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DOES A URL IN A PROMPT STEER AN LLM'S OUTPUT TOWARD ITS CONTENT?

When a URL and its content make it into the training data, the bare URL works as a key into the weights

SOME NEW AGENTIC PATTERNS

A look at how Prime Radiant uses agents.

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MODEL Y LONG WHEELBASE

The Model Y Long Wheelbase is now available in the US and Puerto Rico. The 3-row, 6-seat configuration has ample headroom and legroom for all passengers. The trunk fits a 28" and a 20" suitcase each, and the frunk can hold an additional 20" suitcase. More details about the wheelbase, along with pictures and videos of the vehicle, are available in the post.

MARK ZUCKERBERG TELLS STAFF THAT AI AGENTS HAVEN'T PROGRESSED AS QUICKLY AS HE'D HOPED

Mark Zuckerberg told staff during an internal town hall on Thursday that the pace of AI agent development was not accelerating in the way executives had previously expected it to. He has apparently commented that the job cuts earlier this year were not as clean as they should have been. The perceived upside of the company's new AI-focused structure has not come to fruition yet. Zuckerberg says that the company will begin to see improvements from its AI investments in the next three to six months.

FAA PROPOSAL: SUPERSONIC AIRLINERS CAN FLY OVER US CITIES IF THEY'RE QUIET

The US Federal Aviation Administration has proposed a new rule that would allow commercial supersonic airliners as long as they can reduce the ground-level impacts of their sonic booms. The new rule would require any sonic boom overpressure at the surface to be kept below 0.11 pounds per square foot. Critics of the new rule say it doesn't actually consider loudness or annoyance. Legalization of quieter supersonic flights doesn't guarantee a successful comeback for commercial supersonic airliners - Concorde's massive fuel consumption made it difficult to sustain profitable operations.

CHINA QUANT FUNDS DRAW BILLIONS AS AI TROUNCES HUMAN TRADERS

Quants' assets under management in China have more than doubled in less than a year to over 2.6 trillion yuan. The trend is being fueled by the rapid adoption of artificial intelligence. Quants' breadth in covering thousands of stocks has made it mainstream. Funds are responding to the frenzy by creating new investment products.

UNDERSTANDING IS THE NEW BOTTLENECK

It's still important to understand the code that agents write. Agent work needs to be understood to verify that it is correct. This understanding is required for humans to participate in the creative process. This presentation discusses techniques for building human understanding when working with AI and moving fast.

BUILDING AN INTERN

'Junior' is an AI intern in Slack. Users can give it information to work with, review the work, and steer the agent in the right direction. This article discusses the process of developing Junior, which took over four months. The full source for the project is available.

META'S INEVITABLE CLOUD

After years of trying to diversify, Meta is still almost entirely an ad business. The company's latest solution to that problem is AI. AI will be used to supercharge its ads business, but it will also ideally unlock other businesses. One of these businesses is Meta's newly announced cloud service.

CAREER ADVICE IN THE AGE OF AI

The valuable work of the next decade is everything that can't be graded within the span of model training. Focus on resources that are truly limited and learn to find problems in addition to solving them. Work on the most ambitious form of a problem and learn to execute well in the last mile. Put yourself in the right position to see opportunities. The key to unlocking opportunity is to focus on finding interesting problems and delivering extraordinary results.

A NEW TREND, SMART MODEL ROUTING

Intelligent routing is becoming table stakes.

MICROSOFT UNVEILS $2.5B ‘FRONTIER COMPANY' TO EMBED AI ENGINEERS INSIDE CUSTOMERS

The Microsoft Frontier Company will embed engineers inside customers to build and run AI systems.

SKILL ENGINEERING AND THE CASE AGAINST ONE-SHOT AI DESIGN

Agents need domain knowledge, context, and carefully defined ways for humans to steer the result.

ANTHROPIC IS DISCUSSING A NEW CUSTOM CHIP WITH SAMSUNG

Anthropic has yet to decide what the chip will be used for, how it will fit into the server, or how powerful it will be.

CLOUDFLARE SETS DEADLINE TO BLOCK AI CRAWLERS THAT BUNDLE SEARCH WITH AI TRAINING

AI crawlers have until September to separate bots that gather content for search from those that harvest it for training or be blocked on pages that carry ads.

TESLA CAPS EMPLOYEE AI SPENDING AT $200/WEEK EXCEPT FOR GROK

The cap is a sign that even companies betting their future on AI are struggling to control their costs.

