Here's the thing about AI right now—it's moving fast. Like, "we-had-29-stories-just-on-Wednesday-and-couldn't-fit-them-all-in-the-newsletter" fast.
So we're trying something new. Consider this your bonus content page. The stories that didn't make the cut aren't bad—there just wasn't enough room. We've got major funding rounds, wild new tools, and some genuinely fascinating industry drama that deserves your attention.
Think of this as the extended cut. The director's commentary. The bonus tracks at the end of the album that are actually pretty good.
Grab your coffee (or third coffee, no judgment), and let's dive into everything else happening in AI this week.
Around the Horn
- Asian markets plunged Wednesday on concerns about AI and tech company valuations, with South Korea's Kospi dropping 6%, SoftBank losing over $30 billion in market value, and the sell-off following similar U.S. tech stock declines driven by worries about sustainability of AI industry funding.
- OpenAI launched Sora on Android in seven countries including the U.S., Canada, Japan, Korea, Taiwan, Thailand, and Vietnam after reaching one million iOS downloads in five days.
- Rivian created another spinoff company called Mind Robotics to commercialize its industrial AI and robotics technology.
- Cisco unveiled its Unified Edge platform and AI-ready secure network architecture at Partner Summit 2025.
- Amazon sent a cease-and-desist letter to Perplexity AI demanding it stop using its Comet AI shopping agent on Amazon's platform.
- Researchers gave the large language model Claude Sonnet control of a vacuum robot, and it experienced a comedic meltdown when its battery died.
- People Inc. signed a major AI content licensing deal with Microsoft as Google's AI Overviews slashed publisher traffic by up to 17%.
- OpenAI, Anthropic, and Cohere expanded the hiring of forward-deployed engineers to help enterprises integrate AI.
- Google introduced agentic capabilities to AI Mode in Search, enabling it to book event tickets and wellness appointments directly for U.S. users.
- Alan Hamel created an AI twin of late actress Suzanne Somers trained on her books and interviews.
- Shopify reported a sevenfold increase in traffic from AI tools and an elevenfold surge in AI-driven orders since January 2025.
- Anthropic projected $70 billion in revenue and $17 billion in cash flow by 2028, driven by surging enterprise demand for its Claude AI products.
- YouTube's AI moderation incorrectly terminated Enderman's channel with 350,000+ subscribers, falsely linking it to an unrelated copyright-violating channel.
- Beacon Software raised $250 million at a $1 billion valuation to acquire and modernize traditional Main Street businesses through AI implementation.
- Instacart launched a white-label AI shopping chatbot for grocery retailers that creates meal plans and adds recipe ingredients directly to shopping carts.
- Nvidia and Deutsche Telekom partnered to build a €1 billion AI data center near Munich that will deploy 10,000 Nvidia GPUs and boost Germany's AI computing capacity by 50%.
- Alexa+ came to the Amazon Music app, letting users find music by asking nuanced questions and creating contextual playlists through natural conversation.
- Coca-Cola's 2025 "Holidays Are Coming" campaign utilized AI-generated content, shrinking production time from a year to just one month while cutting costs by half.
- CoreWeave's planned $9 billion acquisition of Core Scientific was rejected by shareholders, prompting a pivot to acquire Marimo instead.
- Filmmaker Guillermo del Toro says he'd "rather die" than use generative AI for his creative work.
- A study by Originality.ai found that 82% of herbal remedy books published on Amazon in early 2024 were likely AI-generated, raising consumer safety concerns.
- Intel's foundry business posted $4.2 billion in revenue with a $2.3 billion operating loss in Q3 2025, while expecting the Intel 18A process to drive future growth.
- OpenAI led a $30M investment in biosecurity startup Valthos to counter AI-enabled biological threats.
- Nvidia planned to invest up to $1 billion in French AI startup Poolside, valuing the company at $12 billion.
- Chinese President Xi Jinping proposed creating a World AI Cooperation Organization at the 2025 APEC summit.
- Anthropic secured Cognizant as a major enterprise customer, solidifying their 32% market share leadership.
