🤖 The NBA’s AI-Powered Robots Take Center Court

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In today’s Daily Report:

• 🏀The NBA’s AI-Powered Robots Take Center Court

• 🧩Is AI Smart Enough for NPR’s Sunday Puzzles?

• 📈Did xAI’s “Grok 3” Meet Expectations?

• 🛠Trending Tools

• 🥪Brief Bites

• 💰Funding Frontlines

• 💼Who’s Hiring?

Read Time: 3 minutes

🗞RECENT NEWS

NBA

🏀The NBA’s AI-Powered Robots Take Center Court

NBA Commissioner Adam Silver showcased four new AI-powered robots at the 2025 NBA All-Star Technology Summit.

Key Details:

1. Kinematic Interface Tool (K.I.T.): Provides companionship to players, coaches, and staff.

2. Automated Basketball Engine (A.B.E.): Helps collect rebounds and throw passes to players during shooting sessions.

3. Bot-Enhanced Basics & Equipment (B.E.B.E.): Helps staff organize equipment like basketballs, knee pads, or towels.

4. Motion & Intercept Modular-Interface Coordination (M.I.M.I.C.): Assists coaches in designing, teaching, and implementing new plays.

Why It’s Important:

• The NBA is embracing Physical AI, which equips robots with AI to help them directly perceive, understand, and interact with the physical world.

• These AI-powered robots could transform the NBA by revolutionizing coaching and providing personalized player support.

🩺 PULSE CHECK

AI BENCHMARKS

🧩Is AI Smart Enough for NPR’s Sunday Puzzles?

Researchers at Northeastern University (NEU) developed a new benchmark that includes 600 Riddles from NPR’s Sunday Puzzle Challenges.

Key Details:

• Existing benchmarks for advanced AI models often focus on highly specialized knowledge in narrow domains, which are “difficult for non-experts to grasp.”

• For example, the Math Word Problem Solving (MATH) benchmark covers 12,500 questions covering algebra, geometry, calculus, and number theory. In contrast, NPR’s Sunday Puzzle Challenges “only require general knowledge.”

• Surprisingly, “DeepSeek-R1” only correctly solved 35% of the 600 Riddles, even saying it was “frustrated” and would “give up.”

Why It’s Important:

• “You don’t need a Ph.D. to be good at reasoning. So, we should design reasoning benchmarks that don’t require Ph.D.-level knowledge,” said Co-Author of the Study Arjun Guha.

• This new benchmark highlights that advanced AI models still struggle to handle complex, open-ended problems. “It’s hard to make meaningful progress on a Riddle if you can’t reason,” explained Guha.

AI LEADERBOARDS

📈Did xAI’s “Grok 3” Meet Expectations?

xAI unveiled “Grok 3,” a new conversational chatbot that’s “scary smart” and can solve more challenging problems in math, coding, and science. It also has a new DeepSearch feature with Agentic capabilities that does an hour’s worth of research in minutes “better than you could’ve done it yourself.”

“Grok 3” claimed the top spot in Hard Prompts, Creative Writing, Instruction Following, Longer Query, and Multi-Turn on the LMArena Chatbot Arena Leaderboard. It’s also the first AI model to achieve an Arena Score that’s over 1400, surpassing “OpenAI o1” and “Gemini 2.0.”

🛠TRENDING TOOLS

👋steev trains your AI models so you don’t have to.

👻caspa AI generates ultrarealistic product photos.

👷Nia is your collaborative AI developer that builds apps.

⚙️OverallGPT compares responses from different AI models.

🧠memories.dev adds real-world context to your AI systems.

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

🥪BRIEF BITES

Mistral AI released “Mistral Saba 24B,” a new hyperlocal AI model that excels in Arabic and Indian dialects.

Lamar (i.e., @LamarDealMaker) paired OpenAI’s Operator with Replit Agent to build an app in minutes.

Meta recently hired former CEO of TheRealReal John Koryl to help jumpstart sales for AI-powered wearables like glasses, headsets, and watches.

Marine Biologists at the University of California Santa Cruz (UCSC) equipped thousands of Northern Elephant Seals with smart sensors to monitor the ocean’s salinity levels.

💰FUNDING FRONTLINES

• Pinkfish AI raises a $7.6M Pre-Seed Round to automate any workflow with AI Agents.

• Lingopal.ai secures a $14M Series A for a Speech-To-Speech (STS) Translation Platform.

• Abridge closes a $250M Series D to deploy Enterprise-Grade AI for clinical conversations.

💼WHO’S HIRING?

• ParkHub (Dallas, TX): Data Engineering Intern, Summer 2025

• Rokt (Los Gatos, CA): Software Engineering Intern, Summer 2025

• UBS (Nashville, TN): Cyber Hygiene Data Analyst, Entry-Level

• Truveta (Seattle, WA): Clinical Data Analyst, Mid-Level

• MIDI (Palo Alto, CA): Head of Data Science, Senior-Level

📒FINAL NOTE

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