Sony AI's Ace robot became the first autonomous system to reach elite and professional level in a competitive physical sport, with results published on the cover of Nature on April 23. Using nine cameras, event-based vision sensors, and model-free reinforcement learning, Ace operates with an end-to-end latency of 20.2 milliseconds — roughly 11× faster than the ~230ms reaction time of elite human players. The robot won 3 of 5 matches against elite players in initial trials, and by March 2026 had defeated world-ranked professional Miyuu Kihara (top 25). The research team cites implications beyond sports: the perception-decision-action pipeline at this speed is relevant to any physical AI problem requiring real-time response.