Figure AI breaks off OpenAI collab

Read time: under 4 minutes

Humanoid robot maker Figure is walking away from something most robotics startups only dream of: Exclusive access to OpenAI's top-tier reasoning models. Also: Apple has a new app and “vibe coding“ with AI is the latest programming trend.

As a side note, I’ve been experimenting heavily with OpenAI’s new deep research feature in ChatGPT and it’s good. Really good. I never thought I would pay $200 for a subscription but deep research delivers. Easily my favorite AI product of the year so far. I’ll publish a video with details on how to use it soon.

Today’s Insights

• Today in AI: Decoding contracts, AI safety, and life-like VLMs

• Tutorial: How to create an app using Replit’s AI copilot

• Frontier: Why Figure dropped its OpenAI partnership

• 5 new AI tools to boost your productivity

• News, memes, what’s trending on socials, and more

TODAY IN AI

1. Adobe’s new AI tool can help decode lengthy contracts: Around 70% of us admit to having signed a user agreement without knowing what it entailed. To address that problem, Adobe just added an AI assistant to Acrobat, its popular PDF editor, that takes the guesswork out of contracts. It’ll surface important dates and details, summarize jargon-laden policies, and compare and contrast different versions so you can see what’s changed.

2. Meta has a plan to quell your biggest fears about AI: Like most AI companies, Meta is scrambling to become the first in the world to achieve AGI. But a new document shows there are certain lines it won’t cross, like releasing a model that could be used for biological or cyber-attacks. Google shared its own responsible AI report this week – but readers noticed it had removed a pledge to not use its AI technology for weapons or surveillance. The company says it will “stay consistent with widely accepted principles of international law and human rights.”

3. ByteDance blurs reality with new video model: In 2014, the best image generators could only produce blurry gray blobs that barely resembled your prompt. Now, ByteDance’s new open-source video model, OmniHuman-1, can produce clips so life-like that it’s difficult to tell them apart from the real thing. To demonstrate the tech, researchers shared deepfake videos of everyone from Jensen Huang to Taylor Swift to Albert Einstein — each with natural-looking movements and body proportions.

PRESENTED BY YOU. COM

How I use 20+ AI models in one platform

I routinely have ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini open side-by-side because each model excels at tasks that the others don't.

That’s why I like using You(dot)com, the tool that combines the most popular AI models in one app:

• Toggle 20+ AI models in the same chat thread

• Compare answers to find the best one

• Eliminates tab switching/prompt pasting

In a recent LinkedIn post, I explain why I like using You(dot)com. Instead of switching tabs and pasting prompts, it allows me to use different models in the same thread to find the best solution.

Ends soon: Access 1 year of Pro at no cost ($180 value). Click here for a chance to access the special offer.

THE AI ACADEMY

How to create an app using Replit’s AI copilot

• Go to Replit and sign up.

• Click ‘Create App’, choose ‘Framework’ from the template dropdown, give your project a name, and click ‘Create’ to open your workspace.

• In main(dot)py, click on ‘Generate code with AI’. Enter your prompt, click the purple arrow, and then ‘Accept’ it once you’re happy.

Sample Prompt: Please write me a script that asks for input of 2 numbers in the console and returns the sum of both numbers.

• Click the green ‘Run’ button at the top to run your app.

• You can highlight any line(s) of code in the main file and click ‘Explain with AI‘ to see a breakdown of what the selected code does.

• Click ‘Modify with AI’, type your instruction (e.g., “Adjust the output format”), accept to save, and then run again to confirm that it works.

• Using the AI assistant chat on the left side, you can ask questions, refine code, make precise edits, and debug.

FROM THE FRONTIER

Figure unexpectedly cuts ties with OpenAI

Entrepreneur Brett Adcock’s robotics startup is going it alone. For the past year, Figure had used OpenAI’s state-of-the-art models as the “brains” behind its humanoid robots. But Adcock says his company has just “made a major breakthrough” with a new model “built entirely in-house” — and as a result, it’s ending that partnership.

What’s behind the decision? While details are scant, we know that OpenAI is actively working on its own robotics releases, which could have rubbed up against Figure’s plans. In the same vein, OpenAI builds general-purpose LLMs that live online, whereas Figure likely wants a physics-based one that’s fine-tuned for its 5’ 6” robots.

We won’t have to wait long for more info: Adcock says he’ll reveal what Figure’s been cooking up within the next 30 days. Our guess: A model that can learn new skills on the fly, not just mimic behavior it’s been trained on. (Tech blogger Robert Scoble also raises an interesting theory.)

