Howdy, it’s Barsee.

Happy Tuesday, AI family, and welcome to another AI Valley edition. This issue takes 4 minutes to read.

Today’s climb through the Valley reveals:

• xAI launches Grok 4.1 and Grok 4.1 Thinking

• Jeff Bezos launches AI startup Project Prometheus with $6.2B

• Plus trending AI tools, posts, and resources

Let’s dive into the Valley of AI…

WISPR FLOW

The new way to communicate with AI

Typing limits how you think—you shorten ideas to fit the keyboard. With Wispr Flow, you just speak. It connects your natural voice to tools like ChatGPT or Claude, turning long, detailed prompts into clear, optimized text.

It's not just faster; it's smarter. Flow gives AI the context it needs to respond like it actually understands you.

Use Wispr Flow → Speak smarter with AI.

_{*This is sponsored}

THROUGH THE VALLEY

1/ xAI launches Grok 4.1 and Grok 4.1 Thinking

Grok 4.1 is now available on grok.com, X, and the mobile apps in two versions: a direct, faster "Non-Thinking" model (NT) and a "Thinking" model (T) that generates an internal reasoning trace before responding. The update focuses on delivering more creative, emotionally attuned, and coherent conversations. To achieve this, xAI used advanced agentic systems like Grok 4 as reward models to refine hard-to-measure traits such as style and personality.

xAI says these changes show up in multiple benchmarks. During a two-week silent rollout, users chose Grok 4.1 over the previous version in 64.78 percent of comparisons. On the public LMArena Text Leaderboard, the Thinking model holds first place, followed by the Non-Thinking version.

The company also points to strong emotional intelligence scores. On the EQ-Bench3 test, both Grok 4.1 versions take the top spots. xAI shared an example response to the line "I miss my cat so much it hurts," showing far more empathy than earlier models. In creative writing, Grok 4.1 performs near the top as well, surpassed only by OpenAI's GPT-5.1 on the Creative Writing v3 benchmark.

Why does it matter?

Grok 4.1 is not a brand-new architecture; rather, it is a sophisticated and thoughtful post-training / alignment release that focuses on what humans actually care about in chat: personality, emotional intelligence, creativity, and fewer factual errors. With a top-ranked model delivered free to hundreds of millions of users, xAI is positioning itself as the most accessible frontier-model provider, and putting pressure on rivals whose best systems remain behind paywalls.

2/ Jeff Bezos launches AI startup Project Prometheus with $6.2B

Jeff Bezos is stepping back into an operational role for the first time since leaving Amazon in 2021. His new company, Project Prometheus, is emerging from stealth with $6.2 billion in funding from himself, instantly making it one of the most well-capitalized AI startups ever. Bezos will run the company as co-CEO alongside Vik Bajaj, a former Google X leader who helped launch Waymo, Wing, and Verily.

How will Project Prometheus work?

Unlike AI chatbots that are trained on internet-scale text, Project Prometheus will aim to build systems that learn from interacting with actual machines, experiments, and sensory data. It will work on enabling engineers and scientists to design, test, and build products in industries such as aerospace, automobiles, computing, and scientific discovery. The company has already hired nearly 100 researchers from OpenAI, DeepMind, and Meta, positioning itself as a direct competitor to labs building AI for real-world problem-solving.

Why does it matter?

Prometheus reflects a broader trend among next-generation AI labs toward world models: AI that understands and reasons about the physical environment. Rivals, including Periodic Labs and Physical Intelligence, are pursuing similar models to automate lab experiments and accelerate discoveries in physics, chemistry, and biology.

TRENDING TOOLS

• Public > Turn any idea into an investable index with AI. Generated Assets are like your very own ETF with infinite possibilities *

• Baidu's ERNIE 5.0 > a natively omni-modal model that claims to beat GPT-5 on document understanding and chart analysis benchmarks

• ElevenLabs Image & Video > The best audio, image, and video models now in one platform

• MyLens Al > It instantly turns any YouTube video into an interactive AI timeline, letting you navigate key moments

_{(*) signifies sponsored tool}

THINK PIECES / BRAIN BOOST

• The impact of Artificial Intelligence on human thought

• Google’s Gemini 3.0 is likely to debut today

• Human behavior is an intuition pump for AI risk

• Half the internet is now AI-generated, lending new weight to the Dead Internet Theory

• Andrej Karpathy explains why verifiable work disappears first to Al

• Google to release Nano Banana Pro powered by Gemini 3 Pro next week

• OpenAI-backed FutureHouse launches Kosmos AI Scientist

• AI is a new computing paradigm

• Anthropic just dropped a detailed report measuring political bias across six major AI models

• 5 thoughts on Kimi K2 Thinking

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

👍️ New reader? Subscribe here

Thanks for being here.

REACH 100K+ READERS

Acquire new customers and drive revenue by partnering with us

Sponsor AI Valley and reach over 100,000+ entrepreneurs, founders, software engineers, investors, etc.

If you’re interested in sponsoring us, email [email protected] with the subject “AI Valley Ads”.