AI Edition - It's AI Time - 300 [09-02-2025]

AI Edition - It's AI Time - 300

Google drops its policy against creating AI that’s “likely to cause overall harm

The company updated its ethical guidelines surrounding AI, removing a policy written in 2018 dictating that it wouldn’t pursue AI for weapons, surveillance, or applications that are likely to cause harm. The change comes as the big U.S. AI firms increasingly bid for defense department contracts. Yesterday, Google also released Gemini 2.0 to the public after first launching it to developers in December. Read more in the Washington Post. 

DeepSeek’s R1 ranks last in cybersecurity compared to leading models. LatticeFlow AI, a Swiss firm that measures compliance of AI models, said the model ranks last compared to its competitors and that it’s especially vulnerable to “goal hijacking” and prompt leakage. The firm says that when DeepSeek modified existing open source models to create its own, it may have broken key safety features. You can read more from Bloomberg. Already, several companies have banned government officials from using the company’s models. Amazon is gearing up to (finally) release its AI revamp of Alexa. After many delays, the company will finally release the new version of Alexa later this month, sources told Reuters. This new version is expected to represent a significant upgrade to the product and could be a significant opportunity for Amazon, which already has more than half a billion Alexa devices in the market. AI Highlights  Hugging Face is building Open Deep Research, an open-source version of OpenAI’s Deep Research. In 24 hours, they used CodeAgent to boost GAIA benchmark scores to 55.15%.  Researchers from TikTok owner ByteDance introduced OmniHuman-1, which creates ultra-realistic deepfake videos from just one image and audio. It handles any style, edits existing footage, and was trained on 19,000 hours of video. Our POV: OmniHuman-1 acts like a universal translator for images and motion, making photos move with sound. China leads AI video tech with Hunyuan, Kling, and MiniMax. Startups like Synthesia ($2.1B) & HeyGen ($60M) are making ultra-realistic avatars, but with deepfakes rising, AI is moving from looking unnatural to becoming a money-making machine. Hugging Face is Now the Biggest AI App Store! With 400,000+ AI apps and 2,000 new ones daily, Hugging Face gets 2.5M visits weekly! Now, you can search AI apps easily by category or AI. The AI future is decentralized Amazon is set to introduce a major AI upgrade for Alexa on Feb 26 after delays. The new Alexa will hold conversations, take actions, and remember preferences. It may cost $5–$10/month but will first launch for free to limited users. Figure has ended its partnership with OpenAI and hinted at a major advancement in robot AI. A big reveal is coming within 30 days.