Sunday Rundown #113: Browser Wars & Deadly Parkour
Sunday Bonus #73: How to train AI on your writing style.
Happy Sunday, friends!
Welcome back to the weekly look at generative AI, which consists of:
Sunday Rundown (free): this week’s AI news + a fun AI fail.
Sunday Bonus (paid): an exclusive segment for my paid subscribers.
In case you missed it, here’s this week’s Thursday deep dive:
Let’s get to it.
🗞️ AI news
Here are this week’s AI developments.
👩💻 AI releases
New stuff you can try right now:
Anthropic news:
Claude is coming directly to Slack to help draft responses, summarize threads, and analyze shared documents.
Claude Code got many upgrades, including checkpoints, subagents, and a VS Code extension, letting it handle more complex development tasks.
Claude Developer Platform added context editing and memory tools that help AI agents perform better without hitting context limits.
Claude Sonnet 4.5 is “the best coding model in the world,” with improved reasoning and math skills.
Apple launched its Foundation Models framework, which lets developers create privacy‑preserving, offline AI features that can run on-device.
DeepSeek launched V3.2‑Exp with DeepSeek Sparse Attention that helps the model focus on key parts of the input, improving long-context performance.
Google news:
AI Mode in Search now lets you explore things visually by talking to Gemini and getting image results back.
Jules got two upgrades: Jules Tools for running it in your terminal and Jules API to plug it into your own systems and workflows.
Hume AI launched Octave 2, a next-gen text-to-speech model that accurately reflects emotions and handles uncommon words across 11 languages.
Meta brought a bunch of AI tricks to WhatsApp, including live photos, AI-generated chat themes, and custom video call backgrounds.
Microsoft news:
Agent Framework (preview) helps developers build and run AI agents using familiar .NET tools.
Copilot Portraits bring voice chats to life with animated AI avatars you can talk to.
Grok 4 is now available in Azure AI Foundry and comes with step-by-step reasoning, 128K-token context, tool use, and built-in web search.
Word, Excel, and Copilot chat now have Agent Mode and an Office Agent that can plan and execute multi-step tasks, track progress, and more.
OpenAI news:
ChatGPT added Instant Checkout, letting US users buy products from Etsy (and soon Shopify) directly through the chat interface.
Sora 2 is a next-gen video model featuring native dialogue and sound effects, with outputs comparable to Veo 3.
Opera launched Neon, an agentic browser that can fill forms, compare sites, complete tasks, and even write code for you.
Perplexity, in turn, made its own Comet browser available worldwide for free.
🔬 AI research
Cool stuff you might get to try one day:
Amazon teased two AI features for Kindle—Story So Far and Ask This Book—which recap what you’ve read and let you “chat” to your book, respectively.
PayPal plans to integrate its Honey extension with ChatGPT and other assistants to showcase deals, price comparisons, and shopping suggestions in chat.
Thinking Machines Lab is developing Tinker, a tool to automate fine-tuning of frontier AI models with minimal setup.
📖 AI resources
Helpful AI tools and stuff that teaches you about AI:
“Prompt Packs” [reference]—a collection of plug-and-play starter prompts for different business roles from the OpenAI Academy.
🤦♂️ AI fail of the week
What gets me is the casual meta-narration as he faceplants and then likely plummets to his death.
Send me your AI fail for a chance to be featured in an upcoming Sunday Rundown.
💰 Sunday Bonus #73: The fun way to teach AI your writing style
I have an odd relationship with AI writing.
While I happily turn to chatbots for brainstorming and feedback, I enjoy the actual “writing” part enough that I don’t want to delegate it. I touched on that here:
But in that article, I also said this:
At the same time, I fully acknowledge that just as I might use an image model to make up for my lack of artistic talent, others might use a large language model to help them write something that might’ve otherwise gone unwritten.
So yes, I know that many of you will want AI to draft articles in your voice.
Yet most approaches I’ve seen to getting AI to mimic your writing style are either:
Way too simplistic (pick “Witty tech guru” from a fixed dropdown)
Way overengineered (“Let’s encode your entire writing history and philosophy in a 50-page document via just 127 quick steps”)
That’s why I came up with a gamified way to help LLMs learn your writing style that is more streamlined and, dare I say, fun.
At the end, you get a complete “Tone of Voice Guidelines” document to drop into any AI chatbot or hand to a copywriter.
Today’s Sunday Bonus is many things in one:
An explanation of the process
A “mini” starter prompt that gets you 80% there
A much more extensive prompt you can build on (the “full” version)
Two ready-to-go tools that incorporate the prompt from #3:
A custom GPT for ChatGPT users
A custom Gem for Gemini users (I’m keeping my promise)
Don’t say I never do anything nice for you!