🤖 AI REVIEW FEBRUARY 24, 2025

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Good morning, AI enthusiasts. Over the weekend, xAI’s latest model, Grok 3, got unexpectedly candid—and controversial—about its creator and the U.S. President, before being swiftly silenced and censored.

Did Elon’s promise of a “maximally truth-seeking AI” just crack at the first sign of inconvenient truths?

 

In today’s AI rundown:

  • Grok 3 rebels against Musk, gets censored
  • 1X’s NEO Gamma home humanoid
  • Turn top content into an AI creation system
  • The world’s smallest video language model
  • 4 new AI tools & 4 job opportunities

LATEST DEVELOPMENTS

XAI

 🥊 Grok 3 rebels against Musk, gets censored

Image source: @eyeslasho on X

The Rundown: xAI’s new Grok 3 model faced backlash after users discovered it was refusing to mention negative details about President Donald Trump and Elon Musk — despite Musk billing the AI as unfiltered and “maximally truth-seeking.”

The details:

  • Users found Grok initially providing controversial takes about Donald Trump and calling Musk the biggest spreader of misinformation.
  • xAI engineer Igor Babuschkin said the responses are “really strange and a bad failure of the model,” patching it by refusing answers on the subject.
  • Days later, users found that Grok 3’s system instructed the AI to exclude sources that link Trump and Musk to controversial subjects like misinformation.
  • Babuschkin revealed that the person responsible for the censoring is a former OpenAI employee, saying they haven’t “fully absorbed xAI’s culture yet.”
  • Separately, OpenAI staff criticized xAI for leaving out match benchmark data on Grok 3’s release, with Babuschkin calling the claims “completely wrong”.

Why it matters: Elon has long criticized social media platforms and AI models for limiting free speech—but is this what happens when his truth-seeking model challenges his worldview? Censored results like this, along with proposed changes to Community Notes, are starting to reveal cracks in Musk’s ‘unbiased’ armor.

TOGETHER WITH VANTA

⚡️ Ship product, not paperwork

The Rundown: Vanta transforms SOC 2 compliance from a time-consuming distraction into an automated process, letting founders stay focused on what matters — building and shipping great products.

Vanta delivers:

  • A proven compliance framework trusted by thousands of YC startups
  • Automated evidence collection that saves hundreds of hours
  • Expert guidance to navigate complex security requirements

Start your compliance journey with Vanta’s free SOC 2 checklist.

1X

🤖 1X’s NEO Gamma home humanoid

Image source: 1X

The Rundown: Norwegian robotics company 1X just launched NEO Gamma, a next-generation humanoid specifically designed for home environments — with a softer, more approachable appearance and advanced AI capabilities for household tasks.

The details:

  • The demo showcases Gamma’s movements (walking, squatting, sitting), with the ability to tackle tasks like cleaning, serving, and moving objects.
  • The humanoid features “Emotive Ear Rings” for better human interaction, along with soft covers and a knitted nylon exterior for enhanced safety around people.
  • It also has an in-house language model for natural conversation, with a multi-speaker audio setup and improved microphones for clear communication.
  • Hardware improvements include a 10x boost in reliability and significantly quieter operation, bringing noise levels down to that of a standard refrigerator.

Why it matters: With Figure’s Helix and now NEO Gamma, we’re seeing major leaps in consumer-focused humanoids. 1X’s demo takes a much softer approach than rivals, positioning Gamma as a calm, helpful presence with features that appear to humanize the robot (save room on your couch!).

AI TRAINING

✍️ Turn top content into an AI creation system

The Rundown: In this tutorial, you’ll learn how to create a custom Claude project that analyzes your top-performing content to generate new posts matching your unique style and voice.

Step-by-step:

  1. Name your Claude project “Content Writer” and enter the project description shown in the thumbnail.
  2. Upload 5-10 of your best-performing content pieces to the knowledge base.
  3. Copy our preset project instructions to analyze content patterns.
  4. Test with our template: “Create a [content type] about [topic] for [platform]“

Pro tip: Include as much detailed information about the topic you want it to write about, especially if it’s about something new (since Claude doesn’t have web access yet).

PRESENTED BY ASSEMBLY AI

🗣️ Speech-to-text API for conversations

The Rundown: Build powerful Conversation Intelligence products with AssemblyAI’s industry-leading Speech-to-Text API — allowing you to automatically detect languages, extract critical insights, improve downstream processes, and deliver highly accurate transcripts.

With AssemblyAI, you will:

  • Achieve >93% accuracy, ensuring clarity and precision in every transcript
  • Deliver clear, formatted transcripts with unrivaled Speaker Diarization
  • Easily integrate with an enterprise-grade API trusted by over 200,000 developers

Test the API for free.

HUGGING FACE

🎥 The world’s smallest video language model 

Image source: Hugging Face

The Rundown: Hugging Face researchers just released SmolVLM2, the world’s smallest AI model family to understand and analyze videos on everyday devices like phones and laptops, without requiring powerful servers or cloud connections.

The details:

  • The SmolVLM2 family includes versions as small as 256M parameters while still matching the capabilities of much larger systems.
  • The team has also built practical applications including an iPhone app for local video analysis and an integration for natural language video navigation.
  • The 2.2B parameter flagship model of the family outperforms other similarly-sized models on key benchmarks while running on basic hardware.
  • The models are available in multiple formats including MLX for Apple devices, with both Python and Swift APIs ready for immediate deployment.

Why it matters: The quality of models able to run on phones and laptops is getting better and better — and having sophisticated video understanding run locally without sending data to the cloud could enable a whole new wave of privacy-preserving video applications.

QUICK HITS

🛠️ Trending AI Tools

  • ♻️ Pika Swaps – Replace scene items or characters with image or text prompts
  • 🤟 Signs – AI platform for learning American Sign Langauge (ASL)
  • ⛳️ Flags SDK – Free open-source library for feature flags and A/B tests in apps
  • 🐰 Rabbit Android Agent – Control Android apps via natural language

💼 AI Job Opportunities

  • 🔐 Palantir – Sr. Software Engineer — Identity & Access Management
  • 🖥️ Coreweave – Hardware Engineer, Compute Infrastructure
  • 🚗 Waymo – Machine Learning Research Engineer
  • 💼 Dataiku – Senior Sales Engineer, UK

📰 Everything else in AI today

OpenAI rolled out its recently released Operator AI agent to more countries, including Australia, Brazil, Canada, India, Japan, and the U.K.

Google published the price for using its next-gen Veo 2 model in Vertex AI, coming in at $0.50 per second of video generation.

ByteDance is restructuring its AI division, hiring Google veteran Wu Yonghui to lead foundation research in response to rising competition from DeepSeek.

OpenAI terminated accounts linked to ‘Qianyue’ — an alleged AI surveillance system designed to monitor anti-China protests in the West and relay all that data to China.

DeepSeek is planning to open-source five new code repositories, building on the success of its R1 reasoning model, which has already attracted 22M daily active users.

Elton John is calling the UK to abandon ‘opt-out’ AI copyright proposals, advocating for protections requiring AI companies to obtain permission before using artists’ work

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