The Sequence Radar - Issue 936: Last Week in AI: Gemini Talks, Astra Practices Law, Figure Folds Laundry, and Crusoe Powers It All
Google tackles real-time interaction, OpenAI targets legal workflows, Figure tests unfamiliar homes, and investors double down on compute.
TL;DR
- Google's Gemini 3.8 Live and Extended Thinking enhance conversational AI with visual context, tool calls, and concurrent reasoning.
- OpenAI's Astra for Law combines GPT-6 with legal information and tools, showing improved accuracy on legal queries.
- Figure's Helix 2.5 demonstrates improved zero-shot performance in household tasks after pretraining on human behavior datasets.
- Crusoe secured $3.9 billion in Series F funding at a $30.9 billion valuation to scale AI infrastructure and compute.
- AI Research includes advancements in defending LLMs against abliteration, continual learning for long-horizon memorization, efficient fan-out retrieval, difficulty-aware length control for reasoning, and building AI agents from research papers.
- Recent AI Tech Releases include Google's Gemini 3.8, OpenAI's Astra for Law, and Figure's Helix 2.5.
- Various AI companies announced significant funding rounds and valuations, including Profound, Emulate, Manus, Bain Capital Ventures, and Treble.
- Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang views AI safety as an engineering problem, not a reason for slowdowns, pushing back on antitrust waiver calls.
- OpenAI is reportedly in early talks for a funding round valuing the company over $1.2 trillion.
- Snap introduced SPECS, standalone AR glasses for AI assistance, work, and Lens experiences.
- SoftBank increased its Arm-backed margin loan by $5 billion to fund expanding AI investments.