The LLM Wars Continue, Humanoid Robots on the Rise, and More!
ikigai Insights #2
Welcome back to the 2nd edition of ikigai Insights, a newsletter by 886 Studios!
My name is Carter, an associate here at 886 Studios. In this monthly newsletter, I’ll be sharing the latest and greatest tech & startup news stories that we’re following, hidden gems from around the internet, a window into what we’re doing at 886 Studios & with our ikigai Launchpad accelerator, fresh takes from us, and more! Join us and subscribe, it’s free!
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What’s Happening!
Earlier this month, Kai Huang, our Managing Partner at 886 Studios, moderated an insightful panel at the JP Morgan x UC Berkeley Healthcare Conference in Taipei, featuring Steve Chen, co-founder of YouTube, and other industry leaders. The discussion dived into their entrepreneurial journeys, lessons from growing their companies, and the evolving startup landscape in Taiwan. They also explored how stronger ties between Taiwan and Silicon Valley can unlock new opportunities for startups on both sides. As Taiwan’s startup ecosystem matures, fostering these connections will be key to driving innovation and global impact!
Our team also joined the Gold Card event, where our Partner, Phil Chen, took the stage to share his experience returning to Taiwan, leading the development of the first Android phone at HTC, launching his battery startup Cold Electric, and building Taiwan’s pro basketball league with the New Taipei Kings, starring NBA champion Jeremy Lin. It’s always great to see new faces and connect with Taiwan’s growing Gold Card community!
At 886 Studios, we’re always looking to work with ambitious founders ready to take their startups to the next level. If you or someone you know is building something cool, apply for our accelerator, ikigai Launchpad. We provide funding, hands-on mentorship from successful founders, and access to an invaluable network of experienced founders and investors in the US. Our next batch begins in June and applications are open NOW!
🚨Top Stories of the Month🚨
A curated selection of impactful, interesting, and fun news
📰 Around the World 📰
xAI released Grok 3
xAI, Elon Musk’s AI company, has released the highly anticipated Grok 3, their most powerful AI model yet. Grok 3 has been trained with ten times more computing power than its predecessor, Grok 2, utilizing the massive Colossus data center equipped with around 200,000 GPUs. This extensive training has resulted in huge improvements in understanding, problem-solving, and contextual awareness. Early evaluations show that Grok 3 outperforms models from OpenAI, DeepSeek, and Google in math, science, and coding. It’s the first model to score over 1400 on Chatbot Arena, making it the top publicly available reasoning model. Grok 3 also introduced advanced reasoning capabilities of the likes we’ve seen from GPT o1, o3, and Deepseek’s R1 model and an Advanced Voice mode. You can try Grok 3 for free through X, the Grok app, or on the grok.com website (also they dropped a new logo, and I think it looks absolutely beautiful).
Humanoid Bots! There’s been a TON of announcements in the humanoid robot industry in the past month. We may be seeing humanoid bots walking around much sooner than we think 😳!
Clone Robotics revealed, Protoclone robot, a “bipedal musculoskeletal android” which they describe as a faceless, anatomically synthetic human with 1,000 myofiber muscles and 500 sensors. The video went viral, racking up over 50 million views on X, with reactions ranging from awe to outright unease—some called it “dystopian” and “terrifying”, and we, at 886 Studio, can attest to this sentiment. Though no release date is set yet, the humanoids’ lifelike movements are a big leap forward.
Figure unveiled their Helix model, a “Vision-Language-Action” system that lets their Figure-02 robots take voice commands and work together on tasks like putting away groceries (watch the video here). Brett Adcock, the CEO of Figure, posted on X, that Helix has advanced faster than the company had originally expected and thus, they have moved up their home timeline by two years. They will begin alpha testing this year!
1X, a startup from Norway, has revealed their Neo Gamma home robot, the successor to their Neo Beta from August last year. It’s another prototype meant for testing in homes, focusing on safety and affordability, which is key for domestic robots.
