Sunday Rundown #136: App Builders & "We Will Mock You"
Live & Learn #1: Three AI tools tested and Substack Live lessons learned.
Happy Sunday, friends!
Welcome back to the weekly AI news roundup.
In case you missed it, here’s this week’s Thursday deep dive:
If you’re consistently missing out on my emails, remember to check your “Promotions” tab and mark whytryai@substack.com as a “Safe Sender.”
I was away during Easter, so we have two weeks’ worth of AI developments to catch up on. Let’s get to it!
👩💻 AI releases
Alibaba news:
HappyHorse-1.0 is a SOTA video model that anonymously topped global video leaderboards before being claimed by the company.
Qwen3.5-Omni is a family of natively omnimodal models that can simultaneously process and generate text, images, audio, and video.
Qwen3.6-Plus is the upgraded flagship model with stronger reasoning and coding capabilities that can reliably handle complex real-world tasks.
Anthropic news:
Claude Cowork is now generally available with admin controls like role-based access, spend limits, and analytics for company-wide deployment.
Computer Use now runs directly in Claude Code CLI, so it can visually verify and fix what it builds by interacting with the screen.
Microsoft 365 Connectors rolled out for all Claude plans, so you can link Claude to your OneDrive, Outlook, and SharePoint directly.
Arcee AI open-sourced Trinity-Large-Thinking, a reasoning model scoring #2 after Cladude Opus-4.6 on PinchBench while being 96% cheaper. (Try for free.)
Cursor now lets you launch coding agents from your phone and run and control them remotely on any machine.
GitHub added a focused review agent called “Rubber Duck” to Copilot CLI that uses a second model to review code and catch errors before they compound.
Google news:
Gemini app added interactive simulations that showcase concepts right in the chat. (I previously compared ChatGPT and Claude versions.)
Gemini added Notebooks for organizing chats, files, and custom instructions per project, with built-in syncing to NotebookLM.
Gemma 4 is a family of open models for advanced reasoning and complex multi-step tasks that is faster and cheaper to run on edge devices.
Google AI Edge Eloquent is a free offline dictation app for iOS that transcribes speech and removes filler words automatically. (Download it here.)
Google Colab introduced a Learn Mode and Custom Instructions, turning Gemini into a personalized coding tutor.
Google Vids added Veo 3.1 video generation with 10 free monthly clips, plus AI avatars and custom music tools.
Veo 3.1 Lite is a cost-efficient video model that’s more than 50% cheaper than Veo 3.1 Fast.
HeyGen news:
Avatar V can capture and consistently recreate your likeness in any setting, from just a 15-second video recording.
Topaz Labs is now integrated into the platform, letting you natively upscale videos to 4K.
Meta is rolling out a new flagship model called Muse Spark, capable of multimodal reasoning and visual understanding across all Meta AI touchpoints.
Microsoft news:
MAI-Transcribe-1 turns speech into text across 25 languages, even in noisy environments, and is both faster and cheaper than existing offerings.
MAI-Voice-1 generates expressive speech from just a few seconds of input and can produce a minute of audio in under a second.
OpenAI news:
ChatGPT Pro now has a $100/month tier with 5x more Codex usage than Plus.
Codex now offers pay-as-you-go seats for teams with reduced annual pricing for ChatGPT Business.
Codex launched as a plugin for Claude Code, so you can use OpenAI’s coding models inside Claude Code workflows.
Perplexity news:
Computer launched inside Slack to help teams run analysis, generate code, and trigger workflows directly from Slack channels and DMs.
Computer for Taxes uses IRS materials to help US users prepare their federal returns through its AI agent.
Plaid integration lets you securely link bank accounts, credit cards, and loans for a full view of your personal finances.
Pika launched a Video Chat Skill (in beta) powered by PikaStream 1.0 that gives any AI agent a face and voice for real-time video conversations.
Salesforce gave its Slackbot 30+ new features, including automated meeting notes, daily recaps, and AI-powered task management.
Softr launched a no-code platform with an AI co-builder that creates functioning business apps from plain-language descriptions.
Topaz Labs shipped a Precision update, making its video models faster and better at upscaling clips to 4K.
World Labs rolled out Marble 1.1 and Marble 1.1 Plus, with improved visual details and larger, more complex generated worlds.
X added a Grok-powered photo editor to the post composer, letting you ask for edits and tweaks to images before posting.
Z.ai open-sourced GLM-5.1, a coding model that can work autonomously for up to eight hours and tops several software engineering benchmarks.
🔬 AI research
Anthropic’s Claude Mythos Preview is a powerful ureleased frontier model capable of finding and exploiting previously hidden software vulnerabilities.
📖 AI resources
“Claude Mythos: Highlights from 244-page Release” [VIDEO]: An excellent deep dive by AI Explained.
“Emotion concepts and their function in a large language model” [RESEARCH]—study by Anthropic on distinct emotions that shape how a model behaves.
🔀 AI random
Anthropic accidentally leaked the Claude Code source files, exposing internal architecture and planned features and sparking security concerns.
🤦♂️ AI fail of the week
When a vectorized version of you ends up looking like knock-off Freddie Mercury.
📹 Live & Learn #1: Testing AI tools together
In the first-ever “Live & Learn” session, I learned a tiny bit about AI tools and a whole lot about Substack’s screen-sharing limitations and the importance of double-checking audience settings. (I explain more here.)
I really want these “Live & Learn” sessions to become a fun way for us all to nerd out about AI together. They don’t have to be limited to the AI tools I prepare for testing.
So bring your own tool suggestions, questions, and other AI things to share with me and the audience. I’ll make sure the live chat is actually open to all subscribers next time. (Oops!)
Also, please let me know what you’d like to get out of these live sessions:
(It’s just a single open-ended question with a few AI-assisted follow-ups.)
Thanks!