Weekly#678

  • OpenAI announces $110 billion funding round with backing from Amazon, Nvidia, SoftBank…Amazon invested $50 billion, Nvidia invested $30 billion and SoftBank invested $30 billion in the round, OpenAI said Friday…more than 900M weekly active users, and we now have more than 50 million consumer subscribers.
  • Vercel Releases React Best Practices Skill with 40+ Performance Rules for AI Agents, repo
  • Why Retries Are More Dangerous Than Failures
  • New AirSnitch attack bypasses Wi-Fi encryption in homes, offices, and enterprises
  • Smartphone market set for biggest-ever decline in 2026 on memory price surge, IDC says
  • Norway’s $2 trillion oil fund, the largest of its kind, generated an annual profit of about $248 billion last year, with strong gains in global equities driving a 15.1% return.
  • CLAUDE.md Masterclass
  • Perplexity announces “Computer,” an AI agent that assigns work to other AI agents
  • Incorporating AI impacts in BLS employment projections: occupational case studies…BLS projects employment of software developers to increase 17.9 percent between 2023 and 2033, much faster than the average for all occupations (4.0 percent)
  • Block generative AI features with Firefox AI controls
  • Google launches Nano Banana 2 model with faster image generation
  • Uber employees have an AI clone of CEO Dara Khosrowshahi — and use ‘Dara AI’ before talking to the big boss himself
  • A Meta AI security researcher said an OpenClaw agent ran amok on her inbox
  • Citrini Research: The 2028 Global Intelligence Crisis
  • One of the humblest and most ubiquitous file formats is stumping the world’s most advanced models
  • Run OpenClaw Securely in Docker Sandboxes

Weekly#677

  • Introducing Moltworker: a self-hosted personal AI agent, minus the minis
  • Introducing Markdown for Agents
  • An AI coding bot took down Amazon Web Services…”…Amazon Web Services experienced a 13-hour interruption to one system used by its customers in mid-December after engineers allowed its Kiro AI coding tool to make certain changes, according to four people familiar with the matter…”
  • The new AI-driven SDLC
  • OpenAI Plans to Price Smart Speaker at $200 to $300, as AI Device Team Takes Shape
  • Google announces Gemini 3.1 Pro for ‘complex problem-solving
  • Open Notebook: A Secure Alternative to Google NotebookLM
  • The conflation of betting markets and news began with political coverage
  • AI software vendors say potential customers are taking longer to evaluate purchases, and shopping less eagerly than they were a year ago (WSJ)
  • Pentagon-Anthropic battle pushes other AI labs into major dilemma
  • Using Jet Engines to Power Data Centers (WSJ)
  • The Complete Guide to Building Skills for Claude
  • When Every Company Can Use the Same AI Models, Context Becomes a Competitive Advantage (HBR) “...What do we mean by “context”? Context is demonstrated execution: the workflows teams actually follow across systems, the signals they respond to, the order in which roles get involved, the exceptions that trigger action, and the judgment calls that repeat across real work. These patterns are visible only in execution, not in stated process…
  • “...Thus, the idea is that just making code is not enough. For example, India based companies have had the ability to create and market enterprise class software for decades … at scale. And there is certainly enough talent that has been exposed to business logic and domain expertise while working at India-based subdivisions of the biggest legacy players. Yet over the decades, even with this insight and a massive low-cost skilled workforce, no regional vendors have successfully emerged to challenge the legacy US vendors, in our view. Factors such as having enterprise class sales teams, technology cross-licensing agreements, proprietary and patented IP, industry specific domain expertise, aligned workflows with industry practice, being first-to-market, having brand awareness, scale, or effective go-to-market strategies are just the tip of the iceberg when looking into the key attributes needed to compete effectively in the software sector and … just making code is not enough

Weekly#676

  • AI Doesn’t Reduce Work—It Intensifies It (HBR)
  • Anthropic closes $30 billion funding round as cash keeps flowing into top AI startups
  • Amazon engineers grate against internal limits on Claude Code
  • X Subscriptions Hit $1 Billion in Annualized Revenue, Exec Says
  • Gemini 3 Deep Think: Advancing science, research and engineering
  • OpenAI’s new Spark model codes 15x faster than GPT-5.3-Codex – but there’s a catch
  • China showcases new Moon ship and reusable rocket in one extraordinary test
  • Apple acquires all rights to ‘Severance,’ will produce future seasons in-house
  • …And it is allowing us to move with much higher speed. As a concrete example, an engineer at Spotify on their morning commute, from Slack on their cell phone can tell Claude to fix a bug or add a new feature to the iOS app. And once Claude finishes that work, the engineer then gets a new version of the app pushed to them on Slack on their phone, so that he can then merge it to production. All before they even arrived at the office. We call the system internally Honk, and we have been told by key AI partners that our work here is industry leading
    In terms of transformation of internal processes, I did briefly share in my prepared remarks this tool called Honk. Where you can, using Claude Code, literally on the bus or the train, just ask Claude to add a feature or a bug to, for example, the iOS code base. It will push a QR code back to you so that you can actually try the app with that feature. If you like it, you can merge it to production without even getting off the bus. This is speeding us up tremendously. Now we foresee this not being the end of the line in terms of AI development, just the beginning.
  • Anthropic subscription surge cuts into OpenAI’s lead
  • Self-Evolving Agents
  • Charts of the Week: Customer Service Reckoning
  • U.S. had almost no job growth in 2025
  • The software complexity of nations

Weekly#675

  • Introducing Claude Opus 4.6
  • Building a C compiler with a team of parallel Claudes
  • OpenAI in talks with Abu Dhabi’s G42 to create specialized ChatGPT version for UAE
  • Google is expanding AirDrop support to more Android devices ‘very soon
  • Waymo leverages Genie 3 to create a world model for self-driving cars
  • Why Darren Aronofsky thought an AI-generated historical docudrama was a good idea
  • Goldman Sachs taps Anthropic’s Claude to automate accounting, compliance roles…Embedded Anthropic engineers have spent six months at Goldman building autonomous systems for time-intensive, high-volume back-office work.
  • Big Tech’s $1.1 trillion cloud computing backlog…Tech AI spending may approach $700 billion this year, but the blow to cash raises red flags
  • Exclusive: Anthropic’s new model is a pro at finding security flaws
  • “…The semiconductor industry is set to hit a significant milestone this year, reaching $1 trillion in annual revenue for the first time as artificial intelligence drives chip demand across nearly every corner of the economy…”
  • more than 750 million monthly active users for the Gemini app, and more than 10 billion tokens processed per minute through direct API usage
  • Apple plans to allow external voice-controlled AI chatbots in CarPlay, Bloomberg News reports
  • On Metastable Failures
  • Spotify Partners With Bookshop.org and Debuts Page Match Feature to Bridge Physical, E-book, and Audio Formats
  • “…We define workslop as AI generated work content that masquerades as good work, but lacks the substance to meaningfully advance a given task…”
  • The World’s First Viral AI Assistant Has Arrived, and Things Are Getting Weird (WSJ)