Maligned - December 05, 2025

AI news without the BS

Here’s what actually matters in AI today. No fluff, no hype - just 5 developments worth your time.

Today’s Top 5 AI Developments

1. DeepMind’s AgilityBot: Robotics Just Got Real 🤖

Google DeepMind just dropped AgilityBot, a new robotics foundation model demonstrating unprecedented dexterity in unstructured real-world environments. This isn’t just lab demo stuff; AgilityBot is tackling complex tasks with human-like precision, marking a significant leap toward truly adaptable embodied AI.

Source: Google DeepMind Link: https://deepmind.google/blog/agilitybot-unveiled/

2. RELIC: The First Truly Interactive AI World Model 🌍

We’ve been hearing about world models, but RELIC delivers on the promise of real-time, long-horizon, memory-aware interactive video generation. Imagine fluidly exploring and controlling vast virtual scenes from a single image for extended periods, all while maintaining consistent spatial memory. This is a foundational step for immersive simulations and dynamic AI environments.

Source: arXiv Link: https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.04040v1

3. SpaceTools: VLMs Get Smarter With Real-World Tools 🛠️

Vision Language Models often struggle with precise spatial reasoning for embodied tasks. SpaceTools introduces “Double Interactive Reinforcement Learning” to teach VLMs how to use multiple tools – like depth estimators or pose estimators – to achieve metrically precise spatial understanding. This is crucial for agents needing to operate accurately in the physical world, moving beyond qualitative visual understanding.

Source: arXiv Link: https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.04069v1

4. MarkTune: Watermarking Open-Weight LLMs Without the Performance Hit 🔒

The challenge with open-weight LLMs? Embedding reliable watermarks without wrecking generation quality. MarkTune tackles this head-on with a principled fine-tuning framework that boosts watermark detectability to inference-time levels, all while maintaining high text quality. This is a big deal for trust and accountability as open-source AI proliferates.

Source: arXiv Link: https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.04044v1

5. SkillFactory: LLMs Learning Advanced Cognitive Skills on Their Own 🧠

Forget needing a stronger teacher model to instill complex reasoning skills like verification or backtracking. SkillFactory shows that LLMs can learn these cognitive behaviors through self-distillation, using their own generated outputs. This approach makes LLM training more robust, less reliant on external models, and helps them generalize better to tough, out-of-domain tasks.

Source: arXiv Link: https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.04072v1

That’s it for today. Stay aligned. 🎯

Maligned - AI news without the BS