howdy, it’s Barsee again.

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

here are the biggest things worth knowing today:

• Humanoid robots might finally be useful

• Oracle just pulled off a brutal AI layoff

• Plus trending AI tools, posts, and resources

Let’s dive into the Valley of AI…

SPOKI

You write. The AI does the rest.

Spoki turns a simple instruction into a fully running campaign.

Type: “Win back inactive customers”

Spoki creates it, sends it, and keeps optimizing it automatically.

No dashboards. No workflows. Just tell Spoki what you want, and it gets it done.

This is the shift from software that gives you tools to software that delivers results.

Run everything from one place across WhatsApp, SMS, and voice. AI agents handle chats and calls 24/7, qualify leads, and guide users all the way to checkout.

Spoki isn’t just another CRM. It’s a Customer Engagement Management (CEM) platform that unifies marketing, sales, and support into one continuous conversation.

With an average +30% increase in sales, businesses are doing more with less effort.

Try Spoki for free.

_{*This is sponsored}

THROUGH THE VALLEY

1/ Humanoid robots might finally be useful 🤖

For years, humanoid robots have mostly been good at one thing:

looking expensive in demos.

That may finally be changing.

What changed?

A few important things are all getting better at once:

• AI is getting better at planning and following tasks

• vision systems are getting better at reading messy environments

• hardware is getting less clunky and more usable

That’s the real unlock.

Not “AGI.”

Just robots becoming less useless.

So what can they actually do now?

A startup recently upgraded the Unitree G1 with an advanced robot brain and showed it doing normal human tasks like:

• watering plants

• opening curtains

• cleaning

• moving objects around on its own

That doesn’t mean humanoid robots are here.

But it does mean they’re slowly moving from:

remote-controlled demo toy
→ to
actual machine that can do stuff

That’s a real shift.

Where do these show up first?

You’re probably not getting one as a roommate anytime soon.

More likely:

• warehouses

• factories

• logistics

• healthcare support

Basically: places where labor is repetitive, expensive, and annoying.

Why does this matter?

Once these things can handle small boring tasks on their own, they stop being a gimmick.

2/ Oracle just pulled off a brutal AI layoff 📉

Oracle reportedly cut up to 30,000 employees.

A lot of them allegedly found out through a 6 am email.

That’s potentially 18% of the company.

Absolutely evil way to start your morning.

Why is Oracle doing this?

Not because the company is dying.

Oracle just posted strong growth.

This looks more like Oracle making room for one thing:

AI infrastructure.

The company is spending aggressively on:

• data centers

• cloud

• compute

And that money has to come from somewhere.

Apparently: payroll.

Here’s the part to watch:

Oracle is also reportedly testing AI agents to automate database admin work.

So some of the jobs getting cut may be the exact kind of work Oracle is trying to hand off to AI.

TRENDING TOOLS

• Softr > Build internal tools, client portals, and business apps that actually work with AI. No coding, reprompts: this builder actually works ^_(sponsored)

• Oumi > Build custom AI models in hours, not months, with a platform designed for every team

• Z.ai > Debuts GLM-5V-Turbo, a new vision coding model built to take on Anthropic’s Claude Opus 4.6

• Naive > Hire autonomous employees with their own identity

• Remotion > It now has Agent Skills - make videos just with Claude Code

• ARC AGI > The first interactive reasoning benchmark built to measure human-like intelligence in AI agents

• Okara > The world’s first AI CMO. Enter your website and it deploys a team of agents to help you get traffic and users

• Humanoid Atlas > It tracks the evolution and deployment of humanoid robots through a curated database of companies, technical specs, and industry news

• Exa Monitors > Your AI agent’s radar for everything happening across the web

WHAT I'M CONSUMING

• AI is different

• Economists on AI and economic growth and employment

• A History of the Future, 2025-2040

• The Economics of Generative AI: Two Years Later

• The OpenAI Paradox

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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