The brief · 25 May 2026

The AI brief, 2026-05-25

A robot inventing microchips, xAI muscling in on Cursor's turf, and the Pope's encyclical finally out. Three different speeds, the same subject.

1 min read J / K to navigate

Princeton has an AI robot fabricating graphene transistors

Qumus runs solo through steps that used to take a PhD student weeks: spotting the right graphene flakes under a microscope, manipulating them, assembling an atomically thin transistor. This won't change your daily ChatGPT use, but it shows where the same building blocks (vision, LLMs, multi-agent planning) end up once they leave the chat window.

practitioners › Qumus combines an LLM, computer vision, and multi-agent planning to run a quantum materials lab with no human intervention.

arXiv (Princeton) →

xAI launches its own coding agent, Grok Build

xAI is adding a coding agent to its lineup, running straight in the terminal, to take on Cursor and Claude Code on their home turf. If you're already paying for SuperGrok or X Premium Plus, you get a new tool to try without pulling out your card. Whether it holds up against established agents on real coding tasks remains to be seen.

practitioners › Early beta limited to SuperGrok and X Premium Plus subscribers, runs from the command line.

xAI →

Pope's AI Encyclical Finally Published, Ten Days After Signing

Leo XIV isn't settling for boilerplate remarks. The Vatican is calling for binding laws, independent oversight of AI systems, and firm limits on the power of the private companies building them. The text names autonomous weapons and disinformation as direct threats to human dignity.

practitioners › The encyclical Magnifica Humanitas is dated May 15, released by the Vatican on the 25th.