Investors bullish on AI data centers may be fueling Nvidia’s multitrillion-dollar market capitalization, but the AI chipmaker has also bet billions of dollars on physical AI technologies such as robotics and self-driving cars. Part of that gambit has involved developing a full-stack safety system that companies can build upon to reduce the risk of their machines harming nearby people.

Nvidia's Halos system launched in 2025 with hardware and software tools to help developers implement guardrails in self-driving cars and other autonomous vehicles. Then the company expanded its safety architecture to more physical AI technologies by announcing Nvidia Halos for Robotics in June 2026—with the goal of enabling safe deployments of autonomous mobile robots in warehouses, humanoid robots walking around inside a factory, or even surgical robots.

“Now the AI models are getting capable, the robot hardware is getting capable, and a thing we thought is going to be the next bottleneck is safety,” Amit Goel, head of robotics ecosystem and edge computing at Nvidia, told Ars. “So that's why we launched our Halos for Robotics to unlock the capability of these systems.”

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In its first live event in two years, Microsoft today announced its newest Surface laptop, outlined a host of changes coming to Windows 11, and shared a vision of how local-AI and agentic workflows could reshape personal computing for those in the dev community as well as home enthusiasts.

Surface Laptop Ultra

Originally teased in May 2026, the new Surface Laptop Ultra will be Microsoft's first offering to take advantage of the new Nvidia RTX Spark SoC (system on a chip). The device has a starting price of $2,599 and comes in various SoC and memory configurations, with either a 5120-core or 6144-core Blackwell GPU and up to 128GB of LPDDR5x unified memory. It will begin shipping on October 16 and is available for preorder now.

While the new Ultra is clearly focused on the developer crowd, graphical performance was highlighted during the presentation to show off just how capable the laptop can be. By leaning on unified memory allocation rather than the physical VRAM limits of a traditional GPU, the laptop can assign its resources to handle modern gaming tasks as well as local AI development and deployment. The new Gears of War: E-Day was shown running on the system, meaning that even without a traditional gaming GPU, AAA titles are on the table.

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For a while, those hoping to avoid the difficulty and expense of dealing with Adobe's Creative Suite have been able to use several free and/or open source alternatives that replicate some or all of those capabilities. Now, one developer is using AI-powered reverse engineering to mimic the look, feel, and functionality of Adobe's well-known software with what he hopes will soon be perfect fidelity.

Artcraft got its start last year as a "controllable AI for artists" that allows for precise post-generation editing of AI-crafted images and videos. Over the weekend, though, the brand debuted its pivot to a suite of seven open source apps recreating the user interface and tools found in Adobe's Photoshop, Illustrator, Premiere, Lightroom, After Effects, InDesign, and Acrobat Pro.

In announcing those new apps on Reddit earlier this week, software developer Brandon Thomas said he used Anthropic's Claude Opus 5.5 to create "clean-room replacements" for Adobe's closed source software in Rust (with WebAssembly versions available for use in a browser). And while commenters on Hacker News and elsewhere have taken pains to point out the new software's many current shortcomings, Thomas makes the grandiose promise that the current "super early alpha" state will soon lead to something just as functional as anything Adobe has ever put out.

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