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This development in the world of fighting is very interesting – and definitely a bit disturbing. While they’re awkward and not very graceful now, the fact this has become possible and the robots very quickly developing in just the last few years means that robots capable of better than human fighting and moving is very near. It has massive implications for everything from helping the elderly to more concerning issues concerning policing and military. It’s rapidly bringing up social questions we’ve barely begun to grapple with.

As for just boxing, we’re one step closer to the Twilight Zone episode called Steel – in which human boxing was banned and robot boxing took off.

In 2025, Fundamental Research Labs (FRL), known at the time as Altera AI, set 1,000 AI agents loose in a world to see what happened. The goal was to see if they could coordinate large groups of AIs, prevent stagnation, and encourage meaningful collaboration in a way that would make them genuinely useful if they were agents in the real world working for real humans.

What emerged was both surprising and revealing. These early AI agents were distributed across urban and rural communities, each with its own distinct culture and identity. They divided labour in farming, others in building or trading.

At times, the society faltered as groups of agents fell into endless loops of polite agreement or got stuck chasing unattainable goals (common in early AI). Users also found the agents frustratingly independent and often ran off to do their own thing. At first, they were only completing 20-25% of their tasks, which they got up to 50% – but still far short of the 60-70% rate of humans.

What they learned was fully autonomous agents were actually not very good. Instead, they started focusing agents to do more specific tasks. They then developed Shortcut, an excel agent able to take a business goal and then build complex financial models, analyze sales figures, forecast revenue, etc. It was tested and could do first-year banking tasks 9 out of 10 times – proving specialization was far better than generalization.

It’s a study of early AI worth reading.

I think this is a phase most experienced developers have gone through in the last 6-8 months and I think it’s worth mentioning so that we remember it in a few years.

This article is from the end of 2025 when AI was just starting to turn the corner from toy to tool. I remember many people, including myself, that tried AI solutions out and found them to be very limited for real production purposes. They were excellent for in-house QA or automating small tasks, but writing real production code was still very rough.

Many people, even midway through 2026, are still calling it all ‘AI slop’. Those days are now largely gone. Even expert Linux package owners recognize that AI assisted bug and vulnerability searching has turned the corner from toy to tool.

A reminder that the 5 stages of grief (and realizing AI is now an essential tool in all software development) are:

1. Denial: A defense mechanism that helps pace feelings of grief. It involves numbness or disbelief, protecting you from the immediate shock of reality.
2. Anger: A natural response to feeling powerless or overwhelmed. This anger can be masked, directed at yourself, or aimed at others, serving as a shield against the underlying pain.
3. Bargaining: An attempt to regain control of a situation. It often involves making deals or asking “what if” or “if only” questions to find a way out of the pain.
4. Depression: A deep, sometimes quiet sense of sadness. It is a natural reflection of the magnitude of your loss, where the reality sets in and you may naturally withdraw to process.
5. Acceptance: Coming to terms with the reality of the loss and understanding that your life will be different moving forward. It does not mean you are “okay” with what happened, but rather that you are integrating the loss into your life and learning to live with it.