OpenAI releases Deep Research, Apple wants to make expressive robots

Plus, old low-res videos will now never be a thing, thanks to Topaz Labs

Must-Know News This Week

OpenAI’s surprise new o3-powered ‘Deep Research’ feature: OpenAI announced its new “Deep Research” feature, an AI agent available to ChatGPT Pro subscription plan users that’s designed to save humans hours by researching across the web for given topics and compiling professional quality reports. Deep Research builds on OpenAI’s O Series of reasoning models, specifically leveraging the soon-to-be-released full o3 model.

Topaz Labs launches Project Starlight: the first-ever diffusion model for video restoration.

Apple releases a research paper on how to make expressive robots! For robots to interact more naturally with humans, robot movement design should likewise integrate expressive qualities—such as intention, attention, and emotions—alongside traditional functional considerations like task fulfillment, spatial constraints, and time efficiency.

OmniHuman: ByteDance’s new AI creates realistic videos from a single photo: Called OmniHuman, the platform generates full-body videos that show people gesturing and moving in ways that match their speech, surpassing previous AI models that could only animate faces or upper bodies. The team trained OmniHuman on more than 18,700 hours of human video data using a novel approach that combines multiple types of inputs – text, audio and body movements.

Hugging Face researchers aim to build an ‘open’ version of OpenAI’s deep research tool: A group of developers at AI dev platform Hugging Face, including Thomas Wolf, the company’s co-founder and chief scientist, say they’ve built an “open” version of OpenAI’s deep research tool. The Hugging Face team’s project, which they’re calling Open Deep Research, consists of an AI model – OpenAI’s o1 – and an open source “agentic framework” that helps the model plan its analysis and guides it to use tools like search engines.

Google drops AI weapons ban—what it means for the future of artificial intelligence: Google has removed its long-standing prohibition against using AI for weapons and surveillance systems, marking a significant shift in the company’s ethical stance on AI development that former employees and industry experts say could reshape how Silicon Valley approaches AI safety. The revised principles remove four specific prohibitions: technologies likely to cause overall harm; weapons applications; surveillance systems; and technologies that violate international law and human rights. Instead, Google now says it will “mitigate unintended or harmful outcomes” and align with “widely accepted principles of international law and human rights.”

Robotics startup Figure AI drops OpenAI partnership to build its own AI models: Figure AI, a startup developing humanoid robots, announced it's ending its partnership with OpenAI and will develop its own AI models instead. The company plans to stop using OpenAI's multimodal AI models for its robots' vision and speech capabilities. The company plans to show off new capabilities within the next 30 days that the company claims will be unlike anything seen before in humanoid robotics.