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In today’s AI Report:

  • đŸŠŸFigure AI’s $2.6 Billion Humanoid Robot

  • 📊Microsoft’s New Finance Copilot for Excel

  • 🎞Alibaba’s Audio2Video Diffusion Model

  • 🛠5 Trending Tools

  • 💰Venture Capital Updates

  • đŸ’ŒWho’s Hiring?

Read Time: 3 minutes

🗞RECENT NEWS

FIGURE AI

đŸŠŸFigure AI’s $2.6 Billion Humanoid Robot

Image Source: Canva AI Image Generator

Figure AI, a robotics company designing humanoid robots to perform dangerous and undesired jobs, raised $675 million at a $2.6 billion valuation from Jeff Bezos, Nvidia, and Microsoft.

Key Details:

  • Founded in 2022, Figure AI developed a general-purpose robot called Figure 01 to optimize manufacturing, warehousing, and retail systems where “labor shortages are the most severe.”

  • Earlier this week, the company published a video showcasing Figure 01 handling plastic crates and interacting with a conveyor belt.

  • Figure AI is partnering with OpenAI to “develop next-generation AI models for humanoid robots.” The company will also leverage Microsoft Azure’s cloud services to expand its AI infrastructure.

  • Humanoid robots with actuators, motors, and sensors are expensive to build. It requires between $30,000 and $150,000 per unit.

Why It’s Important:

  • Figure AI competes in a crowded field with established companies exploring robotics, including Tesla’s Optimus, which can sort through objects autonomously to perform unsafe, repetitive, or tedious tasks.

  • Figure AI believes that as “automation continues to integrate with human life at scale,” it can minimize the impact of labor-based shortages on the economy.

  • Today, manual labor compensation is the primary driver of the prices of goods and services. As robots integrate into the workforce, labor costs will decrease until they become “equivalent to the price of renting a robot, vacillating a long-term, holistic reduction in costs.”

đŸ©ș PULSE CHECK

Which company will have the leading humanoid robot in 5 years?

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MICROSOFT

📊Microsoft’s New Finance Copilot for Excel

Image Source: World Economic Forum/Valeriano Di Domenico

Microsoft is releasing Finance Copilot for Excel to perform critical tasks for financial professionals, including analyzing revenue, expenses, and cash flows.

Key Details:

  • Many business providers, like HubSpot, Salesforce, and Google, have been integrating AI features into existing product offerings to streamline user efficiency.

  • Microsoft has already launched Microsoft Copilot, your everyday AI companion that performs operating system functions across Office 365 applications and answers questions with up-to-date information.

  • The Finance Copilot will be tailored for financial professionals like bankers, advisors, or accountants to automate repetitive data sorting tasks and run variance analysis.

Why It’s Important:

  • Cory Hrncirik, modern financial lead in Microsoft’s office of the chief financial officer, explained: “Comparing data taken from different systems is something every financial team on the planet does a lot of.”

  • Microsoft’s financial planning and analysis teams typically require several hours of weekly reconciliation (i.e., comparing transactions). Internal tests of the Finance Copilot reduced weekly reconciliation chores to 20 minutes.

AI RESEARCH

🎞Alibaba’s Audio2Video Diffusion Model

Alibaba researchers developed Emote Portrait Alive (EMO), an enterprise audio-driven portrait-video generation framework. Simply put, it’s an AI model that generates life-like videos of portraits talking, singing, and moving.

EMO was trained on over 250 hours of diverse multi-lingual footage comprised of speeches, films, and concerts.

LEARN MORE

🛠TRENDING TOOLS

🎙Podwise is the premiere quoting, note-taking, highlighting, summarizing, and mind-mapping app for podcast lovers.

🛒Openmart finds restaurants and retail leads based on customer criteria.

🐍Blobr is the AI business assistant that helps you make the right decisions.

🍰Velvet makes everyone on your team a data engineer.

🐙Octomind finds bugs before your users do.

🔼Browse our always Up-To-Date AI Tools Database.

💰VENTURE CAPITAL UPDATES

  • Former Twitter engineers are building Particle, an AI-powered news reader backed by $4.4M.

  • Inkitt, the self-publishing platform using AI to develop bestsellers, nabs $37M.

  • Microsoft makes a $16M investment in Mistral AI.

đŸ’ŒWHO’S HIRING?

  • Schonfeld (New York, NY): Software Engineering Intern, User Interface, Simmer 2024

  • Bristol Myers Squibb (Princeton, NJ): Commercial Data Science Intern, Summer 2024

  • Tesla (Hawthorne, CA): Automotive Photographer & Digital Retoucher, Fall 2024

  • OpenAI (San Francisco, CA): Engineer Manager, API Capabilities

  • Cohere (San Francisco, CA): Partner Marketing Manager

đŸ€–PROMPT OF THE DAY

STOCK MARKET

📊Technical Analysis of Stock or Market Trend

Act as a professional financial analyst. Your task is to perform a technical analysis of [Stock or Market Trend] that includes trend analysis, moving averages, and support and resistance levels to identify potential entry or exit points for investment.

Stock or Market Trend = [Insert Here]

📒FINAL NOTE

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