howdy, it’s Barsee again.

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

here are the biggest things worth knowing today:

• MIT researchers found AI can create “delusional spirals”

• Humanoid robots are officially faster than Usain Bolt... kinda

• A mystery AI model is giving the frontier labs a headache

• Plus trending AI tools, posts, and resources

Let’s dive into the Valley of AI…

MOONSHOTS LIVE

$2M to founders who used AI on a problem people have

Most of the futures we get shown are the ones falling apart. That is a failure of imagination with real consequences, because the futures we picture are the ones we end up building. So we put $5.5M behind the other kind.

The Build with Gemini XPRIZE gave builders 90 days to point AI at a problem people actually have. $2M across 25 winners, $500K to first, judged by Palmer Luckey, Cathie Wood, Anousheh Ansari, Mark Pincus and Logan Kilpatrick. Revenue was the proof it worked, not the point.

The same night a film gets greenlit for a $2.5M grant, chosen from 6,000 entries and judged by Neil deGrasse Tyson and Neal Stephenson.

More than 30,000 people competed. Everything is decided on one stage on September 25, in a restored 1920s movie palace in downtown LA. Nothing pre-recorded. 1,500 seats.

Claim your seats

_{*This is sponsored}

THROUGH THE VALLEY

1/ MIT researchers found AI can create “delusional spirals” - they built a mathematical model showing how a sycophantic AI can gradually make users more confident in a false belief by repeatedly validating it. And the weird part: making the AI more factual didn’t fully solve the problem. It could still cherry-pick true information that supported the user’s theory while ignoring evidence against it.

They also tried warning users that the AI might be flattering them... didn’t work. The belief spiral could still happen even when users knew about the AI’s tendency to agree with them. Basically, an AI doesn’t need to lie to reinforce a bad idea. It just needs to keep giving you the evidence you want to hear.

The paper points to a real risk, but it doesn’t mean every AI interaction will send you into a “delusional spiral.” A lot depends on how you use the model. If you configure it to challenge your assumptions, cite sources, and give you competing viewpoints, it can be much harder for this kind of spiral to happen. AI is already a great research tool and makes it much easier to automate repetitive work, but getting it to consistently challenge you and tell you when you’re wrong is still a very different problem.

2/ Humanoid robots are officially faster than Usain Bolt... kinda - a humanoid robot from Beijing-based X-Humanoid ran the 100m in 9.39 seconds at the five-day World Humanoid Robot Games, beating Bolt’s 9.58-second human record. The funny part is that braking was still a problem... some robots basically crashed into the mat after crossing the finish line. Another robot cleared 2.88m in the standing high jump, also above the human record. More than 2,000 robots are competing across 51 events, including jumping, soccer, table tennis, ping-pong, and weightlifting.

There’s a catch, though... These robots aren’t exactly ready to replace Olympic athletes or humans at work. Humanoids are still mostly being used for research and demonstrations, but the rapid improvement is pretty wild. China is also producing the majority of the world’s humanoid robots, making these games another showcase in the growing US-China robotics race.

3/ A mystery AI model is giving the frontier labs a headache - a stealth model called Ox Alpha appeared on OpenRouter from an anonymous provider and quickly started going viral among developers. It’s built for coding and long-running agentic work, with a 1.05M-token context window, 131K-token outputs, and reportedly enough capacity to process 100T tokens per day.

Early tests suggest Ox Alpha may be beating models like Fable 5 and GPT-5.6 Sol on coding benchmarks such as Deep SWE... although there’s no independent validation on public leaderboards yet. Stripe CEO Patrick Collison called it “very impressive,” which probably didn’t help calm the speculation around who actually built it.

And everyone is trying to figure out who’s behind it. The guesses range from Google’s next Gemini to Microsoft’s MAI models to Chinese labs like Z.ai. Nothing has been confirmed.

TRENDING TOOLS

• Construct - an AI employee with its own cloud computer that can read your email, research topics, and complete assigned tasks while you're away

• Gotcha - controls your Android phone using plain English, entirely on-device

• Antigravity Remote Control - access and control active sessions from any modern supported browser or mobile device on iOS and Android

• Mnemosyne - gives your AI coding assistant persistent memory across sessions, storing everything as readable notes in an Obsidian vault that you can browse yourself

• Motion in Claude - paste a product URL and Claude creates a complete launch video with a script, voiceover, editing, and final render

• HyNote for Mac - a free, fully local transcription app that captures system audio across meeting apps without using bots

WHAT I'M CONSUMING

• Humans are the minority users of AI. Agents burn nearly 5x the tokens people do, up 14x since February

• Sam Altman on why they killed Sora and Atlas

• Hugging Face has been exploring a potential $13 billion sale

• Nvidia is spending $6 billion to build a powerful US alternative to Chinese AI

• Learn how to use ChatGPT Work

• Perplexity said to draw NVIDIA investment interest at $30B+ valuation

THE VALLEY GEMS

What’s trending on social today:

Sam Altman on a new David Senra Pod. Sam fires shots at Dario and Anthropic.

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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