Manus shows everyone the true power of agents. DeepSeek R2 may go live next week. And a three in one transforming robot. Here’s this week’s AI news.
All the buzz right now is about Manus. Manus is a new AI tool that is allowing people to complete complex end to end tasks that require multiple steps, planning and services.
[It brings multiple existing AI tools like Claude Sonnet into a single service to allow users to complete work that would normally have them jumping across several different tools.
There have been some rumours circulating today that DeepSeek R2 could drop as soon as March 17th. Last week we reported that Deepseek were planning to accelerate the release of their latest model and it certainly seems like it’s likely to be sometime in March. Can Deepseek steal the headlines once again?
Is it a car? Is it a quadruped? Is it a humanoid? Actually, it’s all three. In this cool demo of some of their robotics research, Swiss company Rivr shows the transformative power of their robot. Okay, so humanoid might be pushing it, but this concept does show the potential for robots to be able to take on multiple forms.
Dario Amodei made the controversial statement that “in 12 months we may be in a world where AI is essentially writing all of the code.” Whether you think this is wildly optimistic or not, it’s certainly clear which way the trend is going.
The overall percentage of new code written by AI might be small right now, but that is going to constantly be moving in a positive direction. Whether that gets to 30% or 50% or 100% by the end of year is not really the point. The changes are coming and they’re coming fast.
OpenAI released a new set of tools for developers that can be implemented via their APIs and SDKs.
This includes web and file search where you can get information retrieval from those sources by passing a query. Computer use that allows the takeover of the user’s computer and an agents SDK for creating and configuring agents.
Perplexity have launched their new Windows app. So now you can experience all of the great services that Perplexity has to offer directly on their native Windows app rather than having to use your browser.
Move AI has announced the second generation of their motion capture AI that allows users to capture full body motion without any special equipment from a single camera.
Google releases Gemma 3, a series of lightweight open source AI models that leverage the same technology as Gemini 2. There are four different sizes available from 1 billion to 27 billion parameters and and they all have a 128K context window and multimodal understanding.
They also announced Gemini Robotics. This is an Advanced Vision Language Action model or VLA that is built on Gemini 2 and it adds physical actions as a new output modality. This means that it can take an input prompt and combine it with real world image data to produce physical actions even with tasks that it has never been trained on.
Freepik has scored another big first. Today they announced that image to video for VEO 2 is now available on their AI suite.
Microsoft has announced CoPilot for gaming. The assistant can give you personalised game recommendations and help with game setup, but more importantly it can coach you through a game whenever you get stuck and need a little help.
Google has released even more AI updates today. This includes upgrades to Deep Research, more Gemini personalization tools and image generation with their Flash Experimental model. The new image generation can be used to produce images as part of an output. In the video you can see an example of a step by step recipe being created with images generated in every step.
Convergence have released another update to their impressive proxy AI agent tool called Deep Work. Deep Work has been built for complex multi step tasks and it can spin up multiple AI workers instantly. Each agent then specialises in a specific task so that the work can be broken down into parts and worked on in parallel.
Just how important is the new AI company DeepSeek to China? Well, it’s been declared a ‘national treasure’, and along with that comes some new conditions for some of the staff. The key players involved in research and development may be required to hand in their passports to limit their international travel.
Pika Labs has updated their Pikaffects with no less than 16 new effects. These include ‘Museum Me’, ‘Baby Me’, ‘Hero Me’, ‘Princess Me’, and ‘Puppy Me’. Pika Labs is always cooking.
Perplexity teased that something big is happening on Monday, March 17. The video that accompanied the announcement is as cryptic as the announcement itself. The message is simply 3-17-25 What exactly are Perplexity launching on Monday? Could it be the Comet Agentic search browser that they teased a few weeks ago? Your guess is as good as ours.