SPACEX SHOWED INVESTORS PROTOTYPE OF ELON MUSK'S NEW AI DEVICE

SpaceX showed off a prototype for a handset-like device to investors prior to its IPO last month. Designed to run on a proprietary operating system and integrate AI technology from SpaceX's AI, the device would run on a Qualcomm Snapdragon chipset. Elon Musk has previously considered building a smartphone due to frustration over how Apple controls the distribution of third-party apps. A device could help Musk become less reliant on other companies.

OPENAI PROPOSES 5% STAKE TO TRUMP ADMINISTRATION TO EASE WASHINGTON PRESSURE

OpenAI has proposed handing the US government a 5% stake, worth roughly $42.6 billion, to defuse mounting political pressure. CEO Sam Altman says that giving the public a financial interest in the company is the best way to share the upside of AI. The suggestion is part of a larger proposal in which the government would hold 5% of each of the leading US AI developers via a government vehicle. The proposal was first pitched directly to the Trump administration in early 2025.

RISE OF THE CHEAP ROBOTS

Several startups have announced general-purpose robots in the sub-$10,000 range. Nori Robotics is selling a bimanual robot for under $1,400 that's tall enough to reach the top of a table or countertop. The BracketBot is a wheeled robot manipulator with hoverboard-style drive wheels that will sell for under $3,000. Weave's Isaac 1 is a fully capable home mobile manipulator that can put away laundry and tidy a room. It will cost $8,000 or $450 per month.

FOR THE FIRST TIME, A CELL BUILT FROM SCRATCH GROWS AND DIVIDES

Biologists packed nonliving components into a cell-like membrane piece by piece, and the bag of molecules started to behave like life. The lab-made cell grew, replicated its DNA, and divided. While the cell is not alive, it is the strongest demonstration yet that it is possible to generate life from nonlife. It can't survive without constant deliveries of food and ribosomes, and it has no defenses or a good waste removal system.

META BUILD FOR WEARABLES

Web Apps for Meta Ray-Ban Display use standard web APIs. This guide shows developers how to build optimized Meta Ray-Ban Display Web Apps. The easiest way to build Web Apps is using AI coding tools and app platforms such as Replit, Claude Code, and Cursor.

ZCODE

ZCode is the official development environment for GLM-5.2. It is available now for download on macOS, Windows, and Linux. GLM Coding Plan subscribers now have a 1.5x usage quota in ZCode.

META IS PLANNING A CLOUD BUSINESS TO SELL AI COMPUTING POWER

Meta is developing plans for a cloud infrastructure business that will sell access to AI computing power and models. The business will generate revenue from excess computing power from the data centers Meta built to fuel its AI ambitions. One potential plan is to sell access to various AI models hosted on Meta's infrastructure, similar to AWS Bedrock. Another option may be to sell access to raw computing capacity like CoreWeave.

THE ANTHROPIC FABLE BAN IS OVER. THE BATTLE OVER HOW TO TAME AI HAS JUST BEGUN

The debate over the degree to which the US federal government should control access to cutting-edge API tools is now heating up. There is a growing awareness of how powerful these new tools are, but little agreement on how they should be controlled. AI proponents say that bans and implementations would hurt the US in its efforts to stay ahead of China in the geopolitical AI race. Administration officials and advisers are attempting to balance innovation and security while addressing safety risks in the most minimally invasive way possible.

XBOX WORKING ON A WAY TO DIGITIZE YOUR PHYSICAL GAME COLLECTION AS SONY ABANDONS DISCS

Xbox is testing out a disc-to-digital feature that will create a 'digital entitlement' for games that can be moved between Microsoft accounts and Xbox profiles.

GOOGLE READER WAS BUILDING THE WRONG FUTURE

Google Reader turned out to be the social network that people wanted all along.

MOST AI WORK CAN WAIT

Design systems around routing, not models.

INTRODUCING THE 'USERMEDIA' HTML ELEMENT

The 'usermedia' HTML element reduces boilerplate code, improves security, and provides a seamless recovery path for users who have previously denied access.

THE ECONOMICS OF SPACEX

SpaceX was worth about $164 per share at a market capitalization of $2.163 trillion at the end of June.

ARXIV'S NEXT CHAPTER: UPDATES ON OUR SPIN OUT FROM CORNELL UNIVERSITY

arXiv is becoming an independent nonprofit organization on July 1 after being part of Cornell University for the past 25 years.

