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One of the biggest benefits of Home Assistant is that it offers local control, so your smart home doesn't stop working when the internet is down. If you're away from home when the internet connection dies, however, then you may be unable to reach your Home Assistant server even if it's still working fine. These projects offer some alternative ways to communicate with your smart home without relying on the internet.

The nightlife minutiae of a small town in Massachusetts may not seem like traditional fodder for a 24-hour news cycle. But turn that drama into a more-than-1,500-word Boston Globe article, sprinkled with apéritifs for online discourse? Well, that's a recipe for virality.

That's what happened when the Globe reported on a recent public skirmish between community members and the owners of Last Ditch Bar and Arts Venue, a lesbian bar and event space in Greenfield, a town of just 17,000 people.

SEE ALSO: YouTube's microdrama boom is getting bigger

The Last Ditch is one of just 36 lesbian bars in the U.S., as chronicled by the Lesbian Bar Project. It's a nightlife outlier amid a post-COVID bar and club scene that has had to reckon with a decline in public socialization — let alone one that has addressed the alarming decline of number of lesbian bars across the country long before the global pandemic.

But the bar's reputation as a gathering place for Greenfield's sapphic community is now marred by a dramatic series of events that started with a single Instagram post.

The Aug. 31 alert to customers began as an explanation of the venue's updated mask policy. Where the space used to require KN-95 masks at all times, Last Ditch was moving towards more mask-less events — specifically opening up Saturday nights to maskless customers. The response from commenters online was a no-holds-barred flurry of irate messages, accusations of ableism and racism, and even calls for violence from former customers who said their previously safe space had been compromised.

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From there, the situation spun out of control, chronicled by the Globe as a series of apologies, retractions, public meetings, and online debates that set a group of COVID-conscious collectives against a fractured bar leadership.

The quotes and comments referenced in the article were sure to get attention: Some Last Ditch patrons referred to the Saturday night change as a "mass disabling event" and a "eugenicist" attack. "People like you kill disabled people in the name of your own leisure and convenience," wrote another commenter.

The internet responds to the Last Ditch effort

Like the rabid commenters and enraged community the feature profiles, the internet couldn't be normal about the story's increasingly bizarre anecdotes and comments from the Last Ditch's opposition.

Users called it possibly the best reporting of the year, some of their lives. Screenshots of users' favorite enraged comments — like "one had enrolled in clown school" (a Last Ditch owner is currently enrolled in clown school) and "I hope your venue gets firebombed" — have proliferated online.

Within 24 hours, the story had become 2026's "Cat Person" or "Bad Art Friend."

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But percolating throughout the humor-filled posts is unabashed, homophobic commentary on queer and disabled communities. Quotes of the Globe's reporting included images of staff and customers ripped from the bar's social media pages, posted alongside unwarranted commentary on their appearances. Some took the opportunity to attack liberal and leftist ideologies at large, with one user calling the Last Ditch's initial Instagram post — not the response it engendered — an example of "intergalactic woke batcrapitude."

It's not the first time a lesbian space has been turned into fodder for a bored internet intent on turning LGBTQ people into the butt of the joke or a vessel for a larger social reckoning. In 2024, for example, the saga of a TikTok influencer and New York City's Cubbyhole ignited a widespread debate about the sanctity of queer spaces.

Regardless, the Globe has benefited from its viral tale, allegedly gaining more than 1,000 subscribers after it went live. The Last Ditch may also capture some new customers thanks to its newfound notoriety.

"We started this project as a small group of friends with a burning desire to keep unapologetically queer spaces alive in Western Mass," wrote Last Ditch leadership in an Instagram plea from April 20. "Not to make money, not to garner notoriety. Just to maintain, expand, and serve our queer community."

I’m a Pixel person through and through and have been daily driving one since I bought my Pixel 6a. And, for what it’s worth, I’ve had plenty of time with Samsung phones because I review them, so my preference is an informed choice. However, that’s only when it comes to smartphones. I don’t get many smartwatches sent my way, so I wasn’t very familiar with the hands-on differences until I bought a few with my own money — and boy, was I shocked.

