034

Sakana AI Unveils SAIL, a Method for Generating Robot Trajectories

No.34 · Tuesday, September 29, 2026 · Today in AI

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In this issue

1. 01Sakana AI Unveils SAIL, a Method for Generating Robot TrajectoriesA VLM drafts a robot trajectory, tests it in a simulator and rewrites it before the arm moves. Raising the budget to 45 candidates lifted the success rate from 25% to 73%.
2. 02OpenAI Expands Support for Lenfest AI FellowshipOpenAI doubled its support for the Lenfest AI fellowship, which places AI engineers inside US local news organizations. It is adding $5 million in cash and up to $5 million in credits, and the next cohort will turn its results into tools many newsrooms can share.
3. 03Meta Hires MongoDB CEO, Launches Enterprise AI BusinessMeta announced the launch of Meta Enterprise Platform, a new enterprise AI unit, and hired CJ Desai, until now MongoDB's CEO, to lead it with a direct line to Mark Zuckerberg. MongoDB brought back former CEO Dev Ittycheria as interim CEO.
4. 04Anthropic Releases Claude Sonnet 5.5Anthropic released Sonnet 5.5, the second model in the Claude 5.5 family. It generates output more than 30% faster than Sonnet 5, costs up to 30% less per task, and comes close to Opus 5.5 on several benchmarks.
5. 05Nvidia unveils Open Agent Safety Platform for AI agentsNvidia has released the Open Agent Safety Platform, which pairs OpenShell, a runtime that draws an agent's boundary on the CPU, with Sentry, a watchdog that monitors agents from a DPU. More than 100 organizations, including Anthropic, SpaceXAI and Salesforce, are taking part.
6. 06ElevenLabs Releases Eleven v4 Voice ModelElevenLabs released Eleven v4, a voice model with stronger emotional expression, and its low-latency variant Eleven v4 Turbo. Turbo reaches first speech in about 150 milliseconds, and both models support more than 90 languages.
7. 07Deputy Prime Minister Bae Kyung-hoon Frames AI as Basic InfrastructureSouth Korea's Deputy Prime Minister and Science Minister Bae Kyung-hoon told a foreign news interview that AI is basic infrastructure, like electricity, that every citizen should be able to use without worrying about cost. A record 29.6476 trillion won budget, the AI for Everyone program and an elimination-style national model contest underpin the plan.
8. 08NASA's Brand and Its Trust Principle in the AI EraIn an interview, NASA creative director David Rager cited brand trust as the reason the agency does not use AI imagery. A 67-year brand history, from the 1959 meatball to the 1975 worm, carries that trust principle into the AI era.
9. 09Walmart CEO John Furner issues letter rejecting personalized pricingWalmart CEO John Furner pledged in a letter to customers that the company will not set prices based on income, shopping history or urgency. The pledge applies equally to digital shelf labels and to Sparky, its AI shopping assistant.
10. 10Runway launches Layers, a tool that splits images into editable layersRunway showcased Layers on X, a tool that breaks a single image into multiple transparent layers. It runs on ByteDance's Seedream 5.0 Layers, costs 18 credits per split, and editing and downloading afterward are free.