SpaceX has requested unusually swift entry into several leading stock market indexes as a condition of its historic stock market debut. But the S&P 500 stock market index representing many of the largest profitable US companies has surprised market analysts by refusing to bend the rules for Elon Musk’s space and AI company.

The June 4 decision by S&P Dow Jones Indices—the company that creates and manages stock market indexes such as the S&P 500—means that SpaceX will not gain accelerated access to potentially billions more dollars through passive investment funds that automatically purchase shares of S&P 500 companies. An exception for SpaceX could have also allowed leading AI companies such as OpenAI and Anthropic to gain entry not long after their own expected initial public offerings (IPOs). That possibility has now been shuttered.

The news will likely come as a relief to people concerned about passive investor money and people’s retirement savings plans having greater exposure to the market risks associated with SpaceX’s big bet on AI and speculative orbital data center plans. AI companies are generally facing more challenges in funding and building expensive AI data centers, even as they shift more of the subsidized costs of running AI services onto shocked customers through usage-based pricing.

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It may appear that humanoid robots capable of handling any task have almost arrived—especially when tech companies showcase them performing acrobatic feats or handling household chores. But there is still a significant gap between these robot demonstrations and proving that the same robots can reliably and repeatedly manage such tasks in the real world.

The latest wave of robot videos can be particularly tricky, given the human tendency to anthropomorphize objects with a humanoid figure. A robot arm doing a dance move may simply seem “cool,” but a humanoid robot doing the same dance move can trigger more misleading assumptions, said Jonathan Hurst, cofounder of Agility Robotics and a robotics researcher at Oregon State University.

“People automatically extrapolate and assume that the robot that looks like a person can do all the things that a person who can dance could do—which is not true,” Hurst told Ars. “But a lot of the startup companies do kind of prey on that for being able to raise a lot of money.”

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Thousands of electric vehicles in Waymo’s autonomous robotaxi fleet may eventually give up their used batteries for a very different purpose—contributing up to hundreds of megawatt-hours of stationary energy storage to local power grids.

That prospect comes from a “strategic supply agreement” announced by Waymo and B2U Storage Solutions on June 4. B2U has been repurposing thousands of used batteries from various electric vehicles by installing them in large stationary energy storage projects. Such energy storage facilities can capture excess renewable energy during low demand periods and release such energy when local power grids are experiencing peak demand periods.

“Our business is getting the full residual value out of electric vehicle batteries after they're no longer suitable for automotive use,” Freeman Hall, CEO of B2U Storage Solution, told Ars. “Waymo puts a lot of miles on EVs and their model is expanding rapidly, and so we're just very pleased and honored to be able to work with them.”

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