There's nothing worse than a laptop that overheats. I've been there; the last two decades are lined with less-than-stellar laptops for me, actually. One was so bad that it'd turn off within 45 seconds if it didn't have a hair dryer on the cold setting constantly blowing into its vents. Yes, I've tried to fix it. But when you're a broke college student, you make do with what you have.

The legendary comedy institution that is Saturday Night Live returns this weekend, September 26, for its 52nd season with Knicks star Jalen Brunson hosting and Katseye as musical guest. I've never watched a lot of sports in my life, but SNL's storied history of golden eras, seasonal slumps, "The Weird Year," controversies, iconic cast members (many gone too soon), and ever-rotating roster have made it the team I've followed for almost my entire life.

YouTube has unveiled a flurry of updates to both its core video service and YouTube Music that will tangibly affect your day-to-day streaming habits.

For many people, Claude is the AI model of choice. It pioneered a lot of cool features with Claude Code, Cowork, MCPs, Skills, and more. The models also just sound more thoughtful when answering your questions. So naturally, one of the biggest frustrations folks have with Claude is that it doesn’t last as long as they want it to and burns through their token usage very quickly. Fortunately, there’s an easy fix — one that was sitting right under your nose. By changing this one setting, I was able to make my Claude usage last 8x longer.

People around the world are largely optimistic about artificial intelligence, according to a new Gallup poll. At the same time, a majority of respondents reported they've never actually used the new technology.

The Gallup-Microsoft AI survey, published Sept. 23 as part of the polling company's ongoing research with Microsoft, found that positive feelings about AI outweigh negative ones in 34 of the first 37 countries to complete fieldwork this year. The United States, Egypt, and Palestine were the only exceptions. Gallup says the study will eventually cover 140 countries.

SEE ALSO: Grieving people prefer AI bots that speak as dead loved ones, study suggests

Across the 37 countries, 72 percent of AI-aware adults reported at least one positive emotion toward the technology, compared with 41 percent who reported at least one negative emotion. Curiosity was the most common response, with a median of 64 percent saying AI makes them feel curious. Worry was the most common negative emotion, at a median of 32 percent.

Views on AI's broader impact were also mostly positive. In 29 countries, more people said AI would mostly help their country than harm it. The contrast between the United States and China was particularly revealing: 93 percent of Chinese respondents said AI will help their country. The United States ranked near the bottom, at 36 percent, just above Egypt and Bangladesh.

Gallup noted that optimism doesn't always track with usage. In Nigeria, for example, 68 percent of AI-aware adults expect AI to help the country, although only 20 percent have used it.

In the United States, a Pew Research Center AI survey published in September 2025 found that 62 percent of Americans interact with AI several times a week, including 31 percent who do so several times a day or "almost constantly."

Gallup's poll also found low trust in AI accuracy, and as Mashable has reported, AI hallucinations and inaccuracies remain a stubborn problem. A median of 36 percent of respondents said they trust AI completely or a lot to provide accurate information, with majorities expressing that level of trust in only four countries: Israel, Vietnam, China, and Nigeria. Trust tended to rise with use. In the U.S., 45 percent of daily users trust AI's accuracy, compared with 8 percent of people who have never used it. However, Gallup cautioned that the survey can't determine whether trust drives use or vice versa.

Wealthy Western countries stood out for their worry over AI. Gallup found that 74 percent of AI-aware Americans say AI makes them feel worried, the highest share in any country surveyed, followed by the Netherlands and Canada. But within those countries, daily users were generally less worried than people who use AI less often or not at all.

This year's Made on YouTube event wasn't just about video viewers and video creators. 

On Wednesday, YouTube announced new features for Ask Music in the YouTube Music app. The feature is currently mainly used to create personalized stations and find music based on your mood.

