Figure AI robots at a BMW plant, new model DeepSeek-R1-Lite-Preview, US-China AI race — top 3 AI news stories of the week
Our latest AI Digest covers the biggest breaking AI news of the week. Anywhere Club community leader, Viktar Shalenchanka, comments on key stories.
#1 — Figure AI robots at the BMW plant: machines building machines
Beginning with robotics news (and AI, of course): the 2022 startup Figure AI, which creates humanoid commercial robots, reported on its work with BMW. The company’s Figure 02 robots were autonomously working in BMW production earlier this year for over three months without human control. Figure AI claims that the robots achieved a 400% increase in speed and that the number of tasks successfully performed by robots increased sevenfold compared to the start. It's hard to assess the result — baseline values were not published. But it is cool that engineering giants are starting to use AI-controlled robots — and that the robots demonstrated impressive results on tasks that required high precision.
#2 — DeepSeek-R1-Lite-Preview: China’s competitor to OpenAI’s o1
A major competitor to OpenAI's model o1 has emerged. The Chinese company DeepSeek introduced DeepSeek-R1-Lite-Preview — a new model with reasoning capability. According to some benchmarks (AIME and MATH), it already matches or surpasses o1-preview and makes a significant leap in programming tasks. Right now, DeepSeek-R1-Lite-Preview can only be tested using DeepSeek’s web chat interface for free, but DeepSeek plans to release an API.
#3 — Is an AI race between the US and China inevitable?
In the US, there is a special commission for monitoring China’s economy — the U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission. Created in 2000, it recently provided its annual report to Congress containing 32 recommendations for the US government, ten of which were deemed “particularly important.” The first of the key recommendations begins by saying that Congress should: “…establish and fund a Manhattan Project-like program, dedicated to racing to and acquiring an Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) capability.” The Manhattan Project was a top-secret program of the US government to rapidly create and deploy an atomic bomb during World War II before Nazi Germany could do so. It’s unclear whether US Congress members will heed this call. But considering Elon Musk’s significant influence on the new president, we may be on the brink of a new AI technology race between the US and China.
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