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Good morning. It’s Wednesday, August 21st.

Did you know: On this day in 1993, NASA lost contact with the Mars Observer spacecraft.

In today’s email:

• Humanoid Robots to Ship Soon

• Luma Labs Dream Machine

• 5 New AI Tools

• Latest AI Research Papers

You read. We listen. Let us know what you think by replying to this email.

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Shanghai's First Humanoid Robots Plant to Start Deliveries in October, Report Says

AGIbot, a Shanghai-based startup, will begin deliveries from its new humanoid robot factory in October, with plans to ship 200 bipedal and 100 wheeled robots by year-end. Located in the Lingang Special Area, the factory is nearly ready for mass production, with all production lines completed and in the setup phase.

AGIbot recently introduced five new commercial robots, designed for applications such as interactive services, smart manufacturing, and scientific research. Production is expected to ramp up to 100 units by November.

AGIbot also intends to open-source its Lingxi X1 humanoid robot, providing full access to its design materials and code to encourage wider participation in humanoid robot development. Read more.

Unitree Launches Production Version of G1 Humanoid Robot

Unitree Robotics has officially launched the mass production version of its G1 humanoid robot, just three months after its initial announcement. Priced at $16,000, the G1 represents a substantial cost reduction compared to its predecessor, the H1, which was priced at over $150,000.

The G1, standing just over 4 feet tall and weighing approximately 77 pounds, features advanced technologies including 23 degrees of freedom, a 3D vision system with a Livox Mid-360 lidar camera, and a three-fingered hand capable of precise tasks.

Designed as an affordable platform for research and development, the G1 is expected to attract interest from universities, research institutions, and businesses exploring robotic automation. Unitree's entry into humanoid robotics follows its success in the quadruped robot market, where it holds over 60% of the global market share. Read more.

Luma Labs just released Dream Machine 1.5, a major upgrade to their current AI video generation model

Luma Labs has released Dream Machine 1.5, advancing its AI video generation capabilities. This update features improved text-to-video quality, a more refined understanding of prompts, and enhanced image-to-video conversion. It includes better custom text rendering within videos, facilitating more detailed and personalized content creation. Read more.

Tesla is hiring people to train its Optimus bot via motion capture

Tesla is hiring “Data Collection Operators” to assist in training its humanoid Optimus robot using motion capture technology. This role, offering up to $48 per hour, requires employees to perform actions while wearing motion capture suits and VR headsets, walking for over seven hours a day and carrying up to 30 pounds. Applicants must be between 5'7" and 5'11" tall, matching the robot’s anticipated height of 5'8". Tesla has already hired over 50 people for this role over the past year.

While motion capture is a standard method for training robots, Tesla’s approach at this scale is relatively unique. Experts suggest that the data collection required may involve substantial costs and no guaranteed success. Despite showcasing Optimus in various demonstrations, the robot's readiness for practical use remains uncertain compared to competing technologies from Boston Dynamics and others. Read more.

Etcetera: Stories you may have missed

Code interpreter and plot rendering are slowly being rolled out into Perplexity

Authors sue Claude AI chatbot creator Anthropic for copyright infringement

AMD signs $4.9bn deal to challenge Nvidia’s AI infrastructure lead

Build your own AI-powered robot: Hugging Face's LeRobot tutorial is a game-changer

Meta's Self-Taught Evaluator enables LLMs to create their own training data

ElevenLabs' text-to-speech app Reader is now available globally

Salesforce releases 'xGen-MM' open-source multimodal AI models to advance visual language understanding

Google AI Can Hear Disease in the Sound of Your Cough

OpenAI brings fine-tuning to GPT-4o with 1M free tokens per day through Sept. 23

Nvidia unveils advances in digital humans and avatar tech at Gamescom

OpenAI announces content deal with Condé Nast, including content from Wired, The New Yorker and Vogue

Qualcomm's new Snapdragon 7s Gen 3 brings enhanced AI capabilities to mid-range smartphones

Google releases code for HeAR, an AI that analyzes audio to assess health

📄 MeshFormer: High-Quality Mesh Generation with 3D-Guided Reconstruction Model

📄 LongVILA: Scaling Long-Context Visual Language Models for Long Videos ​​

📄 Automated Design of Agentic Systems

📄 To Code, or Not To Code? Exploring Impact of Code in Pre-training

📄 TableBench: A Comprehensive and Complex Benchmark for Table Question Answering

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