Now, however, YouTube Music users will be able to discover new music based on the songs they're listening to. Users can ask Ask Music for information about songs and albums that inspired a particular track.

If they really like a song, they can even use Ask Music to find podcasts and podcast episodes featuring the artist behind it or get more details about the track. During a demo at the Made on YouTube event, YouTuber Derrick Gee showcased how users could ask Ask Music who played bass on a track and then find other songs featuring that musician. Ask Music can also help listeners find songs that sampled a particular track.

Podcasts are also a big part of YouTube Music and that's where the new Your Podcast Lineup feature comes in.

With Your Podcast Lineup, users can create an AI-generated podcast about other podcasts recommended by YouTube Music based on their interests.

While YouTube's main video-focused platform was the highlight of Made on YouTube, the company made it clear that YouTube Music isn't just a side project.

When you’ve been around as long as Android has, many apps have gone the way of Harvey Dent. Some legendary, trusted names have become completely unnecessary or unsafe to use. Make sure you don’t have any of them on your phone.

Long live Mavis Beacon. 

If you're unfamiliar with the name, she was the not-entirely-real icon behind classroom software that taught generations of students touch typing. Beacon was a celebrity of early digital literacy, with generations of learners collectively misremembering her as a real-life elite typer — not just a made-up name attached to the likeness of model Renée L'Esperance. 

Still, Beacon became an avatar for the digital dreams of the pre-Y2K generation. The software, full name "Mavis Beacon Teaches Typing," was an entry point to the world of technology for thousands of children who would later grow into a computer-skilled workforce. Before entering the rat race, though, these students would be required to attend "Computer Lab," where they would visit typing.com to compete for the highest WPM ("words per minute"). 

Now, most kids don't go to a computer lab. They boot up their personal Chromebooks at their desks, log onto their school's assignment portal, complete their tasks with help from AI, and go back to their phones or iPads. 

Concern about technology's impact on student learning has reached a critical level. A recent longitudinal study of students aged 7 to 16 found that early adoption of social media negatively impacted kids' learning outcomes. Child development researchers and safety advocates have called for an end to screen time in classrooms as literacy rates decline. Generative AI is sending everyone spinning. 

But the kids are still learning. They're just not learning the same things their parents did — especially about computers.

WPM? More like words per hour

Mavis Beacon's memory may live on, but touch typing — or being able to type using just sightless motor memory — has turned into a dying art. A 2024 EdWeek Research Center survey found that just 69 percent of districts teach "keyboarding" in a formal capacity, whether that's directly in curriculum or as a separate, elective course. 

The more affluent the school system, the earlier they introduce keyboarding skills, the survey found.

What those classes are actually teaching is even more of a mystery. Other than surveys, there is little publicly available data on typing proficiency across the country. Directed touch-type curriculum seems to be rare. 

The basic skill is often relegated to app-based tools built into classroom devices. Tech-focused lesson plans available online devote less time to basics and more to mastering advanced computer skills and personalized tools like AI assistants. 

A problem as old as computers 

The shift from basics is not necessarily a new trend. Proper typing became a commonly used benchmark in schools as early as the late '90s, but by 2004, typing classes were already on their way out, according to a 2004 Department of Education study quoted by the Christian Science Monitor.

Search "touch typing op-eds," and you will find dozens of complaints that students don't know how to put hands to keys. 

In a 2011 MIT Technology Review article, for example, Oberlin College professor Annie Trubek criticized a rise in "idiosyncratic, personalized hunt-and-peck" typing among younger generations. "Ironically, in our era of keyboard ubiquity, typing has fallen out of the curriculum," wrote Trubek. "Since most students come to school familiar with keyboards, including cell phone keypads, educators are letting the ad hoc habits of six-year old computer gamers stand." 

A 2015 Wall Street Journal article reported a rising demand for keyboarding classes as digital testing became prevalent under new Common Core State Standards — and teachers realized many kids didn't know how to type. 

