About This Week’s Covers
This week’s cover pays tribute to David Lynch, who died last week, by placing a modern laptop beside Agent Cooper’s iconic coffee and cherry pie. The image was created in Ideogram, upscaled in Magnific, and features the classic Twin Peaks font, ITC Avant Garde Gothic. Lynch was a big influence on me, and showed me that it’s alright to be quirky and sincere.
The rest of the covers were created using Claude 3.5 and the Ideogram API, with the theme “to-do lists + category name” in reference to OpenAI’s new task-scheduling feature. I knew it would be a mess (too complicated without specific text to go with each list), but here are the top six results:
This Week’s Executive Summaries
ChatGPT Launches Task Scheduling Feature, Taking First Step into AI Automation
OpenAI has introduced “tasks,” a new beta feature that can schedule reminders and recurring requests. Users can set simple alerts like passport expiration reminders or ask for daily news briefings at specific times. While the AI can’t make purchases or run continuous background searches (yet), it can perform scheduled web searches – for example, checking monthly for concert tickets in your area. The feature represents OpenAI’s initial venture into AI agents (programs that can work somewhat independently), with CEO Sam Altman suggesting more advanced autonomous AI systems are coming in 2025. The company is reportedly preparing to release a more sophisticated system called Operator that could handle tasks like coding and travel booking.
OpenAI | karinanguyen_ | rowancheung | techcrunch | OpenAI
Examples of tasks: check stock price every morning, provide a news summary, learn a new word each day, provide a workout plan, daily meal ideas, etc.
Actual tasks I am using: send me a high-protein gluten free budget friendly recipe each morning, teach me a new AI technical concept each night, check the following websites and tell me their top stories each morning
Banks Set to Cut 200,000 Jobs as AI Reshapes Financial Workforce
Major banks are planning significant workforce changes as artificial intelligence transforms the industry. A new Bloomberg Intelligence report reveals banks could eliminate up to 200,000 positions over the next 3-5 years, with routine back-office and customer service roles most affected. While this shift could boost bank profits by up to $180 billion by 2027, many financial institutions emphasize that AI will transform jobs rather than completely replace workers. JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon offers an optimistic long-term view, suggesting future generations may benefit from shorter workweeks and improved quality of life thanks to these technological advances.
rohanpaul_ai | bloomberg
AI Tutoring Program Shows Dramatic Learning Gains in Nigerian Schools: Two Years of Learning in Six Weeks
A groundbreaking six-week AI tutoring program in Nigeria has demonstrated remarkable success, with students achieving two years’ worth of typical learning progress in just six weeks. The pilot program, which used generative AI as a virtual tutor, showed significant improvements across English language skills, AI knowledge, and digital literacy. Notably, female students saw even greater benefits, helping close existing gender gaps in education. The program outperformed 80% of other educational interventions in developing countries, marking one of the first evidence-backed successes of AI tutoring in developing nations.
Worldbank | emollick
OpenAI Launches Major Robotics Hardware Hiring Push
OpenAI is expanding its robotics division with three key senior engineering roles, signaling a significant push into physical AI systems. The company is seeking an Electrical Engineering Sensing specialist to develop robot sensor systems, a Mechanical Design Engineer to create core robotic components, and a Technical Program Manager to oversee product development and training facilities. This intensifies competition in the humanoid robotics race, with OpenAI now directly challenging Figure AI and NVIDIA’s open-source robotics initiatives, while also competing with established Chinese robotics companies like Unitree.
Kalinowski007
Reuters Report Reveals AI’s Massive Impact on Journalism
Florent Daudens calls out a new Reuters Institute study that reveals a dramatic shift in journalism, with newsrooms rapidly embracing AI beyond just backend operations. While 96% of publishers use AI for efficiency, over three-quarters are now integrating it directly into content creation and newsgathering. The transformation comes as traditional traffic sources show steep declines, with Facebook and Twitter seeing drops of 67% and 50% respectively. Publishers predict the development of conversational AI news experiences for smart devices, as tech giants like OpenAI, Apple, and Amazon launch their own news products. Despite widespread AI adoption, journalist confidence in the industry’s future has dropped significantly, falling from 60% to 41% since 2022.