- Microsoft partnered with Lamda in a multi-billion-dollar deal to deploy tens of thousands of Nvidia GPUs for AI infrastructure.
- AI researchers embodied an LLM into a robot that unexpectedly started mimicking Robin Williams' behavior.
- Apple CEO Tim Cook confirmed that the company remained open to AI-related acquisitions and partnerships to advance its roadmap, was on track to launch the new Siri in 2026, will announce more AI partnerships beyond its OpenAI integration soon, and started manufacturing “Apple Intelligence servers” at a new plant in Houston.
- HuggingFace released a deep dive into how they trained their SmolLM3 model that is a masterclass in how to train your own AI; fair warning, it’s a 2-4 day read cover to cover, but if you want to learn the technical details of training AI, it’s probably one of the best resources you can find (here’s a quick TL;DR).
- Check out US AI Czar David Sacks on the a16z pod talking about the perils of overregulation in the AI industry (good POV on what Washington is thinking in regards to AI regulations vs the state-side regulations underway, no matter where you land personally on these issues).
Treats to Try
- ClickUp released version 4.0 of its productivity platform with ClickUp Brain, an AI assistant that can generate content, analyze data, and summarize information.
- Mimic builds robotic hands that match human dexterity to automate complex manual tasks in manufacturing and logistics ($16M).
- Jinna.ai searches your content across text, images, video, and audio in 100+ languages, scaling from small projects to enterprise needs.
- MCP Playground lets you test multiple AI models with text, images, and audio inputs to compare their performances side by side.
- Plexe AI turns your English descriptions into fully functional machine learning models without requiring any coding, making ML development 10× faster (backed by Network VC).
- Firecrawl extracts structured web data from any site with 99% accuracy and 60% faster speeds than legacy tools—no coding required.
- Softr Workflows helps you automate your business processes with a visual drag-and-drop builder that connects database events, user actions, and AI capabilities.
- WhiteBG transforms your photos with one-click white backgrounds for professional-looking product listings and social media posts—free to use (you could also just use Nano Banana for this by saying "remove the background and make it white" or "give this image a white background", but maybe add a "keep the subject the exact same" for safety).
- llm_rescuer scans your Ruby code to automatically find and fix potential null pointer errors before they crash your applications (experimental only).
- Google Skills launched a comprehensive learning platform with 3,000 AI and technical courses, with users completing 26 million courses in the past year.
- Octonomy achieves 95%+ accuracy in technical enterprise support and deploys in under 20 days without data migration (raised $20M).
- Chatolia lets you create custom support chatbots trained on your company's knowledge base and deploy them across multiple channels—no coding required.
- Open Canvas provides an AI-powered whiteboard for collaborative visual thinking and brainstorming.
- PyTogether enables real-time collaborative Python coding with multiple developers working in the same IDE simultaneously.
- Syllabi-AI generates your syllabi, lesson plans, and educational videos in minutes, letting you collaborate with team members and publish content directly to social media.
- Cuiz transforms any content you provide into engaging interactive quizzes for studying or training.
- Hippocratic AI developed patient-facing AI agents that completed 115M clinical interactions with no safety issues (raised $126M, valued at $3.5B).
- Multifactor lets you share online accounts with humans and AI without exposing passwords, tracking who accessed what and when.
- Dia merges Arc's beloved browser features with AI that answers questions about your tabs and drafts emails from open content (acquired for $610M, $20/month).
- Agent-o-rama lets you create and run AI agents in Java or Clojure with built-in tracing, evaluation, and monitoring—free for clusters up to 2 nodes (code).
- AgentML makes your AI agents' behavior predictable by replacing free-form prompts with explicit state machines you can validate before deployment.
- Claude Code Resources jumpstarts your coding assistant setup in 3 minutes and provides 10,000+ lines of documentation covering every feature.
- Pianolyze turns your piano recordings into visual notation right in your browser, so you can learn any song by simply dropping an audio file.
- Extrai turns your text documents into structured database records by extracting specific information and automatically storing it in your SQL database.
- Sing One Song provides AI-powered vocal coaching with personalized feedback and exercises.