On the whole, Americans' digital literacy skills are declining.  States tiptoe around typing

As newer, faster, more complex technologies enter the world of education, more teachers are calling on their districts to institute basic computer skill requirements like keyboarding long before they have to engage with something like machine learning. 

As of 2025, Utah was one of just a few states that still listed motor typing skills — like proper hand placement — as part of their state standard curriculum. When the state's Board of Education implemented such specific K-5 keyboarding proficiency standards, they deemed them a "critical literacy skill." 

But Utah could be changing things soon. In a statement to Mashable, state education officials declined to comment on the implementation of keyboarding standards, citing recent legislation. In March, the state passed an amendment to its digital skills curriculum mandating a "modernization" of the standards, including an emphasis on news and media literacy.

While California includes keyboard proficiency in its Common Core standards, a Department of Education spokesperson told Mashable that the state does not "test or measure" the skill at a state level. Schools do not receive a curriculum framework or additional instructional materials beyond what is included in the 2015 Computer Science Standards, the spokesperson explained. 

And similar to Utah, California is set to revamp its tech standards soon, aligned with Governor Gavin Newsom's new executive order on AI in schools. A department spokesperson explained the state's current standards. Where there was once basic computer science, there is now "AI literacy."  

Hitting Ctrl X on Ctrl C 

The keyboard may prove to be a key (pun intended) learning gap for many students whose tech skills are borne from touchscreen devices, like smartphones and iPads.

Complaints about students not knowing basic shortcuts — including classic short keys such as "Ctrl C" for copy and "Ctrl V" for paste — abound on online forums and subreddits r/Teachers and r/AskTeachers. 

"One student was completely blown away when I 'magically' got his suddenly missing work back by pushing ctrl-z a couple times, and a simple copy-paste final part to a project was so confusing to them," wrote one first-year high school teacher in a 2020 Reddit post criticizing the "digital native" myth. "All that said, I love every single one of my ridiculous computer-illiterate stinkers. I just wish their prior schools had given them the tools they needed."

But like many other assumed tech skills, it's hard to put exact numbers on the problem. Most reporting on the subject cites a 2023 survey of 500 university students in Japan that found that only a third knew the shortcut for undoing a keyboard action. The most familiar shortcut among students was for copying text, with just 62 percent reporting they knew what the combination of keys did. And 20 percent said they didn't know any short keys at all. 

Parents and teachers have opined about other hardware deficiencies among their young learners. For example, anecdotes describe computer mouses, obsolete in an era of trackpads, as a specific speed bump in the road to greater device efficiency. 

Now we're trying to throw AI literacy on top of those gaps and it's a recipe for disaster. - Jodie Carreon, Schools Beyond Screens Computer, put it in the cloud  

Personal devices — tablets, phones — as well as sandboxed or app-based learning devices like Chromebooks have created other deficits, too. 

"To add insult to injury, they don't even know how file directories work! The idea there [sic] are different places in computer storage a file can end up is a totally foreign concept," wrote a frustrated college TA in a Reddit post from 2025. 

The streamlined functioning of these tools, built with limited capabilities or reliant on Cloud-based storage, have negated the need for complex file organization and directories that used to be core to learning computer navigation. 

In fact, many devices no longer even give you an obvious option to save your files elsewhere. Instead, media is saved right to your camera roll or sent off to cloud storage to live in the ether until you use your digital assistant to recall it on your behalf. Many devices hide file directions to decrease visual clutter. 

If you use Google's suite of word processors and spreadsheet makers — which most students do — everything is saved and shared instantly with teachers and peers to review. No need to even attach a file and send an email these days. 

Take the stories from this 2021 Verge article, which cite a cohort of professors who started documenting a decline in file directory knowledge around 2017. "In an age where every conceivable user interface includes a search function, young people have never needed folders or directories for the tasks they do," the publication wrote. 

According to anecdotal stories from IT pros flocking to Reddit to air complaints, nested hierarchies — or organizing documents into a main folder with subfolders — are often too difficult for the average user to figure out, let alone a child still learning their multiplication tables. 

