Howdy, it’s Barsee.

Happy Thursday, AI family, and welcome to another AI Valley edition. This issue takes 5 minutes to read.

Today’s climb through the Valley reveals:

• XPENG unveiled its female humanoid robot

• Apple set to pay Google $1B a year to power smarter Siri

• Plus trending AI tools, posts, and resources

Let’s dive into the Valley of AI…

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THROUGH THE VALLEY

1/ XPENG unveiled its female humanoid robot

At its 2025 AI Day event, Chinese automaker XPENG just unveiled Iron, its next-generation humanoid robot that truly walks like a human (although its movements are still somewhat jerky).

Clips of Iron walking the runway went viral, and many thought it was a person in disguise until XPENG’s CEO shared an unedited video revealing the robot’s joints, sensors, and cooling sounds.

Unlike factory bots, Iron emphasizes design and personality. It features bionic hands with 22 degrees of motion, a flexible spine, soft touch-sensitive skin, and a curved digital face capable of expressions. It’s also the first robot powered by a solid-state battery, allowing safer, longer operation.

A notable strategic pivot from Xpeng's AI Day:

• The Iron is being designed for deep customization, including different body shapes and sexes. Users can personalize Iron’s body, skin tone, hairstyle, and clothes like customizing a car.

• The company envisions Iron as a receptionist, tour guide, or retail assistant designed to connect emotionally with people rather than assemble parts.

• Mass production is set for late 2026 in commercial settings.

Why does it matter?

XPENG is taking a different path in robotics. Instead of chasing speed or efficiency, it focuses on emotional connection and human-like design. The line between machine and companion is becoming harder to see.

2/ Apple set to pay Google $1B a year to power smarter Siri

Apple has struck a $1B/year deal with Google to license a custom 1.2-trillion-parameter (8x larger than the current 150B parameter Apple Intelligence model) Gemini model to power Siri’s new summarizer and planner features, finally giving the assistant the reasoning skills it’s lacked for years.

The Gemini system runs entirely on Apple’s Private Cloud Compute servers, meaning Google gets paid but never touches user data. Apple calls Gemini a stopgap while it builds its own 1-trillion-parameter model, which is expected in 2026.

Before signing with Google, Apple tested ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini and chose Gemini for its instruction-following precision and long-context stability, two areas where Siri consistently fell short.

The upgraded Siri is expected to launch in the Spring of 2026.

Why does it matter?

Apple is spending about $1B a year to rent intelligence from its biggest rival. It’s a pragmatic short-term fix, but also a quiet admission that Apple’s once-legendary innovation engine is now playing catch-up.

TRENDING TOOLS

• Rocket > Turn prompts or Figma designs into production-ready apps. Its / and @ commands make workflows fast, precise, and effortless

• Rocket Journal > Your AI-powered mental health companion

• Yansu > It generates design specs and simulates real scenarios before writing code, then traces every line back to requirements and team knowledge

• Firecrawl > Search the web and scrape any websites

• Brex AI Agents > The finance platform Brex introduces agentic finance tools that can analyze data, automate workflows, and make decisions in real time

• Lens with Gemini > Snap a photo of any location and ask questions about it for instant, AI-generated insights, now built into Google Maps

• Jinna AI > Create branded invoices from voice, text or files, add bank or Stripe links, send via link or email

THINK PIECES / BRAIN BOOST

• ElevenLabs CEO Mati Staniszewski says voice will be the next major human-computer interface

• NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang warned “China is going to win the AI race” due to its lower energy costs and fewer regulations that give it inherent advantages

• Google Maps bakes in Gemini to improve navigation and hands-free use

• Google is preparing Nano Banana 2 for the upcoming release

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.

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