$20K AI Agents Challenge Workforce

PLUS: Larry Page’s New AI Venture, Scale AI Faces Labor Investigation and more.

Author

Wes Roth
March 07, 2025

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Today:

  • $20K AI Agents Challenge Workforce

  • Mistral AI Unveils Powerful OCR

  • Anthropic Unveils AI Collaboration Platform

  • Larry Page’s New AI Venture

  • DuckDuckGo AI Chat Goes Public

  • Microsoft Expands AI in South Africa

  • Scale AI Faces Labor Investigation

OpenAI's "Plot" to REPLACE Coders, PHDs etc for $20,000 per Month…

OpenAI expects massive revenue growth, jumping from $1 billion in 2023 to $12.7 billion in 2025, driven largely by AI agent services priced up to $20,000 monthly. These agents, designed to replace high-level human workers, represent a third of future revenue. 

Despite uncertainty around current capabilities, advanced AI agents already show promise in automating complex tasks. The shift raises questions about affordability, workforce displacement, and potential societal disruption from widespread adoption.

Mistral AI launched Mistral OCR, an advanced document-understanding API designed to extract content from complex PDFs and images. It surpasses competitors with exceptional accuracy in text, images, equations, and multilingual content. Ideal for research, historical preservation, and customer service, it processes 2000 pages per minute, supports structured outputs, and offers selective self-hosting for sensitive data. The API is now publicly available, empowering users to transform organizational data into actionable insights.

Anthropic has updated its developer platform, introducing team collaboration features and enhanced reasoning for its Claude 3.7 Sonnet AI model. The new Anthropic Console allows teams across an organization—not just tech experts—to collaboratively build and manage AI prompts, streamlining workflow and improving efficiency. It also features cost-control tools that balance performance and expenses. This integrated approach differentiates Anthropic by combining powerful AI capabilities with accessible, collaborative developer tools, aiming for broader enterprise adoption.

Larry Page launched a new AI startup, Dynatomics, aiming to transform manufacturing through artificial intelligence. Led by Chris Anderson, previously CTO at Kittyhawk, Dynatomics uses advanced language models to optimize designs for various products, facilitating efficient factory production. Page, who remains influential at Alphabet but largely detached from daily operations, joins a growing trend of Silicon Valley entrepreneurs applying AI to physical product design and manufacturing.

DuckDuckGo has expanded its generative AI chat tool, Duck.ai, from beta into public use. Duck.ai integrates models from OpenAI, Meta, Anthropic, and Mistral to provide conversational search results while maintaining privacy. Users can now easily switch between traditional search and chat interfaces. Although currently free, a paid tier is under consideration. DuckDuckGo emphasizes privacy, ensuring user chats aren’t stored or used for training, positioning itself uniquely by providing private, secure access to advanced AI capabilities.

Microsoft plans to invest an additional $296.8 million (5.4 billion rand) by 2027 to expand its cloud and AI infrastructure in South Africa. The investment will support growing demand for Azure services, including AI and cybersecurity. Microsoft will also fund digital skills certification for 50,000 people. This builds on Microsoft's existing $1.1 billion investment in data centers in Johannesburg and Cape Town, part of its global push into AI infrastructure.

Scale AI is under investigation by the U.S. Department of Labor (DOL) over its labor practices, specifically regarding worker classification. Though no wrongdoing has been proven, the investigation follows lawsuits alleging improper treatment of gig workers. Scale AI, valued highly and known for its AI labeling platform, maintains it offers fair, flexible work opportunities. The company previously faced scrutiny over international labor practices involving low-paid contractors and has actively engaged regulators on these issues.

🧠RESEARCH

Babel is a new open multilingual large language model covering 25 major languages, serving over 90% of the global population. It introduces a layer extension technique for enhanced performance. With two variants—Babel-9B and Babel-83B—it outperforms similar open models, rivaling commercial alternatives in multilingual tasks.

Process-based Self-Rewarding is a new method to enhance large language models' reasoning abilities, particularly in math. Unlike existing self-rewarding approaches, this system evaluates and optimizes its own reasoning step by step. The approach significantly improves performance on mathematical benchmarks, suggesting AI reasoning could surpass human capabilities.

ABC is a new multimodal embedding model that deeply integrates visual and language inputs for better user control and interaction. Unlike CLIP-based methods, ABC enhances retrieval and classification tasks by unifying vision-language representations. It outperforms existing models and introduces CtrlBench, a benchmark for instruction-based visual retrieval.

GEN3C is a video generation model that ensures precise camera control and 3D consistency using a 3D cache instead of relying solely on neural network inference. By leveraging depth-predicted point clouds, it prevents inconsistencies like object flickering. GEN3C outperforms previous models in camera precision and view synthesis, excelling in dynamic scenes.

🛠️TOP TOOLS

MathGPT - AI math solver and calculator that provides instant solutions and step-by-step explanations for a wide range of mathematical problems

Imagica - No-code AI development platform that empowers users to create AI applications quickly and easily

Photosonic - AI-powered art generator developed by Writesonic that transforms text descriptions into unique digital images.

HitPaw Watermark Remover - AI-powered tool designed to efficiently remove watermarks, logos, text, and other unwanted elements from both images and videos.

v0 dev - Generative user interface system developed by Vercel Labs that leverages AI to create React code compatible with Shadcn UI and Tailwind CSS. 

📲SOCIAL MEDIA

🗞️MORE NEWS

  • ChatGPT doubled its weekly active users to 400 million in under six months, boosted by new features like GPT-4o and Advanced Voice Mode. Mobile usage surged steadily, though competitor DeepSeek also quickly gained traction.

  • Shield AI raised $240 million at a $5.3 billion valuation to expand its autonomy software platform, Hivemind Enterprise. The funding, led by L3Harris and Hanwha Aerospace, aims to scale advanced autonomy for drones and robotics.

  • Planet Labs partnered with Anthropic to use Claude’s advanced AI for analyzing daily satellite imagery, enabling rapid, large-scale detection of environmental changes and infrastructure issues. This collaboration aims to deliver actionable insights globally.

  • CoreWeave denied reports of canceled agreements with Microsoft, emphasizing their partnership remains strong despite Microsoft's adjustments. The startup, backed by Nvidia, depends heavily on Microsoft, accounting for 62% of its revenue ahead of a potential major IPO.

  • BBC News is launching an AI-focused department to provide personalized news content, aiming particularly at younger audiences. The move is intended to address declining traditional broadcast viewership and strengthen digital engagement across various platforms.

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