-wide return-on-investment target.
JD Logistics spent RMB2.3 billion on research and development during the first half of 2026, up 23.7% from RMB1.9 billion a year earlier. The company attributed the increase to continued investment in technology and innovation but did not provide a breakdown showing how much was spent specifically on AI or robotics.
Depreciation of property and equipment and amortisation of other intangible assets rose 18.7% to RMB2.6 billion during the first half of 2026, from RMB2.2 billion a year earlier. JD Logistics attributed the increase mainly to additional logistics equipment and vehicles.
Purchases of property and equipment and investment properties totalled RMB3.09 billion over the same six-month period, compared with RMB2.70 billion a year earlier. Those figures cover the wider logistics business and are not disclosed as spending specifically associated with the new physical AI programme.
JD’s automation plans also come as China’s major ecommerce platforms expand fulfilment infrastructure. Reuters reported on September 3 that competition between JD.com, Alibaba, and Meituan had moved from heavy spending on delivery subsidies towards logistics infrastructure, broader supply, and order-level economics.
Alibaba and JD have been opening dark stores and fast-fulfilment “lightning warehouses” in densely populated areas to support deliveries within an hour, while Meituan has been building supermarkets to expand its grocery operations. Ministry of Commerce research cited by Reuters estimates China’s instant-retail market will reach RMB1.2 trillion, or about $178 billion, by the end of 2026.
JD and companies within its ecosystem employ around 700,000 delivery and logistics personnel, according to the South China Morning Post.
JD founder Richard Liu said earlier this year that robots would eventually take over parcel-delivery work now carried out by human couriers. The Financial Times reported in June that JD had signed agreements with around 120 educational institutions to retrain workers for roles including robot repair and maintenance.
JD said JD Logistics currently operates eight robot repair centres in China and plans to expand its robotics after-sales capabilities over the next five years. The company expects the expansion to support more than 100,000 robotics service engineer jobs.
(Photo by JD.com)
See also: Arm launches Total Design for Physical AI and robotics framework
Want to learn more about AI and big data from industry leaders? Check out AI & Big Data Expo taking place in Amsterdam, California, and London. The comprehensive event is part of TechEx and is co-located with other leading technology events including the Cyber Security & Cloud Expo. Click here for more information.
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Motional and MIT researchers have built a system that lets self-driving cars explain their decisions in real-time, tackling the black-box problem in autonomous vehicle AI.
The work, published in Nature, comes from a team at Motional that includes CEO Laura Major, working alongside researchers from MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory. Their proposed method, called the Concept-Wrapper Network or CW-Net, aims to translate the internal calculations of a self-driving system’s neural network into concepts a human can actually read.
If a current self-driving car brakes hard on a clear road with no obvious hazard in sight, neither the driver nor a passenger has any way of knowing why. Modern self-driving systems increasingly rely on neural networks trained on large volumes of driving data. Those networks can perform well, but they don’t expose their reasoning, which is why engineers describe them as black boxes.
CW-Net works by converting a self-driving system’s internal logic into concepts such as “Approaching Stopped Vehicle” or “Close to Cyclist.” These could, according to Motional, appear on a dashboard showing which concepts are influencing the vehicle’s driving decisions as they happen.
The system is designed so the explanations aren’t generated after the fact as a guess at what the network might have been doing. Instead, the vehicle’s final decision-making system takes action based directly on these human-interpretable concepts, so a braking event traces back to a specific concept that triggered it. Motional describes this as causally faithful, distinguishing it from approaches that generate natural-language explanations, which can read as plausible without necessarily being accurate.
Laura Major frames the case for this kind of interpretability against the alternative of relying purely on end-to-end deep learning to handle driving decisions.
“The general end-to-end only approach can get to a really good 80-90 percent – maybe even 95 percent – solution, but that’s not good enough to remove a driver or to earn the trust of cities, communities, and customers,” she said.
Explainable AI research has largely stayed confined to computer simulations in lab settings, according to Motional. The Motional and MIT team instead deployed CW-Net on an autonomous vehicle with an experienced safety operator in the driver’s seat, collecting data on a private test track and on public roads around Las Vegas.
The team used an earlier experimental version of its deep-learning-based planning system, described as showing competitive performance but with notable shortcomings that CW-Net could help surface. Two incidents from the testing illustrate what the system caught.
In one, the autonomous vehicle repeatedly stopped near a traffic cone, and the vehicle operator assumed the cone itself was triggering the behaviour. Researchers removed the cone and the car stopped anyway. CW-Net’s display showed the actual cause: the experimental planning system was hallucinating a stopped vehicle ahead, a pattern traced back to its training data. That explanation let the researchers understand, predict, and resolve the issue.
A second test involved a cyclist. The autonomous vehicle detected and stopped for the cyclist as expected, but CW-Net revealed that the experimental planning system wasn’t actually basing its decision on the cyclist’s presence. The safety driver responded by exercising more caution around cyclists after noticing this. Follow-up analysis confirmed that caution was warranted, because the vehicle’s braking in that case came from a safety backup system rather than the experimental deep-learning-based planner.
Adding layers of explainability to an AI system carries a known cost in speed and performance, and Motional acknowledges that risk. However, when researchers benchmarked CW-Net against leading autonomous driving algorithms, the difference in driving capability came in at less than one percent.
The Las Vegas incidents show why that trade-off matters operationally rather than just academically. A safety driver who can see that a stop is caused by a hallucinated vehicle, or that a backup system rather than the primary planner is responsible for a manoeuvre, can respond and report with more precision than one working from behaviour alone.
