The government is gearing up for AGI

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Welcome back, Superhuman. AI-powered voice bots are now realistic enough to fool most of us. But we still haven’t crossed the uncanny valley when it comes to video avatars. A YC-backed startup has plans to finally change that. And: We’ll dive into one of the first “app stores” for AI agents.

Today’s Insights

• Realistic avatars, agentic apps, omnimodal AI, and Larry Page’s next steps

• The US government is prepping for AGI

• Tutorial: How to analyze any video with Gemini 2.0

• 5 new AI tools to boost your productivity

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

TODAY IN AI

1. This startup wants to help you build life-like AI avatars: Anyone who’s tried Sesame’s new voice bot knows AI voices are getting eerily realistic. Now, a YC-backed startup called Tavus wants to do the same for AI avatars. It just dropped three new foundation models that “empower your AI agent to see, hear, respond, and even look human.” You can try a tech demo here. It’s not quite human-level yet, but the lines are definitely getting blurrier.

2. An app store for agentic AI tools: Convergence, the UK-based startup taking on OpenAI’s Operator, just released a new Template Hub filled with dozens of pre-made AI agents for you to try. Options include a daily news digest, a stock tracker, a B2B competitive analysis tool, and even a build-your-own option. You can browse the hub here, but keep in mind, you’ll need to sign in first.

3. Hedra drops first-ever ‘omnimodal’ video model: The a16z-backed startup unveiled Character-3, which reasons across image, text, and audio to create clips that are much smoother and more realistic than its rivals. You can also access third-party models through Hedra Studio, so you don’t have to constantly switch between different platforms. Here’s a reel showing some of the videos you can create.

4. Google co-founder’s secret AI venture: According to The Information, Google's Larry Page is launching a new AI startup called Dynatomics that's focused on using AI to create optimized product designs for manufacturing. The stealth startup joins several other startups exploring AI's potential in manufacturing.

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FROM THE FRONTIER

The government is starting to take AGI seriously

This week, OpenAI, Anthropic, and former Google CEO Eric Schmidt each weighed in on how they think the US government should prep for superintelligence. Was the timing just a big coincidence? Ben Buchanan, a former White House special advisor for AI, doesn’t think so.

In an interview that’s since gone viral, he said the government is starting to face the reality that AGI will likely come within the next few years — even though opinions vary widely on what we should do about it.

What are the different views?

• OpenAI thinks we should “practice for the AGI moment” before it actually happens — basically, learning from current releases and making tweaks so future ones are safer. The startup adds that “embracing uncertainty” is ultimately worth it, since AGI has so much potential to transform our lives.

• Anthropic predicts AI will have “intellectual capabilities matching or exceeding that of Nobel Prize winners” by 2026 or 2027. It wants the government to clamp down on chip exports and keep labs more secure so other countries can’t swoop in and steal proprietary models from the US.

• Schmidt, along with Scale AI CEO Alexandr Wang and the Center for AI Safety’s Dan Hendrycks, think racing toward AGI is reckless. They argue the US should handle AGI with the same level of care as it does nuclear weapons — with tons of safety precautions and regulations — so that no one else can get their hands on such a powerful technology.

THE AI ACADEMY

How to analyze any video with Gemini 2.0

• Go to Gemini’s website and sign up with your account.

• Now select ‘Gemini 2.0 Flash Thinking Experimental with apps’ as your model.

• Go to Settings > Extensions > Media and toggle on ‘Youtube’.

• Open browser, go to YouTube, open any video, and copy its URL.

• Enter your prompt into Gemini, add the copied video’s URL and press enter.

Sample Prompt: ‘Analyze this video and provide me with detailed key insights and practical applications of all the concepts explained. Include timestamps so I can refer to it [enter video URL]’

• You’ll get a quick and detailed analysis of your video in seconds.

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AI & TECH NEWS

Everything else you need to know today

✍️ Digitized Doodles: Engineer Zakwan Ahmad is building a ChatGPT-powered smart pen that can convert handwritten notes into digital ones, draft emails, and even translate text and voice across multiple languages.

🎉 Devs Rejoice: ChatGPT Plus, Pro, and Team users on MacOS can now edit code directly through VSCode, Cursor, and Windsurf.

🔍️ Closer Look: Mistral just released Mistral OCR, a new API that smartly converts PDFs into well-formatted text while preserving images and layout.

✨ AI Advantage: Y Combinator’s Jared Friedman revealed that among the accelerator’s current group of startups, a quarter of them use codebases written 95% with AI. Meanwhile, in the financial world, 90% of top CFOs say AI has delivered “very positive” returns for them over the past year.

💰 Funding: Turing, whose army of 4 million experts lend code to companies like OpenAI, raised $111M in a Series E funding round, handing it a new valuation of $2.2B. Cybersecurity startup Crogl raised $30M to build an agentic “Iron Man suit” that protects IT workers from threats. And Ataraxis AI raised $20.4M in a Series A as it launches an AI tool that can predict cancer outcomes five or 10 years into the future.

PRODUCTIVITY

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PROMPT OF THE DAY

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Prompt: Help me plan a game night around the theme of [insert theme: 80s, mystery, superhero]. Suggest games, activities, and decorations that fit the theme and keep everyone engaged.

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SOCIAL SIGNALS

What’s trending on socials today

🔥 Hot 100: a16z’s Olivia Moore shared the VC giant’s ranking of 100 top AI apps from the past six months.

🔮 Profit Prophecy: Wharton professor Ethan Mollick explains why he thinks the first AI lab to achieve AGI might try to horde it for itself at first.

📚 Research Rewired: University of Chicago economist Chris Blattman shares all the ways he’s used ChatGPT Deep Research, adding that the $200/month “subscription paid for itself in the first days or week.”

🧩 Decoding MCP: A little-known acronym — MCP, or model context protocol — has been blowing up on X this week. It lets LLMs access external apps without special code. Entrepreneur Adam Silverman compiles everything you need to know about it — and why it could totally transform the field of AI.

🔍 Bidding War: The mysterious owner of AI.com (which currently redirects visitors to DeepSeek’s website) is hoping to sell the domain for $100M, which would blow past the current $30M record set by Voice.com in 2019.

AI-GENERATED IMAGES

Sail Away

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