Fdaudens | Read the PDF reutersinstitute
Other publishing headlines this week:
- Partnering with Axios expands OpenAI’s work with the news industry: Openai
- Google signs deal with AP to deliver up-to-date news through its Gemini AI chatbot: Apnews
- OpenAI, Google Are Paying Content Creators for Unused Video to Train Algorithms: bloomberg
- That Sports News Story You Clicked on Could Be AI Slop: Wired
Adobe Releases Tool That Creates On-Demand Transparent Video Effects
Adobe has open-sourced TransPixar, a AI system that generates video clips with built-in transparency from text descriptions. Unlike existing text-to-video AI tools that create solid videos, TransPixar produces footage with alpha channels, making it immediately usable in video editing software.
Bilawalsidhu | Examples: fdaudens
Moondream Matches Human Performance in Tracking Where People Look
A new open-source AI vision system called Moondream can detect where people are looking in images with near-human accuracy. The system scores 0.103 on industry benchmarks, approaching human-level performance of 0.096 (lower scores are better). This technology could improve video classification and captioning, sports analysis, security, and safety monitoring.
Moondream | reddit | youtube | Try it out: huggingface
Legal AI Startup Harvey Nears Major $300M Investment at $3B Valuation
Legal tech startup Harvey is poised to secure a massive funding round led by Sequoia Capital, potentially doubling its value to $3 billion.
Pitdesi
AI Visuals and Charts: Week Ending 01/17/2025
“I don’t think people know that making plausible fake videos is now something that doesn’t require a lot of skill or time I made this Veo video of a man trying out a flying skateboard at CES from a text prompt, 2nd try. Notice the shadows, green light, his body shifts for balance
“The British infantry at Waterloo during a French cavalry charge, the redcoats are all wearing rubber ducks on their heads. Veo2 showing history as it was.
“🇨🇳 ROBO-DOG BREAKS SPEED LIMITS: BLACK PANTHER 2.0 RUNS 100M IN UNDER 10 SECONDS China’s Mirror Me just created a robotic dog faster than you—and probably Usain Bolt. Black Panther 2.0, built in just three months, uses spring joints to replicate animals but with a
“JUST IN: 🇨🇳 Chinese robotics company unveils robotic dog capable of sprinting 100 meters in under 10 seconds.
“The last two weeks of tweets from a safety researcher at OpenAI could be a science fiction short-short story. (And, as usual, you can chose to believe or not whether OpenAI knows how to make an AI superintelligence, I have no special insight one way or another)
“Note the gap in the vision of the future of work between large corporations and the AI labs. Half the fastest growing jobs as indicated by companies in the survey are things that the AI labs think they can automate easily. I guess we will learn who is right in the coming years.” / X
Pratik Kadam on X: “AI Agent which control’s your Browser! Multi-tab handling! Agent task = ” open 3 tabs with elon musk, trump, and steve jobs, then go back to the first and stop. ” https://t.co/m5NEgcbwf7″ / X – https://x.com/PratikKadam_/status/1876881767535092096
“With our upcoming /extract you can capture information from multiple URLs and even entire websites The future of web extraction is coming ✨ Shoutout to @guilherme_rodz + @firecrawl_dev team for beautiful UI work on the beta preview 👇”
Top 35 Links of The Week – Organized by Category
Agents and Copilots
“AI agents are able to perform autonomous tasks today They can log into various systems like Salesforce, PayPal and Confluence and perform the tasks humans do Every white collar knowledge worker can deploy a dozen agents TODAY and increase productivity by 50% Your 5-day work” / X
““We don’t care about professional coders anymore,” Masad said. – Replit CEO Instead, he says it’s time for non-coders to begin learning how to use AI tools to build software themselves. Replit CEO Amjad Masad revealed that their AI tool “Agent” can create full software
“Things will get INSANE as Computer Use Agents continue to take off…. You can wire up an AI agent to log in as you and perform tasks on different systems. You can also respond to Slack messages and emails from folks. WHY BOTHER WORKING WHEN AN AI AGENT CAN DO IT FOR YOU 😅😂” / X
Mercedes to integrate Google Cloud’s new Automotive AI Agent
AGI (Artificial General Intelligence)
“have you noticed the vibe shift? figured i’d stop playing around for a xeet or two to discuss this. contractually, they can’t say it. but we’ve blown past agi and we’re hurtling toward asi. timelines have all but vanished. i’m not even convinced anymore we need agents (which
“It’s legitimately bizarre that we spend billions of params on storing MMLU/GPQA knowledge that 99% of us don’t really need and can simply look up/learn on demand. We wanted intelligence; we got memorized trivia. I expressed to @moinnadeem yday that AGI will probably look like
Derya Unutmaz, MD on X: “This is incredible & actually very sobering! It seems people still have no idea what’s coming, & the age of AI will soon be realized in the most shocking way. The world is so unprepared, yet it seems nobody cares or even believes in the disruption that’s about to happen!” / X – https://x.com/DeryaTR_/status/1878063160055222502
AI researcher François Chollet founds a new AI lab focused on AGI | TechCrunch
Ethics/Legal/Security
AI-generated phishing emails are getting very good at targeting executives – Ars Technica
“Confused about the U.S. plans on AI chips? Here’s the deal: – Biden’s new export rules will limit who gets U.S. AI chips (yes, beyond just China). – Big Tech’s worried – Over 100 countries affected, – Future AI development locations hang in the balance. Let’s break it down 🔍
Charted: AI’s Perceived Impact on Job Creation, by Country
Biden Administration Adopts Rules to Guide A.I.’s Global Spread – The New York Times
“Just published our Economic Blueprint — policy proposals for how the US can maximize AI’s benefits, bolster national security, and drive economic growth.
