Welcome, humans.

Ever wondered how much an AI-generated image is worth? If you’re a robot painting British mathematician and famous code-breaker Alan Turing, about $1M:

The robot painter, named Ai-Da (an homage to Ada Lovelace, of course) was built by a crew of 30 people, and is apparently already on painting arm #3—turns out even robot artists get repetitive motion injuries.

The art estimators at Sothebys thought it would only sell for $120K-$180K, so they were pretty surprised when it sold over $1M.

Here's the wild part: Ai-Da's creators say most of that $1M+ is going straight to the robot’s maintenance and power bills. Typical starving artist, am I right?

So, before you go out and build your own art-bot, make sure you've got a backup plan— or you and your poor bot might have to “go get a real job” (as my parents always say…)

Here’s what you need to know about AI today:

• Google released a new experimental chat UI called “Learn About.”

• Researchers created a 100% successful robot hacking algorithm.

• Apple rolled out new AI features to iOS 18.2 beta.

• xAI released a limited version of free Grok-2.

Google's New AI Tool Wants To Answer Life's Burning Questions

Google’s AI experiment NotebookLM, the company’s sleeper hit AI podcast generator, has been quietly growing like crazy (300% user growth in September alone!).

Unlike typical AI tools, NotebookLM shines by helping you work with your existing content—letting you “ground” the AI in your own notes and sources instead of just generating new stuff from scratch.

Now, Google's back with its newest AI experiment, Learn About, which is all about helping you explore new topics in an engaging way.

Instead of just throwing facts at you (like Gemini does), Learn About guides you through topics such as “why are flamingos pink?” or “what causes earthquakes?” with interactive content, suggested topics, and images/videos… all to help you actually understand what you're learning.

Here's what makes it different from your typical Google search or GPT chat:

• Interactive: It seems to predict everything you might want to know before you even have to ask.

• Adaptable: You can simplify. You can go deeper. You can get images. You can ask for more info, or ask for related topics.

• It's actually fun: The interface feels more like texting a smart friend than surfing the web.

Our take: Learn About is sort of like the ultimate Google search meets Wikipedia rabbit hole. For example, we asked it about Ada Lovelace, and it threw everything and the kitchen sink at us—videos, Britannica entries, Wikipedia articles, and prompts to go deeper, or sideways, or upside down!

This is almost definitely Google’s attempt to take on SearchGPT and Perplexity, but dressed up to look like a fun learning tool.

FROM OUR PARTNERS

Sana AI Just Made Enterprise Search Actually Useful

Want an AI assistant that actually knows where everything is? And can do something about it?

Sana's latest update brings three major upgrades that'll make your work life way smoother:

• Expert assistants for every team—that feel like messaging w/ your smartest colleagues.

• Next-gen enterprise search—that actually understands what you're looking for across all your data.

• Bulk action workflows—with the new Sheets feature (it’s like having a personal data analyst that never sleeps). 

The best part? It all works right out of the box with your existing tools like Drive, Teams, and Confluence.

Time to upgrade your work brain—try Sana AI free today!

Treats To Try.

1. *OpenAI, Character.ai, and Anthropic build with Statsig to consolidate performance, latency, and cost metrics in one platform. Say goodbye to scattered data and guessing what works and hello to smarter tracking. Try the same tool trusted by the biggest names in AI - get started today with 2M events free.

2. 11x gives you virtual sales agents that automatically find prospects, make calls, and book meetings while adapting to each customer's style (just raised $50M).

3. Cogna writes custom enterprise software automatically based on your team's needs (raised $15M).

4. AlphaFold3 helps you predict how proteins interact with drugs and other molecules, and is now officially available to try out for academic use.

5. DuckDuckGo, the privacy-focused search engine, has an AI chatbot now.

6. Univerbal helps you learn 20+ languages through natural conversations with AI tutors that adapt to your skill level and give instant feedback.

See our top 51 AI Tools for Business here!

*This is sponsored content. Advertise in The Neuron here.

Around the Horn.

• Researchers who previously jailbroke a robot dog armed with a flamethrower (real thing) just created a new algorithm to easily hack any LLM-controlled robot.

• Apple’s third round of iOS 18.2 betas, out now, introduces the image playground, the image wand, Genmoiji, Visual Intelligence, and Siri ChatGPT Integration.

• xAI is testing a free version of Grok-2 with certain limitations—10 queries per 2 hours (or 20 for Grok-2 mini) and you gotta have your # linked.

FROM OUR PARTNERS

Lex empowers your creative process with AI tools that follow your lead in a distraction-free writing environment. From brainstorm to final polish, Lex is there to support—not replace—your creativity.

Use @Lex comments to ask for help with line level roadblocks (like above)

Or chat with Lex in the sidebar for detailed, full-picture feedback. Choose from cutting edge LLMs like ChatGPT-4o and Claude 3.5 Sonnet!

Write smarter, faster, for free today - with Lex.

Tuesday Ticker

• A.Z. chose Already trying it out: “I’m mainly using it in email. I’m looking forward to more contextual awareness and connectedness between my messaging apps (*all* messaging, not just iOS Mail and Messages) and Calendar and location.”

• W.K. chose Using Samsung instead: “Every time I think about switching from an Android to an iPhone, an article like this comes out and I think, "Nah.””

• C.D. chose Not interested: “Battery life sucks on new Apple Phone now—can only imagine how much more the new Siri will eat up!”

Check out the full story here if you missed it.

A Cat's Commentary.