AI Mornings with Andreas Vig
Your daily AI news briefing in under 10 minutes. New models, product launches, research breakthroughs, and industry shifts, explained clearly, no hype.
AI Mornings with Andreas Vig
DeepSeek's Permanent Price Cut & First Humanoid Home Cleaning Service
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Hey, welcome to AI Mornings with Andreas Vig. It's Sunday, the 25th of May, 2026. DeepSeek just made a pricing move that's hard to ignore. The company announced that its 75% discount on the V4 Pro model is now permanent. Originally, this was a promotional rate set to expire at the end of May, but DeepSeq confirmed the pricing will stay at one quarter of the original price going forward. The V4 Pro now costs about 43 cents per million input tokens and 87 cents per million output tokens. That's down from $1.74 and $3.48 respectively. This intensifies the price war in the AI model market and continues DeepSeek's pattern of aggressive pricing that's been pressuring competitors like OpenAI and Anthropic for months. Staying with DeepSeq for a moment, there's a new open source coding agent built specifically for DeepSeek's API called ReasonX. What's interesting about it is the architecture. The tool achieves a 94% cash hit rate in long sessions by using an append-only loop that preserves DeepSeek's byte stable prefix cache. It's terminal first, MIT licensed, and includes features like MCP integration, sandbox tools, and a plan gate that keeps things read-only until you approve. The project has already picked up over 6,700 GitHub stars. For developers using DeepSeek, this could significantly cut costs on long coding sessions. In robotics news, a San Francisco startup called Gatsby just made history by sending a humanoid robot to clean a paying customer's apartment. It's the first commercial humanoid home cleaning service. You book it through an iOS app for a flat $150 per clean, which actually undercuts typical human cleaner rates. Unlike Tesla and OneX, which plan to sell robots to consumers, Gatsby is going with an Uber-like rental model and plans to expand to more US cities soon. This feels like a genuinely new business model for humanoids, one that sidesteps the high upfront cost that's kept robots out of homes. On the security front, there's a concerning story out of Google Cloud. An investigation found that Google Cloud API keys can remain usable for up to 23 minutes after being deleted. Multiple developers reported five-figure bills after attackers exploited keys that were originally deployed for Google Maps, but were quietly given access to Gemini models when Google expanded their scope without clearly disclosing the change. Google refunded affected users after media coverage, but reportedly has no plans to change its automatic tier upgrade policy, which can raise spending limits to $100,000 without explicit consent. Google's newer credential formats revoke in seconds, suggesting this is more about priorities than technical constraints. A new data point on the AI hardware side. High bandwidth memory now accounts for nearly two-thirds of AI chip component costs. Epoch AI research shows HBM grew from 52% to 63% of total component spending between early 2024 and late 2025. In absolute terms, memory spending went from roughly $12 billion to $32 billion in one year. Microsoft's 2026 capital expenditure guidance includes about $25 billion just from higher component prices. Memory supply remains tight and prices are rising, which is shaping everything from hyperscaler CapEx to chip design priorities. Alright, a few more things worth knowing about today. ETH Zurich unveiled Helios, a four-armed humanoid robot designed for in-orbit missions like satellite servicing and space station maintenance. It uses a cable-driven system to stay lightweight and dexterous in zero gravity. With astronaut labor costing roughly $140,000 per hour, the economics for robotic maintenance in space are compelling. Unitree showed off its G1 humanoid executing live voice commands in real time, including push-ups, dance moves, and even emotional comfort responses. Unlike scripted demos, this chains speech recognition, intent parsing, and motion planning in a single live loop. It's a glimpse at a future where talking to a robot is as natural as talking to a person. Figure AI's F3 Robots completed a 200-hour warehouse test sorting nearly a quarter million items with zero failures at near-human speed. For an industry where reliability has been a major bottleneck, this kind of sustained performance matters. California Governor Gavin Newsome signed an executive order directing state agencies to develop policies protecting workers from AI-driven job losses. The timing is notable. Coming a day after Meta laid off 8,000 employees to offset AI investments. Within 90 days, California will launch a dashboard tracking AI's job impact. And finally, a few quick hits from the robotics world. Hyundai plans to deploy over 25,000 Atlas humanoid robots across its US factories. Bosch will manufacture humanoids robots for the European market. Nvidia and Kawasaki are building a robotics center in San Jose focused on medical and mobility applications, and Southwest Airlines has banned humanoid robots from flights, regardless of size or purpose. That's it for today. I'll catch you tomorrow.