ByteDance appears to be skirting US restrictions to buy Nvidia chips: Report | TechCrunch
Mercedes to integrate Google Cloud’s new Automotive AI Agent
Google’s Gemini AI just shattered the rules of visual processing — here’s what that means for you | VentureBeat
OpenAI, Google Are Paying Content Creators for Unused Video to Train Algorithms – Bloomberg
“Native image output with Gemini 2.0 Flash is so powerful, very excited for this to roll out more widely… Example of an interaction I just had, this could really change how people do creative work (please excuse the classic off by one error here)!
Multimodality
Google’s Gemini AI just shattered the rules of visual processing — here’s what that means for you | VentureBeat
OpenAI
Adebayo Ogunlesi joins OpenAI’s Board of Directors | OpenAI
OpenAI’s AI reasoning model ‘thinks’ in Chinese sometimes and no one really knows why | TechCrunch
“Interesting prompt for OpenAI Tasks. Good case study. The issue with this kind of prompt is that it blurs specification and implementation too much. The actual important information the human wanted to express is mixed with the verbiage required to get the model to follow
ChatGPT’s newest feature lets users assign it traits like ‘chatty’ and ‘Gen Z’ | TechCrunch
??? – “🚨BREAKING: OpenAI will release GPT-5 tomorrow
Robotics and Embodiment
“Let’s reverse engineer this demo. You need 3 things: (1) robust hardware and motor designs that treat simulation as first-class citizen; (2) a human motion capture (“mocap”) dataset, such as those for film and gaming characters; (3) massively parallel RL training in
“Samsung announced a $181M investment into Rainbow Robotics, expanding its presence in humanoid robotics Here’s what their robots look like This space will only continue to get more competitive
“Really excited to be posting our FIRST Robotics hardware roles for @OpenAI, including two very senior tech lead engineering (IC) roles and a TPM Manager. The first role is for an **EE Sensing Engineer** to help us design the sensor suite for our robots. The second role is for a” / X
OpenAI’s Robotics Plans 🤖, UCBerkeley NovaSky releases Sky-T1 ☁️, Llama & copyrighted works 📚 – ethanholland@gmail.com – Gmail
“I’ve verified from reliable sources. New visual Turing Test: this is a real robot demo! The controller is a neural net trained in Isaac simulator using reinforcement learning and then sim2real. Reward engineering is all you need. Walking gait’s got swag but we need these robots
Science and Medicine
“🚀 Stanford’s MUSK, an AI model, pushes Cancer Prognosis Accuracy Predicts which cancer patients thrive on treatments using massive medical data insight → For all cancer types, MUSK accurately predicted the disease-specific survival of a patient 75% of the time. In contrast,
Video News
Anyone want the script to run Moondream 2b’s new gaze detection on any video? : r/LocalLLaMA
“The NEW @LumaLabsAI #Ray2 is LIVE! Text to video model is VERY Impressive! Grateful for early access and excited to share my favorite generations! If you’re interested to learn more, sign up with the link below 👇
“This is @luma_ai #Ray2 video model. I got early access to test and the results are impressive. . . . .#lumadreammachine #ray2 #lumaai
Tech Papers, Training, and Development
“Ray 2 produces AI influencers on demand — complete with wide angle vlogging and rolling shutter 🫣”
“welcome to the frontier! #Ray2”
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