Bringing back computer basics

On the whole, Americans' digital literacy skills are declining. 

The 2023 International Computer and Information Literacy Study — a global assessment of students' ability "to use computers to investigate, create, and communicate in order to participate effectively at home, at school, in the workplace, and in society" — reported a sharp decline in digital literacy among American eighth graders. 

“The results highlight the need for further inquiry and concentrated efforts to address the computer and informational literacy skills of our students," said Peggy G. Carr, former commissioner of National Center for Education Statistics, at the time. "These skills are as fundamental as the 3 R’s [reading, writing, and arithmetic]." 

Advocates for AI and screentime bans in schools have likened the competing decline of basic tech skills versus the rise in advanced technologies to "building a plane while it is flying."

"We are no longer teaching [digital literacy] in a dedicated and explicit way," said Jodie Carreon, national director of Schools Beyond Screens, the group that spearheaded recent screen time and AI limits at the Los Angeles Unified School District. "The way it's operated in the past decade is to shoehorn it into disciplines where it doesn't belong, with the idea that students would learn through osmosis."

It's just as important that students learn how to type with automaticity as it is that they know how to write fluently, explains executive director of the Stanford Teacher Education Program Dr. Sarah Levine. Writing, including the process of typing, is a mode of thinking, she says. "You have to know your keyboard pretty well, and then you're off and running."

Carreon says there is growing concern that students are graduating high school without necessary tech skills — she's not referring to the competitive coding or AI skills emphasized by Big Tech and corporate leaders, but basic knowledge of computers, computer science, and the way technology itself works. 

"We haven't done a great job of teaching basic digital skills or critical digital literacy. Now we're trying to throw AI literacy on top of those gaps and it's a recipe for disaster," Carreon says. Schools have to go back to the basics. "We need to be much more intentional about teaching some of those prerequisites, those fundamentals, before we put increasingly powerful AI systems in students' hands."

Along with the new features for YouTube viewers unveiled at the company's big Made on YouTube event on Wednesday, YouTube announced a whole suite of features for content creators, too.

For the most part, creators have used their YouTube channels to distribute content. Over the years, YouTube has rolled out features to help users create content, too. But with these latest announcements, YouTube is taking its biggest step yet into the content creation process.

SEE ALSO: YouTube is giving livestream communities more ways to play, pay, and participate

One of the event's biggest announcements for creators is the conversational editing assistant coming to YouTube Shorts and YouTube Create in early 2027.

The conversational editing assistant will help creators edit their footage into videos and short-form clips, using only natural-language conversation, as they would with a chatbot. The editor can pick the best takes, edit clips together with transitions, add text, and more. 

Credit: YouTube

Of course, AI plays a role here, but YouTube was adamant that its AI tools are meant to assist YouTubers in creating content themselves, not do it for them. 

In addition to the editing assistant, YouTube unveiled several new Insight tools for creators seeking guidance on what their viewers want to see.

There's a new feature coming to the Insights section of YouTube Studio's Analytics called Research, which will show creators the top videos in their niche that their own viewers have been watching.

YouTube Insight Research Credit: YouTube

In addition, YouTube Studio can now provide video feedback on new video content that hasn't been published yet. Previously, YouTubers could get insights into their videos to see what worked and what didn't. Now, creators can upload videos directly just to use this feature and make changes based on YouTube's recommendations before a video goes live.

Thumbnails are also getting a big upgrade on YouTube. Creators can generate customizable thumbnails on YouTube and, if they're unsure which thumbnail to use, use multiple thumbnails with the new Dynamic Thumbnails feature.

YouTube Dynamic Thumbnails Credit: YouTube

Dynamic Thumbnails will show viewers thumbnails that YouTube's algorithm believes will most resonate with that particular user.

