Good morning. It’s Monday, February 17th.

Today in Tech History: On this day in 1997, yahoo.com registered their domain.

In today’s email:

• Grok 3 Today

• Perplexity’s Deep Research

• Meta Jumps Into Humanoid Robot Race

• 2 New AI Tools

• Latest AI Research Papers

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Elon Musk claims xAI's Grok 3 is the "smartest AI on Earth" ahead of tonight's live demo

Elon Musk has announced that xAI will present its latest AI model, Grok 3, in a live demo on Monday at 8 PM PT (Tuesday, 5 AM CET). Musk described the system as the "smartest AI on Earth" and said his team will continue refining it over the weekend. He also posted screenshots of Grok 3 making controversial remarks about the media outlet The Information.

Grok 3 was reportedly trained on xAI’s "Colossus" supercomputer, powered by 100,000 Nvidia H100 chips housed in Tesla's Gigafactory data centre. xAI has secured $6 billion in funding from investors such as Nvidia, AMD, and BlackRock, with another $10 billion under discussion at a $75 billion valuation. The company aims to double its GPU capacity to 200,000 units.

Musk’s demo comes amid growing competition, with OpenAI enhancing GPT-4o and working on a reasoning-based GPT-5, while Anthropic develops hybrid models. Read more.

Perplexity introduces ‘Deep research’ that can generate expert-level reports on complex topics

Perplexity AI has introduced Deep Research, a tool designed to generate expert-level reports on complex topics within three minutes. The feature, available on the web for all users, allows Perplexity's AI model to conduct in-depth analysis, iteratively refine responses, and evaluate alternative theories. Unlike OpenAI’s research tool, which takes between five to 30 minutes, Perplexity claims its system provides faster, structured outputs. The feature is integrated into the model picker, enabling users to activate Deep Research with a simple selection.

Pro subscribers have unlimited access, while free-tier users are subject to a daily cap. The AI combines search and coding capabilities to analyze documents, adjust reasoning, and compile structured reports, which can be exported or shared as Perplexity Pages. Currently web-exclusive, the feature is set to expand to iOS, Android, and Mac. Internal testing reportedly shows Deep Research outperforming OpenAI's o1, o3-mini, and DeepSeek-R1 on Humanity’s Last Exam benchmark. Read more.

Meta jumps into the humanoid robot race

Meta is pushing forward with the development of AI-driven humanoid robots through a new division under its Reality Labs unit. According to an internal memo from CTO Andrew Bosworth, the focus will be on creating "consumer humanoid robots" that integrate with the company's Llama AI models, supporting a range of physical tasks. The company plans to advance its AI and mixed-reality efforts while investing heavily in embodied AI technology, which will enable robots to perceive and navigate the physical world.

The project, led by Marc Whitten, former CEO of Cruise, will initially target household tasks. Meta has begun talks with robotics firms like Unitree Robotics and Figure AI but will not introduce its own branded robot immediately. Despite billions poured into robotics by tech giants, progress has been slow. Meta’s push faces competition from Tesla, which is set to deploy its Optimus robots in 2025.

Meta's long-term goal is to develop the AI, sensors, and software needed to power these humanoid robots across various sectors. Read more.

• ChatGPT passes Turing Test in psychotherapy with empathetic edge

• Apple Intelligence to arrive in Vision Pro by April, Siri upgrade delayed

• Stanford Researchers Crack ‘Among Us’ with Advanced Multi-Agent RL

• Sam Altman's World Network says 1 in 4 people are flirting with chatbots online

• OpenAI board rejects Musk's $97B takeover bid

• Claude Jailbreak results are in, and the hackers won

• Neuromorphic systems gear up for mass adoption

• Larry Ellison wants to put all US data in one big AI system

• Researchers are training AI to interpret animal emotions 

• China’s EV giants are betting big on humanoid robots

• AI replaces boyfriends in China, making entrepreneur Yao Runhao a billionaire

• AI robots make their NBA debut: Basketball bot becomes Stephen Curry's shooting partner

• Tencent's Weixin app, Baidu launch DeepSeek search testing

• Language models tend to favor other LLMs that make mistakes similar to their own

• New smart jacket uses AI to prevent overheating and discomfort

• New York Times goes all-in on internal AI tools

📄 InfiniteHiP: Extending Language Model Context Up to 3 Million Tokens on a Single GPU

📄 The Stochastic Parrot on LLM's Shoulder: A Summative Assessment of Physical Concept Understanding ​​

📄 Region-Adaptive Sampling for Diffusion Transformers

📄 Step-Video-T2V Technical Report: The Practice, Challenges, and Future of Video Foundation Model

📄 CoT-Valve: Length-Compressible Chain-of-Thought Tuning

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