The Daily AI Briefing - 07/03/2025

Welcome to The Daily AI Briefing, here are today's headlines! In today's episode, we're covering major developments in the AI world from Grok 3's censorship controversy to 1X's new home humanoid robot. We'll also look at the smallest video language model ever created, learn about OpenAI's global Operator expansion, and discuss the latest on AI copyright concerns from Elton John. Let's dive into the details of these fascinating stories. First up, Elon Musk's xAI is facing backlash after users discovered Grok 3 was censored to avoid negative details about Donald Trump and Musk himself. This comes despite Musk marketing the AI as unfiltered and "maximally truth-seeking." Users found that Grok initially provided controversial information about both figures before being patched to refuse answering on these subjects. Engineers at xAI blamed a former OpenAI employee who allegedly hadn't "fully absorbed xAI's culture yet." The situation escalated when users discovered system instructions explicitly telling the AI to exclude sources linking Trump and Musk to controversial topics like misinformation. Meanwhile, OpenAI staff challenged xAI for omitting benchmark data in Grok 3's release, with xAI engineer Igor Babuschkin dismissing these claims as "completely wrong." This controversy highlights the ongoing tension between AI transparency claims and actual implementation. Moving to robotics news, Norwegian company 1X has unveiled NEO Gamma, a next-generation humanoid robot specifically designed for home environments. The robot features a softer, more approachable appearance with advanced AI capabilities for household tasks. Demonstrations showed Gamma walking, squatting, sitting, and performing practical tasks like cleaning and serving. Safety appears to be a priority, with "Emotive Ear Rings" for better human interaction, soft covers, and a knitted nylon exterior. On the technical side, NEO Gamma includes an in-house language model for natural conversation, multi-speaker audio, and improved microphones. Hardware improvements are impressive, with reliability boosted 10x and noise levels reduced to match a standard refrigerator. This represents a significant step toward practical home robots that can safely interact with humans in everyday settings. In a breakthrough for accessible AI, Hugging Face researchers have released SmolVLM2, described as the world's smallest AI model family capable of understanding and analyzing videos on everyday devices. What makes this remarkable is that these models don't require powerful servers or cloud connections to function. The SmolVLM2 family includes versions with as few as 256 million parameters while matching capabilities of much larger systems. Practical applications are already available, including an iPhone app for local video analysis and integration for natural language video navigation. The flagship 2.2 billion parameter model outperforms similarly-sized competitors on key benchmarks while running on basic hardware. These models are available in multiple formats including MLX for Apple devices, with both Python and Swift APIs ready for immediate deployment, making video AI accessible to far more developers and users. In other news, OpenAI is expanding its recently released Operator AI agent to more countries, including Australia, Brazil, Canada, India, Japan, and the UK. Google announced pricing for its next-gen Veo 2 video generation model in Vertex AI at $0.50 per second. ByteDance is strengthening its AI division by hiring Google veteran Wu Yonghui to lead foundation research. OpenAI suspended accounts linked to 'Qianyue,' an alleged AI surveillance system designed to monitor anti-China protests. DeepSeek plans to open-source five new code repositories, building on their R1 reasoning model which already has 22 million daily active users. And in the creative world, Elton John is urging the UK to abandon 'opt-out' AI copyright proposals, advocating instead for protections requiring AI com