🤖 Figure AI CEO Launches New AI Research Lab

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In today’s Daily Report:

• 🚀Figure AI CEO Launches New AI Research Lab

• 🔦Bay Area Blackout Exposes Self-Driving Car Flaws

• 🛠Trending Tools

• 🥪Brief Bites

• 💰Funding Frontlines

• 💼Who’s Hiring?

Read Time: 3 minutes

🗞RECENT NEWS

FIGURE AI

🚀Figure AI CEO Launches New AI Research Lab

Figure AI CEO Brett Adcock recently launched a new AI research lab called “Hark,” and he’s backing it with $100 million of his own capital.

Key Details:

• It’s focused on developing “human-centric AI” that’s capable of thinking proactively and improving recursively to care deeply about people. In other words, building “self-aware AI” that’s designed to analyze information, incorporate context, and draw logical conclusions while prioritizing human needs, values, and safety.

• Figure AI collects a treasure trove of real-world, physical data from F.03, including recognizing objects (e.g., cups, chairs, and containers), identifying obstacles (e.g., boxes, boards, and barriers), and navigating spaces (e.g., homes, factories, and warehouses).

• This physical data allows “Hark” to train advanced AI models for “Embodied AI”: AI that takes physical form through drones, robots, or self-driving cars to interact with the physical world.

Why It’s Important:

• Imagine humanoid robots that possess the same internal sense of bodily awareness as humans by constantly comparing what they expect to feel with what they actually feel.

• For example, each time F.03 moves a robotic limb, it measures the difference between the predicted feel and real sensations, helping it innately understand variations in physics, friction, and velocity relative to robotic movements.

WAYMO

🔦Bay Area Blackout Exposes Self-Driving Car Flaws

On Saturday, a fire at a PG&E substation caused a massive blackout across the Bay Area, effectively paralyzing Waymo’s autonomous ride-hailing service.

Key Details:

• Waymo relies on a multimodal sensor suite:

  1. 🔴 LiDAR: Utilizes light to measure the depth and distance of objects.

  2. 🟡 RADAR: Utilizes radio waves to measure the speed of objects through dust, fog, and rain.

  3. 🟢 USS: Utilizes sound waves to detect nearby objects when parking, reversing, or performing tight turns.

• This multimodal sensor suite is processed and interpreted by AI-powered algorithms and compared to detailed 3D maps of surrounding environments, enabling the Jaguar I-PACE SUVs to autonomously steer, brake, accelerate, and signal.

• Under normal conditions, the self-driving cars are programmed to treat non-functional traffic lights as four-way stops. Despite this, the “sheer scale” of the blackout created a “software deadlock” where the Waymo entered an MRC: the self-driving car’s software couldn’t confidently decide what to do because of the dark, rainy conditions and erratic behavior of human drivers.

Why It’s Important:

• Waymo isn’t fully “stand-alone.” It still requires remote assistance from human operators through the self-driving car’s 5G/LTE network when it enters an MRC. Since the blackout knocked out the WiFi, everyone started using cellular data, which jammed local cell towers.

• The 3D maps told the self-driving car: “There’s a traffic light here!” The multimodal sensor suite said: “There’s a dark object here!” The AI-powered algorithms said: “There’s a logic mismatch!” Waymo’s prior knowledge contradicted the real-time data.

THE STOCK MARKET

📍AI Tier Tracker

🔔CLOSING BELL: As of 12/22/2025 market close.

💡STOCK SPOTLIGHT: Each tier showcases a new stock every day.

🛠TRENDING TOOLS

📱CyberCut enables everyone to easily create viral videos.

👷Loki.Build creates on-brand, studio-grade landing pages.

✏️Pencil Art AI turns any photo into realistic pencil drawings.

📸RemakePic remakes product images for marketplace compliance.

🦾Incredible deploys AI Agents that put repetitive work on autopilot.

🧰 Browse our Always Up-To-Date AI Toolkit.

🥪BRIEF BITES

OpenAI’s ChatGPT reached $3 billion in “mobile consumer spending” in just 31 months, with about 82.7% of that spending taking place this year alone.

Instacart halted “Item Price Tests,” following public criticism over the AI-driven software setting different prices for the same items at the same store.

OpenAI rolled out “GPT-5.2-Codex,” the world’s most advanced software engineering agent that autonomously writes, debugs, and deploys code.

Mistral AI launched “Mistral OCR 3,” which excels at extracting text and embedded images from a wide range of documents with exceptional fidelity.

💰FUNDING FRONTLINES

• Cynch AI raised a $9M Seed Round to scale AI-native tax automation.

• Nirvana landed a $100M Series D to fix commercial insurance with AI.

• RedotPay closed a $107M Series B for stablecoin payment adoption.

💼WHO’S HIRING?

• Labelbox (San Francisco, CA): Cyber Security Intern, Summer 2026

• NVIDIA (Austin, TX): ASIC Design Verification Engineer, Entry-Level

• Notion (San Francisco, CA): AI Applications Engineer, Mid-Level

• Anthropic (San Francisco, CA): Consumer Product Lead, Senior-Level

📒FINAL NOTE

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