A/B testing for thumbnails has been a feature in YouTube Studio for some time. Now, YouTube is rolling out A/B testing for an entire video. Creators can upload multiple Shorts or long-form video edits and then select the main cut based on what users like best based on viewer retention data.

Video A/B testing Credit: YouTube

Ask Studio, which YouTube announced is also coming to mobile, can now parse a creator's back catalog of videos and optimize previous content with new thumbnails and A/B test features.

Fedora is easily one of the best Linux distributions out there, but the default software manager it ships with isn’t doing it any favors. Whether you're on Fedora Workstation with GNOME Software or running Fedora KDE with Discover, both are painfully slow to load and offer an overall buggy experience. I can't tell you how many times I've searched for an app, gotten an empty screen, and assumed the app just wasn't available — when it was actually just stuck loading.

Netflix has used artificial intelligence to (in a sense) resurrect a beloved star of stage and screen.

As of Wednesday, several episodes of the new Netflix reality competition show Wonka's Golden Ticket are now available on the popular streaming service. This show has been a source of some controversy ever since its announcement over the summer, as its "host" is an AI-generated Gene Wilder who exists in voice form. Reviews of the series from outlets like Variety and NME have criticized the practice, with Variety calling it "ghoulish."

You can get a feel for how it works in the trailer, but the essential fact is this: Wilder's AI voice is used to host the game show. Its challenges and general aesthetic are loosely based on the 1971 Willy Wonka & The Chocolate Factory film, rather than the original Roald Dahl book or any of the later Hollywood adaptations. Crucially, this AI-generated Wilder is never seen, only heard, with NME calling this version of the deceased actor "blatantly cruel."

It's worth mentioning that Wilder's estate gave permission for Netflix to do this, but that hasn't stopped people online from reacting to it in a not-entirely-positive manner. We've seen similar controversies play out in other cases where deceased entertainers have been resurrected with AI (with the permission of their estate).

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Hopefully, nobody gets stuck inside a TV or turned into a giant blueberry if they lose on the game show.

SEE ALSO: It's time to add AI protections to your will

There's little argument that, among today's flat-panel display technologies, OLED (Organic Light-Emitting Diode) screens are objectively the best.

A big upside to owning a 3D printer is being able to print things for next to nothing when you need them. While tools made from filament like PLA and PETG lack the durability of even their cheapest metal counterparts, they’re often good enough in a pinch.

SAVE $549.01: As of Sep. 23, get the Anker Solix S2000 Portable Power Station for $649.99 at Amazon. That's down from its usual price of $1,199.

Opens in a new window Credit: Amazon Anker Solix S2000 Portable Power Station $649.99 at Amazon
$1,199 Save $549.01   Get Deal

Fall's cooler temperatures may be blowing in, but don't discount the power of an autumn thunderstorm.

Whether you live in an area that's prone to blackouts during the season or you just want to make sure you've got what you need to stay on the grid, a portable power station is always a good investment. And if you're fast, you can snag one for an excellent price right now thanks to this Amazon lightning deal.

As of Sep. 23, get the Anker Solix S2000 Portable Power Station for $649.99 at Amazon, down from its usual price of $1,199. That's $549.01 off for a limited time.

SEE ALSO: The 6 best power stations for camping keep you both online and off-grid

The Anker Solix S2000 is a great option if you're looking for a reliable power station to provide electricity if yours goes out. It's perfect for use at home, with AC ports on both the front and back to power a variety of devices.

It offers 2,010Wh of capacity, and Anker claims it can keep even large appliances like your refrigerator running for up to 35 hours, so your food doesn't have to spoil just because you don't have electricity.

Its low power draw of 6W makes it a convenient pick for keeping all your devices powered up, as does its under-10ms uninterrupted power supply —- which means that should your power go out, your Solix power station can handle the load in less than that time.

Nathan Fielder first teased his Elizabeth Holmes documentary, You Can See Everything, earlier in Sept. with a tense minute-long exchange between the two.

