Figure’s home robot breakthrough

Good morning, AI enthusiasts. Two weeks after breaking up with OpenAI, humanoid maker Figure revealed what they have been working on: an AI system that lets robots understand speech and handle objects they’ve never seen before.

Could this technology be the breakthrough that finally brings capable robots into our homes?

In today’s AI rundown:

• Figure debuts latest system for household robots

• Microsoft’s latest AI hastens protein research

• Create your personal AI-powered email assistant

• AI matches decade-long superbug research in days

• 4 latest AI tools & 4 job opportunities

LATEST DEVELOPMENTS

FIGURE

🤖 Figure debuts latest system for household robots

The Rundown: Humanoid robot maker Figure just introduced Helix, a brand new AI Vision-Language-Motion model that lets robots understand voice commands and handle items they’ve never seen before — a significant step toward practical household robots.

The small print:

• The system combines a 7B-parameter “brain” for understanding and a quick 80M-parameter model for precise movement control.

• Figure demonstrated two robots working together to place away groceries they’d never seen before using natural language commands.

• Helix runs efficiently on basic onboard GPUs and requires just 500 hours of coaching data, far lower than previous approaches.

• The breakthrough comes just weeks after Figure ended its OpenAI partnership, suggesting confidence of their in-house technology.

Why it matters: Robots are already proving capable in industrial settings, however it’s a matter of when, not if humanoid robots will play a major role in household tasks. Figure’s system and its ability to scale robot learning brings the tech a step closer to with the ability to reliably handle the mess of unique objects and situations around a house.

TOGETHER WITH TURING

🔮 AI’s next era with DeepMind’s Jeff Dean

The Rundown Turing’s AGI Icons Episode 3 features Jeff Dean, Google DeepMind’s Chief Scientist, and Jonathan Siddarth, CEO of Turing, as they discuss the longer term of AGI, breakthroughs in Google’s Gemini 2.0, and the way AI is transforming software engineering, research, and businesses worldwide.

Watch to learn:

• The evolution of AI from early days to AGI

• Key challenges in scaling intelligence

• The longer term of AI’s real-world impact

Watch the episode now.

MICROSOFT

🔬 Microsoft’s latest AI hastens protein research

The Rundown: Microsoft Research just released BioEmu-1, a brand new AI system that may predict how proteins change shape and move — generating 1000’s of protein structures per hour while matching the accuracy of supercomputer simulations.

The small print:

• The system generates protein structure samples 100,000x faster than traditional molecular dynamics, turning months of compute into minutes.

• The model was trained on 200 milliseconds of molecular simulation data, over 9 trillion DNA constructing blocks, and 750,000 stability measurements.

• Testing showed extreme accuracy in predicting how stable proteins are, matching lab measurements even for proteins it hadn’t seen before.

• Microsoft is making the system freely available to researchers worldwide through Azure AI Foundry Labs.

Why it matters: Is that this the week of fast takeoff for AI science? Each Microsoft and Google are dropping model after model that speed up the scientific research process — turning months or years of labor into days (more on that below). Plus, with so many systems being open-sourced to researchers across the globe, it’s likely just the beginning.

AI TRAINING

💌 Create your personal AI-powered email assistant

The Rundown: On this tutorial, you’ll learn find out how to construct a private email assistant that may draft and manage emails using n8n’s workflow automation and AI capabilities.

Step-by-step:

1. Visit n8n and create a brand new workflow.

2. Arrange a chat trigger as your workflow’s place to begin.

3. Add an AI Agent with OpenAI Chat Model, Window Buffer Memory, and Gmail tool

4. Configure Gmail settings for draft creation with dynamic content using $fromAI(‘placeholder_name’)

Pro tip: We did an intensive workshop showing The Rundown University members find out how to create your personal AI Agent to automate tasks and run local AI models with n8n here.

PRESENTED BY DEEPGRAM

🗣️ AI speech-to-text, redefined

The Rundown: Deepgram’s Nova-3 is a brand new speech-to-text model built to excel in essentially the most difficult enterprise environments, from high-volume call centers to chaotic trading floors — ending your days of wrestling with poor transcription accuracy.

What sets Nova-3 apart:

• Industry-leading accuracy for each live and recorded audio

• The primary Voice AI model built for real-time multilingual transcription

• Fast customization to fine-tune vocabulary without extensive retraining

Try Nova-3 today.

GOOGLE

🦠 AI matches decade-long superbug research in days

The Rundown: Google’s AI co-scientist system just independently reached the identical conclusion about bacterial antibiotic resistance as Imperial College researchers — in only 48 hours in comparison with the team’s decade-long unpublished investigation.

The small print:

• The AI identified how bacteria steal virus “tails” to spread resistance genes, matching unpublished findings from a 10-year study.

• The system generated five viable hypotheses, with its top prediction matching the experimental results perfectly.

• Researchers confirmed the AI had no access to their private findings, making the matching conclusion much more significant.

• Google publicly announced the Co-Scientist system yesterday, making it available to researchers through a brand new testing program.

Why it matters: It didn’t take long for Co-Scientist to already make jaw-dropping news, and it’s only a taste of a future where years of scientific breakthroughs will likely be compressed into days. This testing also illustrates how AI won’t necessarily replace scientists, but dramatically speed up their discovery and validation process.

QUICK HITS

🛠️ Trending AI Tools

• 💻 Proxy 1.0 – AI assistant that may click, scroll, and browse the online

• 🧠 R1 1776 – DeepSeek’s R1 reasoning model post-trained by Perplexity AI to remove censorship

• 🎬 BuzzClip – Generate viral TikTok AI UGCs in 60 seconds

• 👩🏻‍💻 Fleet AI Copilot – AI-driven IT assistant for personalized support and streamlined equipment management

💼 AI Job Opportunities

• 🛡️ OpenAI – Network Security Engineer

• 🎯 Notable – Account Based Motion Coordinator

• 🆘 Author – Enterprise support agent

• ✍️ Glean – Technical Author

📰 The whole lot else in AI today

xAI announced that its latest Grok-3 model is now freely available for a limited time, with premium users getting increased usage and early access to advanced features.

COO Brad Lightcap revealed that OpenAI now has 400M weekly lively users and 2M paid enterprise customers, with developer usage also doubling over the past 6 months.

NVIDIA partnered with the American Society for Deaf Children to launch ‘Signs’, an AI-powered platform that gives real-time feedback for ASL learners alongside a dataset of 400,000 sign language video clips.

Pika Labs released Pika Swaps, allowing users to simply replace any item or character in a scene with image or text prompts.

Spotify announced the combination of ElevenLab’s AI voice technology into the platform, enabling authors to create and distribute AI-narrated content in 29 languages.

MIT researchers unveiled ‘FragFold’, an AI system that may predict which protein fragments can bind to and inhibit goal proteins for drug discovery and cellular biology.

COMMUNITY

🎥 Join our next live workshop

Join our workshop today at 4 PM EST to learn find out how to use the most recent Grok 3 model effectively and the way it stands out in the present AI landscape with Dr. Alvaro Cintas, The Rundown’s AI professor.

RSVP here. Not a member yet? Join The Rundown University on a 14-day free trial.

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See you soon,

Rowan, Joey, Zach, Alvaro, and Jason—The Rundown’s editorial team