€80m for the workplace, a robot that learns by watching, a school with no degree

Pittsburgh-based Skild has announced a robot foundation model, S1, designed to learn previously unseen multistep tasks from a single video demonstration. In one experiment reported by the company, eleven minutes elapsed between recording a plant-potting demonstration and the robot performing the task autonomously. The model can also adjust when objects move, recover from errors, and combine skills in sequences it was not explicitly programmed to perform.

This is not only a lab demo: Skild, Nvidia and Foxconn are running the model on dual-arm robots at an Nvidia factory in Houston, assembling Blackwell GPU systems. S1 was built on Nvidia infrastructure (Cosmos, Isaac Lab, Isaac Sim, Omniverse), and Skild says it reached a $100 million annual revenue run rate ten months after its first commercial deployment. Amit Goel, a product director at Nvidia, names the bottleneck that remains: data and evaluation.

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French labour minister Jean-Pierre Farandou presented “Impulsion IA 2027” on Tuesday: 12 measures and €80 million in new funding, the employment arm of the “Osez l'IA” plan launched in summer 2025. Half the measures target AI literacy: a free Explore IA platform, another for apprentices, financial support for apprentice training centres, an AI “maturity” test for jobseekers through France Travail, and a reform of the personal training account that makes AI a national priority. “Without determined action on our part, AI will shape a world that is not necessarily the one we want,” the minister warned.

Two numbers frame the announcement. A Coface study cited in April estimated that one job in six in France — five million — could be automated within three or four years. And the labour ministry must find €2.5 billion in savings in the 2027 budget, which puts the €80 million in perspective. The CGT union, through Agathe le Berder, says “the whole social dialogue section grants no new rights to employees” and calls the promise of business support without conditions “scandalous”.

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Mistral has acquired Pimento, a French startup building advertising campaigns with AI, founded in 2022 by Florent Facq and Tomas Yany. The deal was revealed by L'Informé, which puts the price at close to €3.8 million, and confirmed by Florent Facq on LinkedIn: his teams join engineering and product to work on Vibe, Mistral's conversational agent (formerly Le Chat).

It is Mistral's third acquisition this year after Koyeb (serverless cloud) and Austria's Emmi AI (industrial simulation models), and it lands two weeks after the €3 billion round led by Samsung. One detail the source underlines: at the time of writing, Mistral has made no official announcement of the deal, and the figure quoted comes from a media outlet, not from the parties.

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Venture firm Andreessen Horowitz is investing $35 million in an alternative to college: a two-year, unaccredited programme based in San Francisco and open to students aged 16 to 22. Named the Horowitz Andreessen Academy, it will operate as an independent business led by Gagan Biyani, co-founder of the ed-tech platform Udemy, alongside Ben Horowitz and Erik Torenberg. Other Bay Area tech giants are said to be on board.

The pitch fits in one line from the paper: don't drop out of school to start a company, come do school with us instead. What the accessible part of the article does not say: when it opens, what it costs students, which other companies are involved — and, for an unaccredited programme, what exactly students leave with.

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OpenAI says an internal model, whose training began on 28 August, has resolved more than 100 long-standing open problems across most areas of mathematics — on top of its Navier-Stokes claim, which the community was already asking to see. The company writes that “the pace of its progress in mathematics has surprised the mathematicians within OpenAI,” and cites the open letter “A Severe Misalignment of AI in Mathematics,” which criticises labs for treating open problems as a benchmark.

The answer is an independent advisory group of mathematicians: it will advise on reviewing results, assessing their significance, coordinating their dissemination and upholding academic standards. OpenAI states that the group operates independently, may publish advice it was never asked for, may change its own membership, and that its members are not paid by the company. One limit is written plainly: the group will not advise OpenAI on the pace of its own progress in mathematics. The page names none of its members.

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