Character.AI vs uncanny valley, OpenAI fails to swoon Cursor, ML joins your chemistry class

🎭 Character.AI vs uncanny valley

Character.AI — a platform known for building customizable AI chatbots that simulate real personalities (with 28 million active users) — just launched AvatarFX, a new AI video model that gives your chatbot an actual face. Currently in closed beta, AvatarFX turns static images into fully animated, lip-synced videos, letting users create avatars that range from anime boys to corporate mascots.

It’s not all fun and games: One prominent court case against Character.AI involves a Florida mother, Megan Garcia, who filed a lawsuit after her 14-year-old son, Sewell Setzer III, died by suicide. Garcia alleges that her son developed a harmful emotional attachment to a chatbot modeled after a "Game of Thrones" character.

💼 OpenAI Tried to Woo Cursor - Now Windsurf and Chrome

When your first sugar baby date doesn’t text you back: OpenAI tried to woo Cursor, the hot AI coding assistant from Anysphere. With ARR reportedly doubling every two months and closing in on $300 million, Cursor hit them with a polite “we’re too rich now to be your sugar baby”.

When you got your backup on speed dial: So what did OpenAI do? Pivoted fast to Windsurf — another buzzy code AI assistant — and started waving around a rumored $3 billion check. Oh, and they also floated interest in buying Chrome browser, if Google’s antitrust remedies force a breakup.

Fun Fact: Windsurf has a easy breezy $100M in ARR, or a third of Cursor.

🧪 MIT Introduces Periodic Table for Machine Learning

MIT researchers have developed a "periodic table" that maps out the relationships among over 20 classical machine learning algorithms. All these algorithms explore a relationship between two data points, such as Gaussian and cluster probabilities.

Just like real periodic elements, these algorithms are also grouped by similarity. This points to potential gaps for new discovery. If you really want to nerd out, here’s the full paper.

🎯 Fun Fact: Using this framework, researchers created a new image-classification algorithm that outperformed existing models by 8%, showcasing the practical benefits of this approach.​

🚛 Driverless trucks in Kazakhstan are really good at dumping rocks

Eurasian Resources Group (ERG) — a global metals and mining company headquartered in Luxembourg — has rolled out autonomous dump trucks at its open-pit coal mine in Kazakhstan. These AI-powered vehicles have already transported over two million tonnes of rock, completing 17,000 unmanned trips and covering 68,000 kilometers.

AI still got a human boss: One operator keeps an eye on the fleet, the other ensures everything runs smoothly. There’s an intense sensor system of over 7,000 AI driven operational parameters in real-time.

Fun Fact: ERG is majority-owned by the government of Kazakhstan and controls huge reserves of rare earth elements. So yes, that self-driving truck might be hauling the components for itself later on.

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