Howdy again. It’s Barsee, and welcome back to AI Valley.

Today’s climb through the Valley reveals:

• xAI to pay Telegram $300M to integrate Grok into the chat app

• Meta plans to offer half-a-dozen new AI wearables in 2025

• The $5T robot economy is coming

• ElevenLabs just lost the crown to open source

• DeepSeek quietly updates R1 AI model

• Plus trending AI tools, posts, and resources

Let’s dive into the Valley of AI…

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THROUGH THE VALLEY

1. xAI to pay Telegram $300M to integrate Grok into the chat app

Telegram has agreed in principle to a $300 million cash-and-equity deal with Elon Musk’s xAI to distribute the Grok chatbot across its platform for a year. Grok is already available to Premium users and may soon be rolled out more widely. Features include writing help, chat and document summaries, sticker generation, business tools, and pinned access.

Telegram would also earn 50% of revenue from xAI subscriptions sold through the app. However, Musk later claimed that “no deal has been signed,” prompting CEO Pavel Durov to clarify that terms were agreed on but pending formalities.

If finalized, this partnership could be a major boost for xAI, giving it access to Telegram’s massive 1B+ user base, just as Meta and Perplexity race to integrate AI into their messaging apps.

2. Meta plans to offer half-a-dozen new AI wearables in 2025

Meta is quietly gearing up for a major retail expansion, with plans to open physical stores and hire retail staff, a bold move reminiscent of Apple’s iconic store strategy. These new Meta stores will offer hands-on experiences with devices like the Meta Quest VR headsets and Ray-Ban smart glasses, marking a deeper push into the consumer hardware space.

A leaked internal memo, revealed by Business Insider, highlights 2025 as a make-or-break year, with Meta aiming to launch “half a dozen” new AI-powered wearables including a new pair of smart glasses with a built-in display and possibly even camera-equipped earbuds.

3. The $5T robot economy is coming

Morgan Stanley predicts 1 billion humanoid robots will be working by 2050, generating $5 trillion a year. That’s nearly twice the size of today’s car industry.

Most of that value will come from logistics, retail, manufacturing, and services. China leads the rollout for now, but the U.S. is catching up fast, helped by reshoring trends. This robot revolution could hit travel and hospitality first industries plagued by high labor costs, frequent turnover, and the need for consistent service. Expect robots to handle tasks like cleaning, maintenance, luggage handling, check-in, and food service.

4. ElevenLabs just lost the crown to open source

Resemble AI has released Chatterbox TTS 0.5B, an open-source text-to-speech model that early testers say beats ElevenLabs on voice quality. It supports zero-shot cloning from five seconds of audio, real-time playback, emotion tuning, and even built-in watermarking.

Installation is simple with pip install, and the model automatically downloads weights when you run example scripts. While it's CPU-viable for short tasks and performs impressively, some users note the documentation is sparse for advanced setups or source builds. Still, it's fully open-source with no hidden limits.

5. DeepSeek quietly updates R1 AI model

Chinese AI startup DeepSeek quietly rolled out an updated version of its reasoning model, R1-0528, marking the first revision since its January debut. While the company didn’t share update details, the model is now live on Hugging Face and the DeepSeek chatbot.

Despite the silence, developer communities quickly noticed performance gains with LiveCodeBench ranking it as the top Chinese model for AI-assisted coding, beating Alibaba’s Qwen3 and even Anthropic’s Claude 3.7. The release comes as DeepSeek prepares for its next-gen R2 model, amid fierce competition from Chinese tech giants like Alibaba and Baidu, who are pivoting to advanced multimodal models that go beyond text into audio, images, and video.

Other Headlines

• Anthropic CEO says AI could wipe out half of all entry-level white-collar jobs within five years, pushing unemployment as high as 20%.

• Netflix co-founder Reed Hastings joins Anthropic’s board of directors.

• Scientists can now 3D print tissues directly inside the body.

• Elon Musk tried to block Sam Altman's big AI deal in the Middle East.

TRENDING TOOLS

• Retool Agents - Your first fully autonomous AI team.

• Stitch - Google’s AI UI builder that generates UI designs from text and exports them as code.

• Droids - The world's first software development agents.

• Operative - An AI website creation agent that writes and tests code in your browser so anyone can build and launch a working web app in minutes.

• OpenAI Academy - Harness AI's transformative power through workshops, discussions, and digital content

THINK PIECES / BRAIN BOOST

• Humans as 'luxury goods' in the age of AI.

• For those saying veo3 video generation is still obviously fake and would only fool boomers.

• One of the reasons I'm finding LLMs so much more useful for coding than a lot of people.

THE VALLEY GEMS

What’s trending on social today:

1/ You can build Cursor for {any industry} in 2025.

2/ AI meme of the day.

3/ The start of AI generated films are here.

4/ Rick Rubin says vibe coding is the punk rock of software.

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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