This Week in AI

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OpenAI to Release Thinking ‘Strawberry’ AI Model Within 2 Weeks 🍓

Synthetic has mentioned OpenAI’s next-generation AI capability, codenamed ‘Strawberry’ in several previous editions. The new model is rumored to bring powerful new reasoning capabilities and is designed to take its time to consider answers and ‘think’ its way through problems before responding. Will it be a disappointment, or will it define the next level of AI? We may find out later this month.

Elon Musk Is Winning the AI Race 🏎️

Elon Musk managed to ram through the construction of the world’s largest AI training installation in just 134 days. How did he do it? Apparently, permits are for losers who don’t take the AI arms race seriously enough 😀 Musk plans to double the system’s capabilities in the next few months and has already begun training his latest model, Grok 3. At least one analyst disagrees that Musk is leading the AI race, going so far as to declare the future of AI will be dominated by the “magnificent six” companies (excluding Tesla, which has long been considered part of the “magnificent seven.”)

Shady Firms Say They’re Already Manipulating Chatbots to Say Nice Things About Their Clients

Search engine optimization (SEO) is a multi-billion-dollar industry. As search gives way to AI-powered research and agentic AI becomes the primary interface to find information and perform tasks online, SEO will become “CBO” or “AIO” (Chatbot optimization or AI optimization). This process has already begun as people figure out how to optimize for AI-integrated search and influence chatbots. Chatbots are easily manipulated by placing crawlable text on a website asking a bot to say nice things about your brand.

Google’s AI Will Help Decide Whether Unemployed Workers Get Benefits 🧠

Nevada is working with Google to build a first-of-its-kind AI system to determine whether or not unemployed claimants should receive benefits. Trained on transcripts of unemployment appeals hearings and recommendations by human referees, the system will analyze hearing transcripts and documentary evidence to recommend whether a claim should be approved, denied, or modified. A human referee will then review that recommendation. Nevada has a significant claims backlog, with some cases pending since the pandemic. 🦠 In related news, a recent survey of American consumers revealed many people are uncomfortable with AI making decisions about their lives. No surprise there.

Quick Hits

• Apple Punts on AI - At this week’s ‘Glowtime’ launch event for iPhone 16, Apple shared more on Apple Intelligence, but critics came away underwhelmed. 📱

• Man Arrested for Creating Fake Bands and Listeners with AI - The feds arrested a man who collected $10 million in royalties by using AI bots to play his AI-generated music on Amazon, Apple, Spotify, and YouTube streaming platforms. 💰

• Oracle Unveils First Zettascale AI Supercluster - In this phase of the AI race, bigger is better. Oracle announced it is taking orders to use its planned OCI Supercluster, which will be available in 2025. It will feature 131,072 Nvidia Blackwell GPUs and deliver a theoretical 2.4 zettaFLOPS 🔥 of peak performance, making it suitable for next-generation frontier workloads. That’s a lot of AI oomph! ⚡️

• Black Eyes Peas’ New AI-Powered Member - A new band member will join the famous group for their 2025 Las Vegas residency at Planet Hollywood. The AI’s name is ‘Vida.’ 🎸

• Has AI Hacked the Operating System of Humanity? - In his new book, Nexus, bestselling historian Yuval Noah Harari argues that AI is a radical new force in the development of human civilization and is already outstripping human understanding. OK, doomer. 📗

• Adobe Previews New Video Model - Adobe has previewed its upcoming video generation tools, which look pretty sweet. 🎬

Video: I Lived With a Humanoid Robot for 48 Hours 🤖

Neo, a humanoid robot built by 1X, spends a couple of days in the home of an online journalist. The robot has limitations but can navigate the house, do simple chores, hold a conversation, and understand simple human gestures and their intent. The Norwegian company plans to ship robots into homes starting next year. Their production targets are for 1000s of units in 2025, 10s of thousands in 2026, 100s of thousands in 2027, and millions of units in 2028. Their robots will cost around as much as an average car. (12 mins)

A previous episode, “They Built This Robot For Your Home,” provides additional detail on Neo. Enjoy! (18 min) 🤖

AI Tech and Innovation

AWS ‘Tackle Probability’ AI Predicts NFL Blitzes

Amazon-built AI tools now support NFL Thursday Night Football broadcasts, arming commentators with new stats on the probability of the quarterback being tackled in a blitz. As this explainer video outlines, Tackle Probability uses massive amounts of player and team statistics to make predictions. The system was trained in less than six months. 🏈

Synthetic’s Take: Expect AI to become an increasingly important component of professional sports. For example, Google DeepMind’s TacticAI, which emerged from a multi-year partnership with Liverpool FC, helps coaches optimize tactics to increase their team’s chance of scoring a goal during a corner kick.