What’s next? With around $750M raised so far, Figure’s 02 robots are already being used on BMW production lines, but Adcock wants to eventually ship 100,000 for use across industries.

PRESENTED BY INNOVATING WITH AI

Want to become an AI Consultant?

Innovating with AI just welcomed 200 new students into The AI Consultancy Project, their new program that trains you to build a business as an AI consultant:

• Tools, frameworks, and a 6-month plan to build a 6-figure AI consulting business

Click here to request early access to The AI Consultancy Project

AI & TECH NEWS

Everything else you need to know today

🇰🇷 Pacific Partners: OpenAI announced it’s bringing ChatGPT to Korean tech giant Kakao’s popular messaging app and AI platform, just a day after announcing a similar partnership with Japan’s SoftBank.

🎨 Mobile Masterpiece: Snap is rolling out a new text-to-image model that can run locally on smartphones, generating images in as little as 1.4 seconds on the iPhone 16 Pro Max.

🧑‍💼 Human Touch: Open-source developer Simon Willison called out Anthropic’s ironic hiring policy: When submitting an application, prospective employees have to check a box promising they didn’t use AI to help apply for the position.

🎉 Double Booked: Apple released a new app called Invites that lets you create custom party invitations and manage RSVPs, although popular events platform Partiful has already accused the iPhone maker of copying its idea.

📈 Markets: Palantir jumped an eye-watering 24% Tuesday following news that demand for its AI services had far exceeded analysts’ predictions. Although Alphabet finished the day up 2.5%, its stock quickly slid in after-hours trading when an earnings report showed it had brought in lower-than-expected cloud revenue in the fourth quarter.

💰 Funding: Toronto-based StackAdapt, which uses AI to optimize its programmatic advertising platform, raised $235M in equity funding. And former Google and DeepMind engineers raised $10M in seed funding to launch a startup called Qeen AI that builds AI agents for e-commerce companies.

PRODUCTIVITY

5 AI Tools to Supercharge Your Productivity

✅ Omniflow: Supercharge your product development journey from ideation, design, development, and release with AI.

✅ Zeropath: Use AI-powered code vulnerability scanning to find and fix broken authentication, logic bugs, outdated dependencies, and more.

✅ Google Cloud*: Fuel your AI startup's growth with the Google for Startups Cloud Program. Get $350K in credits & expert support. Apply to get started. 

✅ Orate: Create realistic, human-like speech and transcribe audio with a unified API that works with leading AI providers like OpenAI and ElevenLabs.

✅ Chatbase: A complete platform for building & deploying AI Agents for your business to handle customer support & drive more revenue.

^{* indicates a promoted tool, if any}

PROMPT OF THE DAY

Create a Project Plan

Prompt: As a project manager, I am responsible for [project example]. The project is planned to span over [add duration] and involves multiple departments like design, development, and marketing [add context]. Please generate a comprehensive project plan that includes objectives, business case, scope, timeline, stakeholders, and success metrics in a [insert output format].

_{Source: Jean Kang via Forbes}

SOCIAL SIGNALS

What’s trending on socials today

✨ Instant Apps: Popular AI coding platform Replit now has a mobile app, letting anyone design custom programs on their phone with simple text prompts.

🔍 More with Less: Runway’s Siqi Chen said OpenAI’s deep research tool combined with o3 performs better than the $150k private research team he hired to study his daughter’s rare medical condition.

🧠 Research Rebels: Developers are already building their own open-source alternatives to deep research, which they say perform about as well as OpenAI’s feature, but without the hefty price tag.

🌊 Go with the Flow: OpenAI co-founder Andrej Karpathy says AI programming assistants have ushered in a new age of “‘vibe coding’, where you fully give in to the vibes, embrace exponentials, and forget the code even exists.”

AI-GENERATED IMAGES

Funny seeing you here

Midjourney Prompt: hyper realistic image in HD, it is a photograph taken from below the water, where you can see in close-up the face of a [insert animal here] that has just jumped into the water. The [animal]is face to face with the lens that is underwater, it was a strong jump into the water, so you can see a lot of foam and bubbles too. It's a funny image

Acquire new customers and drive revenue by partnering with us

Superhuman is the world’s biggest AI newsletter for businesses and professionals with 1M+ readers and 2M+ followers on socials working at the world’s leading startups and enterprises. Companies like Amazon, Hubspot, and Salesforce feature their products in Superhuman. You can learn more about partnering with us here.

Your opinion matters!

Got more feedback or just want to get in touch? Reply to this email and we’ll get back to you.

Thanks for reading.

Until next time!

Zain & the Superhuman AI team