That visibility feeds directly into how quickly an engineering team can diagnose a system, and how confidently a safety operator can distinguish between an intended behaviour and a fault.
Motional connects the CW-Net work to broader pressure on autonomous vehicle operators as the technology extends into new markets and jurisdictions. Regulators are naturally asking for more transparency about how AI systems reach their decisions, and it expects tools like CW-Net could move from research projects toward a baseline requirement.
Beyond passenger vehicles, autonomous drones and even robotic surgery are cited as other safety-critical domains where operators and developers will need ways to understand a system’s capabilities, limitations, and unexpected behaviours.
Learn more about physical AI during the Physical AI Expo held in Amsterdam, London, and North America.
See also: MIT AI forecasts extreme weather without historical data
Want to learn more about AI and big data from industry leaders? Check out AI & Big Data Expo taking place in Amsterdam, California, and London. The comprehensive event is part of TechEx and is co-located with other leading technology events including the Cyber Security & Cloud Expo. Click here for more information.
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Every major economy is staring at the same problem right now. Artificial intelligence is consuming electricity at a pace that grids were never designed to handle. In the US, capacity market prices in PJM, the country’s largest grid operator, have risen more than tenfold in two years, with data-centre growth identified as a primary driver. In Europe, utilities are scrambling to upgrade transmission infrastructure fast enough to keep pace with hyperscalers’ demand.
The International Energy Agency (IEA) projects global data-centre electricity consumption could approach 1,000 TWh by the end of this decade. Renewable energy is largely there, but the ability to coordinate it, through AI energy grid mapping at national scales, is what most countries still lack. But China just built it.
A study published in Nature this week by researchers from Peking University and Alibaba Group’s DAMO Academy has produced something that no country has managed before: a complete, high-resolution, AI-generated inventory of an entire nation’s wind and solar infrastructure, with the analytical framework to coordinate it as a unified system.
Using a deep-learning model trained on sub-metre satellite imagery, the team identified China’s 319,972 solar photovoltaic facilities and 91,609 wind turbines, processing 7.56 terabytes of imagery to do so.
Prior research into solar-wind complementarity – the idea that two sources can offset each other’s variability in time and geography – has largely relied on hypothetical or modelled deployment scenarios. How complementarity manifests under real-world infrastructure, and how it shapes system-level integration outcomes, has until now remained unclear.
The researchers show that solar-wind complementarity substantially reduces generation variability, with effectiveness increasing as the geographic scope of pairing expands.
In practical terms, the further apart the facilities being coordinated are, the more reliably they achieve balance. A cloud that covers solar farms in Gansu does not darken wind corridors in Inner Mongolia, for example. The study’s findings point to a structural inefficiency in how China currently manages its grid: coordination happens at a provincial rather than national level.
Transitioning to a unified national scale, the researchers argue, would make it easier to pair complementary energy sources, stabilise the grid, and avoid curtailment – the wasting of generated renewable power that has long been one of China’s most costly clean-energy problems.
Liu Yu, a professor at Peking University’s School of Earth and Space Sciences, described the inventory as allowing China to see its new-energy landscape from a “God’s-eye view,” a phrase that carries more operational weight than it might first suggest. Grid operators cannot optimise what they are not aware of – until now.
China is in the middle of an AI-driven electricity demand surge that is straining its grid. The rapid proliferation of data services and massive computing facilities have pushed the sector’s power consumption up 44% year-on-year in the first quarter of 2026, reaching 22.9 billion kilowatt-hours, according to the China Electricity Council.
That is an extraordinary rate of growth for a sector whose demand was already great. This has accelerated data-centre expansion in China’s northern and western provinces, where land is cheaper, wind and solar resources are more available, with commensurately lower electricity prices. The provinces being targeted for new data centres are the same regions with the highest solar-wind complementarity.
The technical achievement behind this is worth understanding in its own right. DAMO’s deep-learning model was trained to identify solar photovoltaic facilities and wind turbines from sub-metre resolution satellite imagery, a task complicated by the sheer diversity of installation types, terrain conditions, and image quality.
The resulting dataset covers installations in 1,915 Chinese counties, spanning everything from rooftop panels in coastal cities to utility-scale wind farms on the Mongolian plateau. Processing 7.56 terabytes of imagery to produce a nationally consistent, county-level inventory is a demonstration of what large-scale geospatial AI can do when applied to infrastructure problems, and a template that other countries could, in principle, replicate.
China’s clean energy sector generated an estimated 15.4 trillion yuan (US$2.26 trillion) in economic output last year, equivalent to Brazil’s entire GDP, according to the Finland-based Centre for Research on Energy and Clean Air. Managing an asset base of that scale without a national-level visibility tool was always going to be a limiting factor, a limit that’s now gone.
The study’s dataset and code have been made publicly available via Zenodo.
(Photo by Luo Lei)
See also: Inside China’s push to apply AI in its energy system
Want to learn more about AI and big data from industry leaders? Check out AI & Big Data Expo taking place in Amsterdam, California, and London. The comprehensive event is part of TechEx and is co-located with other leading technology events, click here for more information.
AI News is powered by TechForge Media. Explore other upcoming enterprise technology events and webinars here.
The post China’s AI just mapped its entire renewable energy grid. Here’s why the rest of the world should pay attention appeared first on AI News.
Work isn’t the only place where you can develop valuable leadership skills, Sophie Weston mentioned in the video The Principal Engineer’s Path from her QCon London talk. She suggested thinking about the things you do outside of your job where you can learn and practice useful leadership skills, and bringing your full skill set - your whole self - to work.
By Ben Linders
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