Microsoft creates a new state of matter (I had no idea this was possible!)
Microsoft unveiled the Majorana 1 chip, powered by a “topoconductor”, a new state of matter beyond solid, liquid, or gas. The CEO of Microsoft, Satya Nadella called it a “breakthrough”, leveraging topological superconductors for stabler qubits, potentially cutting quantum computing timelines from decades to years. You can think of this chip as a supercomputer on steroids, built using a new type of material that allows it to process information in a completely different way than regular computers. Unlike traditional quantum systems prone to errors, this could scale more effectively, though practical applications remain years off. (Microsoft) (Satya’s X post)
Digg is coming back! The once-iconic social news aggregator that earned the nickname, “the homepage of the internet”, announced a surprising revival led by founder Kevin Rose and Reddit co-founder Alexis Ohanian, who repurchased the brand from Money Group. Originally launched in 2004, Digg peaked with 40 million monthly users by 2008 but crumbled after a disastrous 2010 redesign (v4) that favored publishers over users, losing ground to Reddit, Twitter, and Facebook and eventually selling off in pieces. Partnering with new CEO Justin Mezzell (ex-Google, Facebook, and PROOF Collective), Rose and Ohanian, once competitors, aim to resurrect Digg’s original spirit of community-driven discovery while leveraging modern AI tools and fun quirks. The prototype, teased at reboot.digg.com with over 1.2 million upvotes at the time of writing, targets a private beta in June 2025 and a full launch by September. (Alexis Ohanian’s X post)
🗞️ More Stories We’re Reading 🗞️
Mistral AI releases its AI assisant, LeChat (Mistral AI)
Humane is shutting down the AI Pin and selling its remnants to HP (The Verge)
Elon Musk escalates Sam Altman feud in battle for AI's future (Axios)
Anduril takes over Microsoft's $22 billion US Army headset program (Reuters)
Righting a major wrong (Coinbase)
Apple debuts iPhone 16e: A powerful new member of the iPhone 16 family (Apple)
Thinking Machines Lab is ex-OpenAI CTO Mira Murati’s new startup (TechCrunch)
Waymo One is now serving 200k+ paid trips each week across LA, Phoenix, and SF (X)
Introducing Claude 3.7 Sonnet (Anthropic)
Perplexity launches $50M seed and pre-seed VC fund (TechCrunch)
Introducing GPT-4.5 (OpenAI)
Katy Perry, Lauren Sánchez, Gayle King: all-female crew to helm next space flight on Bezos’s Blue Origin rocket (The Guardian)
Microsoft is shutting down Skype after a 21-year run. Here’s how it lost out to video call rivals (CNBC)
Ramp, a 6-year-old fintech startup, has more than doubled its annualized revenue to $700M (TechCrunch)
Anthropic raises Series E at $61.5B post-money valuation (Anthropic)
Trump and TSMC announce $100 billion plan to build five new US factories (Reuters)
Trump signs executive order establishing U.S. strategic bitcoin reserve (CNBC)
📋 The Bulletin 📋
Our top picks from around the web.
Reading 📖
Three Observations - by Sam Altman (Co-Founder & CEO of OpenAI)
What happens when knowledge is commoditized? by Jack Raines
Why Everything is Becoming a Game by Guruwinder
The Addiction Economy by Evan Armstrong
Why America's future could hinge on Elon Musk by Noah Smith
Podcasts 🎧
Palmer Luckey - Superhuman Soldiers, AI Missiles and Exoskeletons in Warzones | SRS #171 (YouTube)
Gwern Branwen - How an Anonymous Researcher Predicated AI’s Trajectory | Dwarkesh Podcast (Spotify)
Rolex | Acquired (Spotify)
JD Vance's AI Speech, Techno-Optimists vs Doomers, Tariffs, AI Court Cases with Naval Ravikant | All-In Podcast #215 (YouTube)
Thanks for reading and see you soon!
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