Google Releases Open-Source DataGemma to Ground AI and Reduce Hallucinations

Google has released DataGemma, the world’s first open models designed to help address the challenges of hallucination by grounding LLMs in the vast, real-world statistical data of Google’s data commons, which is a repository of publicly-available, trustworthy data. DataGemma uses both RIG (Retrieval-Interleaved Generation) and RAG (Retrieval Augmented Generation) to enhance factuality and reasoning.

Inside Google’s 7-Year Mission to Give AI a Robot Body 🤖🦾

Many AI researchers believe that for AI capabilities to reach human-level, so-called Artificial General Intelligence (AGI), it must first be embodied. An embodied AI, built inside a robot to explore, experience, and interact with the physical world, should be able to create a world model, an understanding of how the world works, in much the same way a child does. A researcher from Google X’s now-defunct “Everyday Robots” team tells their story and why he believes robots are vital to humanity’s future.

AI Makes Effective Solar Cells—And Explains the Results

A new AI has discovered organic light-harvesting molecules with five times better stability than compounds previously used in organic solar cells. Notably, the AI system can also explain to scientists WHY the compounds are more stable, helping them design better future materials. Researchers published their findings in Nature. ☀️⬛️

We’re in the Brute Force Phase of AI—Once It Ends, Demand for GPUs Will Too 🪫

As part of Synthetic’s effort to provide balanced coverage on the future of AI, this piece argues that generative AI is a distraction from other types of AI applications that actually make companies money. Gartner’s chief of AI research, Erick Brethenoux, believes the current need for power-hungry, brute-force hardware indicates that AI techniques and algorithms still need refinement. Gartner advocates the combination of traditional AI with generative AI, which they call ‘composite AI,’ to maximize impact and limit risk.

AI Insights and Analysis

How ARK Is Thinking About Humanoid Robotics

Venture Capitalist ARK shares their perspective on the rapidly advancing humanoid robot market. They foresee a $24 trillion market opportunity and estimate that if priced at just $40,000 per unit, these robots need only offer a 15% productivity uplift to pay for themselves.

Why Etched and Other Competitors Probably Won’t Beat Nvidia

This excellent analysis piece explores Nvidia’s innovative competitors and assesses their chances of grabbing some of the AI king’s market share. Specifically, the article looks at Etched, Groq, Cerebras, and the ailing GraphCore and uses counter-positioning theory (one of Hamilton Helmer’s 7 Powers of business strategy) to judge their strategic chances. 📊

A Company Gave 1,000 AI Agents Access to Minecraft — and They Built a Society

An effort known as ‘Project Sid’ populated a Minecraft world with 1,000 autonomous AI agents to see what would happen. The result was fascinating. Agents formed alliances, set up a shared trading currency, and collaborated to advance common goals. A crooked priest bribed other townsfolk to gain an unfair advantage. AI truly is a mirror of humanity. A short video on the project is available here.

Toolkit for the Future

Shoeboxed: #1 Receipt scanner for expenses, tax prep, and more 

AI extracts information from your receipts and organizes it in an easy-to-search database alongside IRS-approved, secure image scans. Capture receipts on the go📱, forward receipts 📧, use the web portal, or mail in a pile of physical receipts🧾. Try it free for 30 days.

Maika AI: AI companion for content creators

This versatile AI assistant helps content creators to write text, edit content, change writing tone, create images, generate audio, easily translate text into other languages, quickly summarize hours-long YouTube videos, generate memes, and more. Free to try.

Browse AI: Extract and monitor data from any website

Extract data from websites and place it in a spreadsheet that fills itself and notifies you of any changes. Pre-built robots make it a breeze to get started. Extract whatever you need: job listings, property details, TikTok videos, hotel info, or competitor pricing. Free to try. No coding required.

Laxis: AI meeting assistant for revenue teams

Keep your sales team focused on customers during meetings. Laxis captures attendee comments verbatim and flags items for follow up. It auto-generates meeting summaries and follow-up emails in seconds, quickly identifying customer requirements, pain points, and action items. Free to try.