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ANTHROPIC LAUNCHES CLAUDE SONNET 5 AT A STEEP DISCOUNT TO ITS TOP MODEL AS THE COMPANY RACES TOWARD A BLOCKBUSTER IPO

Anthropic's newly released AI model Claude Sonnet 5 delivers near flagship performance at mid-tier prices. The model is aimed at giving cost-conscious enterprise developers access to powerful agent capabilities at lower costs. Sonnet 5 is now the default model for users on Free and Pro plans. API pricing is set at $2 per million input tokens and $10 per million output tokens until August 31, after which prices will rise to $3 and $15, respectively.

META CONSIDERED BUYING KALSHI BEFORE DEVELOPING ITS OWN PREDICTION MARKET APP

Mark Zuckerberg met with Kalshi CEO Tarek Mansour about a possible takeover last year, but the negotiations never advanced. It is unclear why the talks broke down, but some say Mansour would not move forward with a sale and that Meta was concerned about the legal and ethical questions surrounding the business. Meta appears to still want to tap into the prediction market craze. Prediction markets have become one of the fastest-growing parts of the tech industry in recent years.

THE FIRST EARLY HUMAN EGGS FROM STEM CELLS

Conception, a stem cell technology company, has successfully generated the first early human egg cells derived from stem cells. The company converted blood cells into stem cells and then coaxed those stem cells into becoming miniature human ovaries, which grew early eggs. The next step in the research involves growing the stem cell-derived eggs to a point where an IVF physician could collect them surgically.

REALTA FUSION GENERATES ELECTRICITY DIRECTLY FROM A FUSION REACTION, AN APPARENT FIRST

Realta Fusion has successfully powered a lightbulb using electricity harvested directly from its demonstration fusion device. The company plans to use direct electricity conversion to heat the plasma in its reactor. The process is estimated to be 90% efficient. Helion, a startup backed by Sam Altman, is also planning to deploy direct energy conversion technology in its reactor, though it has yet to demonstrate that publicly.

COPYBARA

Copybara is a tool for transforming and moving code between repositories. One common use case is for projects that require maintaining a confidential repository and a public repository in sync. The tool allows contributions to any repository, but one repository must be selected as the authoritative repository so that there's always one source of truth. Copybara is stateless, which allows several users to use it for the same config/repositories and get the same result.

LOCAL REASONING FOR GLOBAL PROPERTIES

AI often generates high-quality local chunks of code, but it struggles when asked to generate code that requires a global understanding of the program. This problem could be solved in the next one or two generations of models. One possible way of solving the issue is through programming language design. It is likely that a large company will attempt to solve the issue through programming language design soon, especially if model advancements don't fix it.

ANTHROPIC REACHES DEAL WITH TRUMP ADMINISTRATION TO RESTORE ACCESS TO FABLE AI MODEL

Anthropic has agreed to address the workarounds that researchers at Amazon used to evade the safeguards for Fable. Access to the model will begin to be restored today. The agreement is expected to involve the Center for AI Standards and Innovation, a government testing unit.

AWS PUTS $1 BILLION INTO NEW AI UNIT TO EMBED ENGINEERS WITH CUSTOMERS, JOINING GROWING WAVE

Amazon is investing $1 billion into a new Forward Deployed Engineering unit that will help customers build and roll out AI systems. Forward-deployed engineers are employees who are embedded directly within another business to accelerate a technical transformation. The term was coined by Palantir more than a decade ago, but it has recently seen a resurgence in the AI era. Other leading model developers, including OpenAI and Anthropic, also have their own FDE units.

FENIC

fenic is a DataFrame query engine for semantic data processing that turns AI-assisted exploration of structured and unstructured data into reusable and inspectable DataFrame pipelines.

TESLA STARTS TESTING ITS PRODUCTION CYBERCAB WITHOUT STEERING WHEEL OR PEDALS IN AUSTIN

Tesla is targeting a retail price of under $30,000 per Cybercab with a long-term production goal of two million units per year.

GOOGLE KILLS TENOR GIF API, FORCING CHANGES AT X, DISCORD, AND MORE

Many apps appear to be moving to Klipy, a GIF service created by one of Tenor's founders.

NANO BANANA 2 LITE

A 'Where's Waldo' style image generated by Nano Banana 2 Lite, the fastest and cheapest Gemini image model.

THE TWILIGHT OF THE CHATBOTS

Work is increasingly about assigning work to agents rather than working together with chatbots.