Daily Kickoff

Up to seven things a day for people building with AI. Fewer when there aren't seven.

  1. Google’s new forecasting model beats everyone. You can’t use it at work (yet).

    On Monday, Google launched TimesFM-3, a 330-million-parameter time-series forecasting model trained on over a trillion real-world and synthetic data time

    The New Stack

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  2. Skild AI unveils S1 flagship robot foundation model

    Skild AI unveiled S1, its flagship robot foundation model, which it says lets robots learn complex new tasks — like flipping a pancake or repotting a plant — from watching a single video via in-context learning. Founded in 2023, Skild has raised nearly $1.7 billion and says S1 works across robot types, from quadrupeds to humanoids, with production deployments now underway following its Fetch Robotics acquisition.

    The Robot Report robotics

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  3. Ex-Meta scientists want to bring visual AI to the factory floor

    Perceptron, founded in November 2024 by former Meta FAIR researchers Armen Aghajanyan and Akshat Shrivastava, launched Isaac 0.5, an open-weight vision model meant to help robots perceive, reason and act in warehouses and factory floors. The model was trained on a million hours of video, including footage from wearable cameras, and the startup — which previously raised $21 million from Bessemer Venture Partners, Foundation Capital and S32 — is now closing an additional funding round.

    TechCrunch Robotics robotics

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  4. firecrawl / pdf-inspector

    Fast Rust library for PDF inspection, classification, and text extraction. Intelligently detects scanned vs text-based PDFs to enable smart routing decisions.

    GitHub Trending

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