A robotic hand normally depends on an arm for almost everything. The arm transports it, positions it, stabilizes it, and supplies the reach required to interact with the surrounding world. Researchers at ETH Zurich are challenging that conventional architecture by teaching an off-the-shelf anthropomorphic robotic hand to move independently across surfaces using its own fingers. The result is an unusual but technically significant machine: a five-fingered robotic hand that can crawl without an...

Alibaba’s Qwen research team has introduced Qwen-Image-2.1, an open-weight artificial intelligence model designed to combine high-quality image generation and advanced image editing within a single system. Its visual generation component contains 7 billion parameters and uses a 32-layer single-stream Diffusion Transformer architecture. The model also integrates a Qwen3-VL 8B text and vision encoder, a dedicated RGBA autoencoder, and an inference design intended to reduce repeated computation...

The artificial intelligence industry has spent much of the past decade competing to build increasingly capable foundation models. Larger parameter counts, greater training budgets, longer context windows, and more sophisticated reasoning systems have driven successive waves of progress. But the economics of AI are beginning to expose a different problem. For many real-world workloads, the most capable model available is not necessarily the most economically intelligent choice. A simple...