Now, Fielder (The Rehearsal) posted A24's official trailer on social media, showing a deeper look into the time he spent with Holmes and her husband, Billy Evans. As Mashable previously reported, You Can See Everything, directed by Fielder and Lance Oppenheim (Primetime), chronicles the weeks before Holmes went to prison to serve her over 11-year sentence for fraud. It then spans a three-year journey "into the abyss," according to the film description on A24's website.

Fielder lived with Holmes, Evans, and their children on their invitation. The trailer shows Fielder questioning both Holmes and Evans — the motives of the former, and whether Evans trusts his wife. Holmes, who founded the bunk health tech company Theranos, insists she has nothing to hide, while her husband insists he's never been suspicious that she's lied to him.

The trailer ends with Holmes admitting it's taken her a long time to be OK with anyone seeing her cry.

You Can See Everything hits theatres on Oct. 16.

Want more film and TV news and reviews delivered straight to your inbox? Sign up for Mashable’s Top Stories newsletter or get Mashable push alerts.

At a glance

• Challenges a core assumption in robotics AI: Our research shows that running physical AI inference exclusively on onboard GPUs can limit robot performance, battery life, and scalability, and that offloading inference to edge or cloud GPUs can offer significant advantages.
• Demonstrates measurable benefits of inference offloading: Across representative mobile manipulation workloads, offloading improved task success rates, enabled larger AI models, and helped robots respond more effectively in dynamic, real-world environments.
• Extends robot operating time: Replacing power-hungry onboard AI compute with lightweight onboard hardware and remote inference can substantially improve battery life, enabling robots to operate longer between charges.
• Introduces a new capability in the Physical AI Toolchain: Developers can now containerize, deploy, and orchestrate robotics AI workloads across robots, edge infrastructure, and the cloud using Kubernetes-based tooling for distributed inference.

Readily-available physical AI, with robotics assisting users in manufacturing, home, and warehouses scenarios, holds immense potential to improve safety, productivity, and assistance across a wide range of tasks. In many ways, AI for the physical world represents a major frontier for AI . Physical AI must operate in open, unpredictable environments, interact with both other robots and people, and work with a diversity of embodiments. Realizing this vision requires advances along three dimensions: robot hardware, embodied AI models, and systems infrastructure for training and inference. While robot hardware and the AI models have advanced rapidly in recent years, we turn our focus on a relatively under-addressed aspect: inference infrastructure of physical AI. Enabling robots to effectively and safely operate in the physical world will require sophisticated systems to handle large volumes of distributed inference compute.

Today, the prevailing approach to physical AI is to provision a GPU onboard the robot, e.g., by wiring a GPU to the robot. In this model, the robot’s inference will be confined to the onboard GPU, and provide the robot with the necessary chunks and sequence of actions for the execution of its tasks. While higher-level planning may be performed in the cloud, task execution typically remains tied to the robot itself. We challenge this assumption.  As physical AI models grow in size and sophistication, the constraints of onboard compute become increasingly apparent. GPUs consume significant power, reduce battery life, add cost and weight, and can limit the ability to run the latest generation of AI models. 

To better understand the systems implications of physical AI, we conducted the first systematic study of robotics workloads. We focused on mobile robotic manipulation, with the canonical task such as “check for rubbish in the kitchen and put it in the trash.” Such a task involves planning the path to the kitchen, perceiving the environment to find rubbish, navigating to the rubbish, picking up the rubbish, and navigating back to the trash can for disposal. We evaluated representative models across three core capabilities: semantic mapping and planning, navigation, and manipulation, as summarized in Figure 2. 

Figure 2: Details of the models used for the different components of mobile manipulation.

Offloading physical AI inference out of the robot improved its response time and accuracy, along with battery lifetime and cost. We evaluated the inference models across a range of onboard, edge, and cloud compute configurations. Details of the specific test hardware are available in our technical report. 