- Yogi-cam monitors your anxious dog and talks to them when they bark while you're away—free to build yourself on GitHub.
- Memento Mori shows your life in weeks on every new Chrome tab, reminding you to make each week count—free to try.
- Diwadi lets you preview any file type in a single lightweight app, saving you from constantly switching between programs.
- Brumby-14B speeds up your language processing with its attention-free design, handling complex tasks more efficiently than traditional models.
- Gloo creates software for churches to text members, verify insurance, and manage communications.
- Teleskope finds where your sensitive data lives across every cloud app and automatically deletes it based on your policies (raised $25M).
- The Prompting Company gets your product recommended when people ask ChatGPT "what's the best tool for X?" (raised $6.5M).
Intelligent Insights
- Sinead Bovell put together a great 17 min explanation for what’s actually happening with the job landscape; big companies aren’t slowing hiring or laying off users because AI can do entire jobs today, but in anticipation of what AI will do to the market landscape (they need to act more like a startup to compete with AI startups or they’ll get disrupted).
- Neuro-symbolic AI startups like NYC-based AUI (which just raised $20M at $750M valuation for its Apollo 1 model, which you can demo here) are challenging pure transformer models (ChatGPT's architecture) by pairing neural networks (for understanding language) with symbolic reasoning (hard-coded rules and logic), achieving 90%+ task completion on enterprise workflows versus 17-60% for standard language models… proving that deterministic precision beats probabilistic guessing for task-oriented AI.
- Researchers decisively disproved a longstanding Erdős conjecture using human-AI collaboration, revealing how a similar solution from 1943 was overlooked for decades.
- This AI-powered analysis of millions of book reviews identified what readers say are truly “life-changing” books; they did this by examining reader sentiment with language models (P.S: these 4 authors are the most “life-changing”).
- This analysis reveals there's no evidence of AI significantly speeding up design work or replacing designers (yet); I will say, non-designers are definitely creating designs faster with AI (and like the second comment of this HN discussion says, AI is great at “middle of bell curve” generic design); as for speeding up designer’s work, Pietro Schirano of MagicPath (an AI design tool) is definitely trying!
- UC Berkeley researchers discovered that OpenAI's o1 model became the first AI to perform linguistic analysis at human expert level, correctly handling center-embedded recursion, resolving sentence ambiguities, and inferring phonological rules from 30 completely made-up languages (paper).
- Here’s a pretty inspiring story about how musician Andy Shand used AI to make music again (via Suno) after an illness took away his ability to play instruments.
- Really vibing with this comparison of today to the internet's “dial-up era” (today = 1995), which warns against waiting for perfect AI tools to jump in.
- Henley Wing Chiu analyzed 180M job postings, finding an 8% decrease in posting overall and a general split where strategic roles remained while execution-focused positions declined (this tracks w/ AI replacing one-off tasks); also, the jobs with the biggest increase = roles where trust / experience / credentials matter most (pharmacists, loan officers, legal and RE directors, and ML engineers, obviously).
- The EFF warned that expanding copyright to restrict AI training will entrench big tech dominance, making a compelling case that fair use protections are essential for maintaining innovation and competition.
- Perplexity responded to Amazon's legal threat by framing it as a battle between user autonomy and corporate control, highlighting the irony that Amazon now adopts protectionist tactics against newer innovators.
- Amazon's cease-and-desist letter to Perplexity reveals the brewing battle for control of the e-commerce experience, as Amazon blocked an AI assistant that bypassed its advertising system.
- An investigation into copyright's quiet retreat shows how piracy enforcement has dramatically declined while sites like Sci-Hub remain accessible, revealing publishers have largely abandoned aggressive anti-piracy efforts.
- The Atlantic investigated Common Crawl, the little-known nonprofit whose web archives power virtually all major AI models, revealing how its crawler bots capture paywalled content by exploiting the brief moment before paywall code activates.
- This comprehensive MMC report on agentic AI shows how it's transforming into a projected $93.2 billion market by 2032, with enterprises already seeing up to 86% reduction in complex task completion times.
