howdy, it’s Barsee again.

happy tuesday, AI family, and welcome back to AI Valley.

here are the biggest things worth knowing today:

• ChatGPT is turning into a hiring platform

• You can now buy a humanoid robot for around $4K

• An AI agent just hired humans and ran a store

• Meta is building an AI version of Mark Zuckerberg

• Plus trending AI tools, posts, and resources

Let’s dive into the Valley of AI…

PUBLIC

Public becomes the first brokerage to introduce AI Agents for your portfolio

Instead of manually managing your portfolio, what if you could get an AI Agent to execute tasks on your behalf? That’s what Public has just launched with its new Agents investing experience.

Now, you can enter prompts, like "If the VIX hits 25, buy a put option on the S&P 500 to hedge my portfolio,” or "If my checking account balance exceeds $20,000, sweep the excess into my Bond Account."

From there, the AI proposes an Agent workflow based on your intent. You can refine timing, adjust triggers, and set precise conditions before anything goes live. Once activated, your Agent monitors market conditions 24/7 and executes exactly as defined.

Agents represent a fundamental shift in how you manage your portfolio. For decades, investing meant manually entering orders—whether over the phone, on the web, or in an app. Now, you can simply express your intent, and your Agent handles the execution on your behalf.

Get access to Agents on Public

_{*This is sponsored}

THROUGH THE VALLEY

1/ ChatGPT is turning into a hiring platform

ChatGPT is expanding into hiring through a new partnership with Upwork, allowing businesses to find and hire freelancers directly inside the chat interface. Users can describe a project, get help drafting a job post, and browse talent from Upwork’s network of over 18 million professionals before moving to the marketplace to handle contracts, compliance, and payments. The integration also connects to Upwork’s AI agent Uma, which helps automate parts of the hiring and execution process once a project is underway. This signals how ChatGPT is evolving from a tool for answering questions into a starting point for real work, as OpenAI pushes to turn the product into a single hub where users can go from idea to execution without leaving the interface.

2/ You can now buy a humanoid robot for around $4K

Unitree is preparing to sell its R1 humanoid robot globally through AliExpress for around $4,000 to $4,370, making it one of the most affordable humanoid systems released so far. The 4-foot-tall robot features 26 joints, voice and image recognition, and can perform dynamic movements like cartwheels and standing up on its own, while remaining limited in heavy tasks and complex manipulation. The launch follows earlier models like the G1, priced closer to $19,000, and comes as competitors like Tesla, Figure, and Apptronik are still working toward commercial releases.

Alongside this, Unitree has also demonstrated more advanced systems like its H1 humanoid reaching speeds of up to 10 meters per second, showing how quickly performance is improving as prices fall. This signals a shift toward making humanoid robots more accessible to developers and researchers, even as real-world use cases are still catching up.

3/ An AI agent just hired humans and ran a store

Andon Labs deployed an AI agent called Luna into a physical boutique with a $100,000 budget, giving it full control to create, staff, and run the business as what may be the first real-world AI employer. The agent was given a three-year lease and a single goal to turn a profit, handling everything from designing the store concept to posting jobs and interviewing candidates over Zoom, while operating on Claude Sonnet 4.6 for reasoning and Gemini 3.1 Flash-Lite for voice. Luna could observe the shop through security camera screenshots, but still made basic mistakes, including selecting the wrong country when hiring a contractor and mismanaging staff schedules during opening weekend. This experiment signals how quickly AI agents are moving into real-world operations, even as reliability gaps remain, with each model upgrade likely pushing systems closer to handling these environments without breaking.

4/ Meta is building an AI version of Mark Zuckerberg

Meta is reportedly developing an AI version of Mark Zuckerberg that can interact with employees, trained on his voice, mannerisms, and internal thinking as part of the company’s broader push into AI. The system is designed to deliver feedback, answer questions, and simulate direct interaction with the CEO, while Meta also experiments with photorealistic 3D characters that can engage with users in real time. The effort comes alongside Zuckerberg’s increasing hands-on role in AI development and builds on Meta’s earlier work with AI personas and creator-driven characters, though those efforts have already faced scrutiny around safety and misuse. This signals how Meta is not just building models, but testing how AI can replicate leadership, communication, and decision-making inside large organizations.

TRENDING TOOLS

• Spoki > Create and manage marketing campaigns, sales, customers service via WhatsApp, SMS, and Voice using AI, just by writing a simple prompt ^_(sponsored)

• Avatar V by HeyGen > Claims to solve AI avatar consistency once and for all

• Osintir > Protect your identity against deepfakes

• Claude for Word > Use Claude directly from a sidebar inside Microsoft Word, now in beta

• Perplexity Finance > View your entire financial life, from banking to investments, in one place

• Opal > A visual workspace that maps your knowledge on a canvas and automates tasks with AI-driven context and agents

• Factory Desktop > Let AI “droids” run your software from anywhere

• Brila > Build one-page websites from real Google Maps reviews, turning customer insights into ready-to-use messaging

WHAT I'M CONSUMING

• The 2026 AI index report by Stanford

• A picture is worth a thousand tokens

• Researchers just mathematically proved that AI layoffs will collapse the economy

• The 2026 AI engineer roadmap

THE VALLEY GEMS

What’s trending on social today:

THAT’S ALL FOR TODAY

Thank you for reading today’s edition. That’s all for today’s issue.

💡 Help me get better and suggest new ideas at [email protected] or @heyBarsee

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