Howdy. It’s Barsee again.

Happy Wednesday, AI family, and welcome back to AI Valley.

Today’s climb through the Valley reveals:

• Perplexity has made a $34.5 billion offer to buy Google Chrome

• Figure unveils a robot that can fold laundry autonomously

• Sam Altman’s new brain-to-computer interface startup

• Plus trending AI tools, posts, and resources

Let’s dive into the Valley of AI…

MINIMAX

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THROUGH THE VALLEY

1/ AI startup Perplexity has made a $34.5 billion offer to buy Google Chrome

Perplexity AI has made a surprise $34.5 billion all-cash bid to buy Google’s Chrome browser (more than double its own $14 billion valuation), aiming to tap Chrome’s 3 billion-plus users in the race for AI-powered search. The three-year-old startup, backed by Nvidia and SoftBank, says it would keep Chrome’s code open-source, invest $3 billion over two years, and keep Google as the default search engine. Google hasn’t put Chrome up for sale and is expected to fight any forced divestiture, with legal experts saying such a case could take years to resolve.

2/ Figure unveiled the first humanoid robot that can fold laundry autonomously

Figure has unveiled Helix, a new AI model that helps humanoid robots perform complex tasks like folding laundry with human-like adaptability. In a demo, the Figure 02 robot neatly folded towels using Helix’s ability to combine vision, language understanding, and precise control. The model can run on multiple robots at once, follow natural language commands, and handle unfamiliar objects without special retraining. Built for efficiency, it runs on low-power GPUs and controls a robot’s upper body with speed and dexterity, marking a step toward practical, general-purpose household and commercial robots.

3/ Sam Altman’s new brain-to-computer interface startup, Merge Labs

Sam Altman is working on a new brain–computer interface startup called Merge Labs, which is still in early talks and may raise funding, possibly from OpenAI’s ventures arm. The company could be valued at around $850 million and is reportedly collaborating with Alex Blania from Tools for Humanity, Altman’s digital ID project. Merge Labs would compete with Neuralink, which is already testing brain implants to help people with severe paralysis control devices. Details are still unconfirmed, but the project could be Altman’s move to rival Neuralink in shaping how humans merge with technology.

4/ Anthropic Claude Sonnet 4 now supports 1 million tokens of context

Anthropic has upgraded its Claude Sonnet 4 so it can handle 1 million tokens at once, meaning it can read and work with huge amounts of text, like full apps or thousands of pages, without losing context. This is aimed at big companies that need AI for complex projects in areas like software, legal work, and research. The change makes Claude more useful for large-scale tasks and puts Anthropic in closer competition with OpenAI for the growing market of advanced AI coding tools.

TRENDING TOOLS

• GeoSpy - It can help track the location of a criminal using just a few grainy pixels from a profile picture

• v0.app - The AI builder is free for everyone for a week

• Recall - Chat with everything you’ve read, heard, watched, or noted

• Graphy - From messy data to beautiful graphs in a click

• Simular Pro - The production-grade computer use agent

• Claude 4 Sonnet - Now upgraded with a 1M context window for API use

• Codédex v1.0 - Learn Python, HTML, CSS, JS, SQL, and more through a gamified fantasy adventure

THINK PIECES / BRAIN BOOST

• No AGI in sight: What this means for LLMs

• OpenAI burns the boats

• Learn how to build an LLM from scratch

• Sex is getting scrubbed from the internet, but a billionaire can sell you AI nudes

• ChatGPT Connectors now links to Gmail, Calendar, and Contacts, so it can reference them directly in chats

THE VALLEY GEMS

What’s trending on social today:

THAT’S ALL FOR TODAY

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