Benefits in task performance: Our evaluation shows offloading inference can significantly improve robot performance across mapping, planning, navigation, and manipulation workloads. Some smaller GPUs could not accommodate the mobile manipulation stack. On GPUs with sufficient memory, mapping and planning slowed by up to 383% compared to an A100, thus limiting the robot’s abilities in dynamic spaces. Navigation showed a 30% drop in its timely detection of obstacles with lighter GPUs. While the VLA models did not dramatically slow down with smaller GPUs, the slowdown was still sufficient to drop their accuracies by 50%. In other words, onboard GPUs limited the performance of the robots while offloading their inference to an on-premise or cloud GPU boosts their operations, as shown in the videos below and quantified in the graphs. As physical AI models continue to grow in size and complexity, the benefits of offloading are likely to become even more pronounced.

Figure 3a: The video shows the handover task with onboard GPUs. Figure 3b: The video shows the handover task when the inference is offloaded. Figure 4: Success rates of robot arms handing over objects to each other when inference is performed with different GPUs (some onboard, and some offloaded). Offloading improves success rates.

Benefits in battery lifetime: Beyond performance, onboard GPUs also significantly drained the battery life of the robot. We compared the increase in battery lifetime by replacing an onboard GPU with a Raspberry Pi-5 board and shipping all the data to the offloaded GPU. The larger onboard GPUs, such as Jetson Thor, drained robot batteries by up to 160% (or a few hours) for even the larger robots.

Figure 5: Impact of offloading GPU inference on the battery life of the robots; the above numbers are for the Stretch-3 robot.

The above results show that offloading GPU inference out of the robot is critical for functioning in the open world with large models and long battery lifetimes. Nonetheless, offloading inference out of the robot involves a complex tradeoff involving performance, network latency and bandwidth, and available GPU resources. We believe that our measurement study will inform the design of physical AI inference systems.

video series

On Second Thought

A video series with Sinead Bovell built around the questions everyone’s asking about AI. With expert voices from across Microsoft, we break down the tension and promise of this rapidly changing technology, exploring what’s evolving and what’s possible.

Explore the series Opens in a new tab Toolset for automatic offload

We have built a toolset for easy inference offloading out of the robot and distributing inference between the edge GPU and cloud. Kubernetes is a natural platform to provide a uniform abstraction to distribute robotic AI between the robot’s compute, edge GPU, and overflowing to the cloud. The toolset allows automatic containerization and offloading of robotics workloads using declarative specifications, distributes physical AI containers with smart policies using Kubernetes, and integrates with robotic simulators, LeRobot, and ROS2 for easy development. The sequence of steps below shows how the toolset can be prompted with what to offload, and how it creates a separate container for GPU inference and offloads the same.

Figure 6: Steps in the offloading toolset with containerization and deployment.

Microsoft has recently released the Physical AI Toolchain (opens in new tab) for operationalizing physical intelligence at scale. Physical AI Toolchain is an open-source, production-ready framework that integrates Microsoft Azure (opens in new tab) cloud services with NVIDIA’s (opens in new tab) physical AI stack, accelerating robotics and physical AI developers to automate and scale data curation, augmentation, and evaluation across perception, mobility, imitation learning, and reinforcement learning pipelines. We are announcing the addition of an industry-first capability for offloaded physical AI inference for robots as part of the Physical AI Toolchain. This release includes example projects for offloading inference of a SO-101 and a UR10e. The videos below show the offloading of the inference of Microsoft’s Rho model, targeted at dual-arm robots, to a Jetson Thor GPU, which controls the actions of the Mobile Aloha robot (opens in new tab).  

Figure 7a: Offloading of GPU inference of Microsoft’s Rho model controlling the Mobile Aloha robot for interactions with the BusyBox to press the blue button. Figure 7b: Offloading of GPU inference of Microsoft’s Rho model controlling the Mobile Aloha robot for interactions with the BusyBox to turn the knob to position 4.

Check out the inference offload feature, look into the source code, and let us know your feedback. We have already tested it with many real-world use cases, and look forward to hearing about your deployment experiences.

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