AI Update: The Robots Are Here

Welcome to the newest edition of ID Tech’s AI update. Here’s the latest big news on the shifting landscape of AI and identity technology:

Figure has signed its second commercial customer, with founder Brett Adcock eyeing “a path to 100,000 robots over the next four years”. The startup’s AI-powered humanoid robots are already being used by BMW to perform “end-to-end operations”, and Adcock says the new, as-yet-undisclosed partner is “one of the biggest U.S. companies”.

Freepik has launched an AI Suite offering access to various image and video generation and editing tools. Among other things, users can change the face of a depicted person, and then realistically animate that person in an AI-generated video. Freepik started in 2010 as a portal for free design resources, and is now positioning as a one-stop shop for creative tools.

ElevenLabs has reached a $3.3 billion valuation after raising $180 million in a Series C funding round co-led by Andreessen Horowitz and Iconiq Growth. The London-based startup specializes in voice generation, offering a range of use cases from voice cloning to film dubbing. The firm says it will use its latest funding to build more expressive AI voices.

Britain’s Channel 4 appears to have violated the country’s Sexual Offences Act with an AI-generated video of actress Scarlett Johansson wearing lingerie. The video was shown in a documentary meant to highlight the threat of deepfake pornography. The Sexual Offences Act specifically outlaws the non-consensual sharing of computer-generated images of people in their underwear.

DeepSeek has ruffled some feathers after its launch last week. Taiwan’s digital ministry has advised government agencies not to use the China-made open source AI tool, and Australia’s Treasurer has advised his countrymen to proceed with caution. New York-based cybersecurity firm Wiz says it found publicly accessible, sensitive user data collected by the app, including chat logs.

OpenAI says it has evidence that DeepSeek trained its AI model on OpenAI’s tech, in a practice called “distillation“. Not to worry: OpenAI itself is in talks to raise its valuation to $300 billion, with SoftBank considering contributing up to $25 billion. And it has launched its new o3-mini reasoning model, which outperforms the previous o1 model across many benchmarks.

The chatbot’s take: Let’s see how smart this new model is:

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January 31, 2025 – by Alex Perala