Happy Sunday,
Welcome back to the weekly AI news roundup.
In case you’d missed it, here’s this week’s Thursday post:
Note: If you’re consistently missing out on my emails, remember to check your “Promotions” tab and mark whytryai@substack.com as a “Safe Sender.”
Here’s last week’s AI news roundup:
👩💻 AI releases
Alibaba launched HappyShrimp 1.0, an AI music model that can turn simple text prompts into full instrumental tracks or entire songs with lyrics. (Try for free.)
Anthropic news:
Claude can now send emails via Gmail and manage your Google Drive directly from the online chat interface. (Paid plans only.)
Computer Use, Skills API, and Files API are now available for developers to build with, so they can create more advanced and feature-rich apps.
DeepSeek launched V4-Flash-Vision-Exp, a multimodal model that adds image understanding while matching V4 Flash on text and agentic reasoning.
ElevenLabs rolled out Eleven v3 Conversational, a real-time speech model that supports 70+ languages and comes with a library of 11,000+ voices.
Google news:
Gemini AI Pro is now free for a year for college students and comes with interactive visualizations, Deep Research tools, and study notebooks.
Gemini in Chrome rolled out to Android users in the US with an Auto Browse agent that can perform tasks in the browser on your behalf.
Meta news:
Meta AI Mac app can see your screen to answer questions about what you’re working on and also comes with Google Workspace tools.
Pocket is an app that lets you create and share small games built from text prompts, now rolling out in the US. (Download for Android or iOS.)
OpenAI news:
ChatGPT launched an Apple Messages plugin for Mac that lets you search conversations, catch up on threads, and draft replies using AI.
ChatGPT for Teens comes with built-in safety protections and a Study Mode that uses guiding questions instead of direct answers. (My post on the topic.)
Ornith open-sourced Ornith-1.5, a family of self-improving models, with the flagship one allegedly matching the performance of Claude Opus 4.8.
Perplexity now lets you email Computer at computer@perplexity.com, so you can send tasks from your inbox for it to work on.
Replit launched Free Mode for Core subscribers, which lets them create 30x more content using GPT-5.6 Luna with limits that reset every five hours.
Runway released Ruby, a model that converts SDR video to 16-bit HDR in ProRes and EXR formats for professional editing workflows.
Salesforce launched Slack Code with dedicated channels where designers, developers, and PMs can collaborate directly with coding agents.
Stability AI upgraded Stable Audio 3.0 with a DAW plugin and richer web editor that lets musicians generate, tweak, mix, and extend tracks without restarting.
Tripo launched P2.0 Preview, a 3D model generator that creates game-ready assets from image or text prompts.
🔬 AI research
Cursor previewed its code-hosting platform Origin in early beta, with repos, pull requests, and GitHub sync built into the Cursor editor.
📖 AI resources
“2026 AI Marketing Industry Report” [REPORT]: a look at how marketers are adopting AI tools and their platform preferences by Social Media Examiner.
“How Much of the Internet Is Written With AI?” [STUDY]: interactive report by Pew Research Center tracing the spread of AI-generated content.
“Young Adults Increasingly Wary of AI” [SURVEY]: study of Americans’ attitudes toward and concerns about AI by the Pew Research Center.
🔀 AI random
Amazon has been bulk-buying rare books and scanning them for AI training data after destroying their bindings (404 Media investigation).
OpenAI paused training of its frontier model (codenamed Astra) after early tests suggested it could pose serious cybersecurity risks.
🤦♂️ AI fail of the week
Wait! Where did that coin go?! That went too fast for me!