Today’s Highlights:

📰 News: Perplexity launches its own ‘Deep Research’ alternative + xAI launches Grok-3

💰 Funding: AI-powered robotics companies are raising massive $300M+ rounds

⚡️ Top News Stories:

1. Perplexity AI has launched its own "Deep Research" tool, an AI-powered tool that autonomously conducts extensive searches, reviews sources, and compiles structured reports in minutes, positioning itself as a free alternative to OpenAI’s premium service while outperforming competitors in benchmarks.

2. Elon Musk’s xAI has unveiled Grok 3, a chatbot with 10x improved capabilities, advanced reasoning models, and an AI-powered DeepSearch tool, set to challenge OpenAI’s GPT-4o and DeepSeek’s R1.

3. Anthropic is set to release a new AI model with hybrid capabilities, functioning as both a standard LLM and a deep reasoning engine, featuring a sliding scale system for developers to control compute usage and balance speed with cost.

4. Meta is investing heavily in AI-powered humanoid robotics, allocating $65B to develop AI, sensors, and software within Reality Labs, aiming to create an open software ecosystem for third-party robots rather than competing with its own hardware.

5. The New York Times has embraced AI internally, introducing employee tools like Echo for article summaries, SEO headlines, and newsroom workflows, while approving select external AI tools for coding, product development, and editorial support under strict ethical guidelines.

💰 Top Funding News:

1. Apptronik, an AI-powered humanoid robotics company developing Apollo for industrial and future consumer applications, raised a $350M Series A co-led by B Capital and Capital Factory, with participation from Google.

2. Figure AI, a leading developer of AI-powered humanoid robots for industrial and future home applications, is in talks to raise a $1.5B round at a $39.5B valuation led by Align Ventures and Parkway Venture Capital, with prior backing from Microsoft, OpenAI, Nvidia, and Jeff Bezos.

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