GoKawiil
Tech News
Stanford researchers, working with the Terminal-Bench team and scientists across disciplines, launched Terminal-Bench-Science, a benchmark testing AI agents on real scientific research workflows. The initial version includes 70 tasks spanning life, physical, Earth, mathematical, and engineering sciences, with Claude Opus 5 running Claude Code topping the leaderboard at a 30% resolution rate.
More than 600 teams, mostly from Chinese universities and robotics firms, brought humanoid machines to Beijing's second World Humanoid Robot Games from August 22 to 26. Alongside sprint, jump and combat contests, organizers added scenario-based challenges like shelving books and making beds, scoring autonomous performances higher than remotely operated ones. Robots set records in speed and jumping, but researchers noted that everyday chores remain far tougher for machines than flashy athletic feats.
A technical writeup walks through the logic behind PageRank, the algorithm Sergey Brin and Larry Page built at Stanford in the 1990s to rank web pages by the links pointing to them rather than just keyword matches. The piece argues the core idea is simple enough that a curious person could reconstruct it themselves, and it includes a short Python implementation showing how reputation flows between pages using a damping factor.
A Stanford study finds that AI's disruption of the job market falls hardest on entry-level workers whose roles depend on formal, documented, codifiable skills. In contrast, experienced employees whose jobs rely on tacit, practice-based expertise have actually seen employment gains, according to the report cited by Ars Technica.
MIT Technology Review spoke with cognitive scientists comparing how babies and large language models acquire language, finding that infants learn to speak proficiently after hearing only 10 to 30 million words, while LLMs require vastly more data to approach similar fluency. Stanford's Michael C. Frank noted that training a model like GPT-2 on the same word count a toddler hears produces a 'nonsense generator,' not coherent speech.
Researchers from Stanford, including Erik Brynjolfsson, analyzed labor data and found that since 2022, employment among 22-to-25-year-olds in the most AI-exposed occupations has dropped about 11 percent, while it rose 10 percent in the least-exposed fields. Economy-wide, however, employment differences between AI-affected and unaffected jobs were minimal, suggesting the disruption is concentrated among young, entry-level workers.
Stanford economist Erik Brynjolfsson, working with the Digital Economy Lab, now says there is no evidence of economy-wide job losses from AI, though entry-level positions remain vulnerable. His updated research finds productivity growth accelerating instead, with nonfarm business productivity rising over 2% annually, the strongest pace since the late 1990s.