This week in news: OpenAI evolves, Toyota's CUE6 sets basketball record, Google CEO warns of high stakes, and Meta invests in AI characters.

Happy new year 2025!

2024, without a doubt, was the biggest year for AI, technology and robotics in decades. In 2025, AI pulse will continue to bring AI, technology, and robotics news every single friday.

Are you ready? Here's what companies have been working on this past week:

• OpenAI plans to evolve its structure into a Delaware Public Benefit Corporation to better support its mission of ensuring AGI benefits all of humanity.

• Toyota's CUE6 robot sets a Guinness World Record for the longest basketball shot, showcasing advanced AI capabilities in real-time learning and adaptation.

• Qwen released QVQ-72B, their new open-weight multimodal reasoning model that enhances visual understanding and problem-solving, achieving significant improvements over its predecessor, Qwen2-VL-72B.

• Google CEO Sundar Pichai warns employees that "the stakes are high" for 2025, emphasizing the need to accelerate efforts in AI amid increasing competition and regulatory challenges.

• Meta invests in AI-generated characters for Facebook to boost engagement, launching trial tools that created hundreds of thousands of profiles, despite concerns over misinformation.

• Hugging Face has launched Smolagents, a minimalist open-source framework enabling developers to create AI agents with minimal Python code, featuring a unique CodeAgent for direct code generation.

This week we have 2 must-have tools that startups and developers will love!

• SEOBot: is an all-in-one AI agent that drives significant online traffic, creates SEO optimized blog articles and offers essential SEO tools for boosting visibility.

• Scourhead: is a free, open-source AI agent that organizes web data and delivers results in a spreadsheet, running locally on macOS, Windows, and Linux.

Did we miss any big updates this week? Send us an email, and we might feature it in our next roundup.

See you next week!