AI Daily Brief — 20 February 2025
Thursday delivered the year’s most consequential humanoid-robotics release and xAI’s free-tier opening. Figure AI introduced Helix — a “System 1, System 2” Vision-Language-Action model coordinating a 35-DoF action space at 200 Hz, controlling fingers, wrists, torso, head, and gaze. Helix is the first VLA to output high-rate continuous control of the entire humanoid upper body, the first to operate simultaneously on two robots solving a shared long-horizon task, and lets Figure robots pick up virtually any small household object from natural-language prompts without per-task fine-tuning. xAI made Grok 3 available to all free users “for a short time” with caps of 20 default requests per 2 hours and 10 Think requests per 24 hours. Microsoft’s Majorana 1 (announced Wednesday) drew sustained physicist pushback. Microsoft Muse continued spreading on Azure AI Foundry.
Top stories
- Figure AI unveils Helix — first generalist VLA for humanoid upper-body control. 200 Hz output, 35 DoF, dual-robot collaborative solve, household pickup from natural-language without per-task fine-tuning. Coordinates fingers, wrists, torso, head, gaze in a unified policy. via Figure AI
- xAI opens Grok 3 to all free users “for a short time.” Caps: 20 DEFAULT requests per 2 hours, 10 THINK requests per 24 hours. Premium+ ($40/mo) and SuperGrok ($30/mo) subscribers retain priority access plus early Voice Mode. via Engadget
- Microsoft Majorana 1 fallout: physicists push back on Nature paper. Sharp Day-2 coverage argued the accompanying Nature paper fell short of demonstrating an actual topological qubit; Microsoft pointed to additional Station Q data. The eight qubits placed / 1M-scale roadmap remained the headline talking point. via Microsoft Azure
- Microsoft Muse fallout: dev-press absorbs the open-source WHAM. Microsoft Research and Xbox kept seeding the open WHAM Demonstrator on Azure AI Foundry. The “back-catalog revival” framing — letting players revisit classic Xbox titles via Muse-generated continuations — emerged as the framing line through Feb 20 coverage. via Xbox Wire
Who shipped
Figure AI‘s Helix was the only marquee Feb 20 release. xAI shipped a free-tier expansion. OpenAI, Anthropic, Google DeepMind, Meta, and Mistral made no dated launches. Anthropic’s Claude 3.7 Sonnet was four days away.
Open-source pulse
No new Chinese open-weight release Feb 20. Microsoft’s Muse Demonstrator continued spreading on Azure AI Foundry. Perplexity’s R1-1776 (Tuesday’s Apache 2.0 R1 post-train) kept landing in Hugging Face download charts.
By the numbers
- 200 Hz / 35 DoF — Helix output rate / action-space dimensions
- 20 / 10 — Grok 3 free DEFAULT / THINK request caps (per 2h / per 24h)
- Most-mentioned company: Figure AI
Compiled by AI Feed’s editor from verified web sources for 20 February 2025.