According to The Rundown AI on X, Sony AI unveiled Ace, the first autonomous robot reported to defeat elite human players in table tennis, with its peer-reviewed paper published in Nature; the system uses nine cameras for 3D ball tracking and three additional vision modules to read spin from the ball’s logo mid‑flight, enabling an approximately 20 millisecond end‑to‑end reaction time, about 10 times faster than humans (source: The Rundown AI; publication: Nature). According to The Rundown AI, Ace was trained with 3,000 hours of self‑play in simulation without human demonstrations and progressed from beating 3 of 5 elite players in April 2025 to defeating a professional by December 2025, highlighting rapid policy improvement via reinforcement learning and sim‑to‑real transfer (source: The Rundown AI; publication: Nature). As reported by The Rundown AI, an on‑site observer, 1992 Olympian Kinjiro Nakamura, noted Ace executed a previously considered “impossible” backspin return, underlining the system’s high‑precision control and perception stack (source: The Rundown AI). Business impact: according to the Nature publication as cited by The Rundown AI, the breakthrough points to immediate opportunities in high‑speed robotics for sports training systems, industrial manipulation under millisecond latencies, and premium consumer coaching robots, while validating multi‑camera spin estimation and self‑play simulation pipelines for broader commercial robotics.