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SHOW ME YOUR ADS! (WEBINAR)

This webinar on April 10 is a hands-on workshop for B2B marketers and creatives looking to improve their paid ad performance. Jess Cook, VP of Marketing at Vector, will break down what makes effective ad creative, common mistakes teams make, and small adjustments that can drive big results. Participants can bring their own ads for live feedback and will learn how viewers engage with ads and how a single tweak can double the chances of a winning creative.

ALL GOOGLE USERS IN THE US CAN NOW CHANGE THEIR GMAIL ADDRESS

Google is now allowing all US users to change their Gmail username, giving them a chance to update the part before the @ in their address. Users can access this option through their account settings under Personal info > Email. The change can be made once every 12 months, and all existing emails will be retained. Google will keep the old address as an alternate, so people can reach you at either email, and both addresses can be used to sign into Google services.

DO EXPLAINERS STILL WORK?

Explainer content remains essential even as AI summaries absorb more top-of-funnel search traffic. The value has shifted from raw volume toward topical authority and Google Discover visibility. Long-tail keywords matter more now because they target specific queries that large language models have not yet fully absorbed. Experts recommend treating explainers as part of a broader content ecosystem rather than standalone traffic drivers, and refreshing them in sync with the news cycle to maintain freshness signals.

GOOFY, PLAYFUL, AND KNOWINGLY A BIT SILLY

A new brand identity for “Yes! Apples” turned a commodity product into a distinctive consumer brand by layering New York cultural references with product-level messaging. The graphic system is built around PLU sticker motifs that carry short copylines about fiber content, hydration, and convenience, transforming functional product claims into visual design elements. The wordmark uses Fraunces, an homage to the iconic "Thank You For Shopping With Us" grocery typeface, and works equally well as a full lockup or truncated to "Yes!" inside an apple-shaped frame.

SEO TOOL: THE "REVERSE PROMPTER" SHOWS POTENTIAL PROMPTS FOR A GIVEN PAGE

Instead of trying to find cited pages for a prompt, the tool looks at a submitted URL and tries to find the questions most likely to surface that page.

META STARTS TESTING INSTAGRAM PLUS SUBSCRIPTION WITH EXCLUSIVE PERKS

Instagram Plus is a new subscription tier Meta is testing in select markets, offering perks like story viewer search, rewatch analytics, extended story duration, and the ability to spotlight stories.

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THE SUDDEN FALL OF OPENAI'S MOST HYPED PRODUCT SINCE CHATGPT

Sora was hyped as AI's next consumer-friendly frontier, and even Disney signed onto the vision. OpenAI then suddenly killed the project, with many Disney executives learning about the decision less than an hour before it was announced. OpenAI needed to free up more computing resources, and Sora was using far too much. The product wasn't profitable, and every user drew down a finite resource. CEO Sam Altman says the move was a difficult but necessary sacrifice toward the company's larger goals.

APPLE PIVOTS ITS AI STRATEGY TO APP STORE, SEARCH-LIKE PLATFORM APPROACH

Apple is recommitting to its core business model of selling hardware and services. It knows its homegrown AI technology lags behind competitors, so it is focusing on its core strengths. Historically, Apple's software has been about driving product sales rather than generating revenue in their own right. It plans to embed just enough AI in its OSes to keep users from defecting, while opening Siri and Apple Intelligence to third-party services. This approach leverages its hardware, makes its products more customizable, and keeps the company in control of its ecosystem.

INSIDE THE STEALTHY STARTUP THAT PITCHED BRAINLESS HUMAN CLONES

A Californian startup called R3 has raised funds to create non-sentient monkey 'organ sacks' as an alternative to animal testing. The startup's founder reportedly secretly pitched a vision where the startup creates 'brainless clones' to serve as backups for human bodies. This could be in the form of a baby version of a person with enough brain structure to be alive in case they ever need a new kidney or liver, or it may even be possible to one day transplant a brain into a younger clone to gain a second lifespan. The company has denied that it ever made the pitch, saying that any allegations of intent or conspiracy to create human clones or humans with brain damage are categorically false.

VULNERABILITY RESEARCH IS COOKED

Coding agents will soon drastically alter both the practice and the economics of exploit development. A substantial amount of the high-impact vulnerability research will just be pointing an agent at a source three and telling it to find zero days. This will profoundly alter information security and the Internet itself.

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CODEX PLUGIN FOR CLAUDE CODE

This plugin enables Claude Code users to start using Codex from the workflow they already have. Users can use Codex from inside Claude Code for code reviews or delegate tasks to Codex. The plugin uses the local Codex CLI, so existing sign-in methods and configs still apply. It also uses the same repository checkout and machine-local environment.

ENGINEERING FOR AGENTS THAT NEVER SLEEP

Most of the signals that trigger engineering work are already machine-readable. The current bottleneck is where a human reads that signal, interprets it, and then types a prompt telling the agent what the signal already said. Give agents comprehensive unit tests so they can verify their own output, good documentation to discover context, reproducible dev environments to run code, and rich system accounting. This scaffolding will enable agents that can close incidents around the clock.

TO LURE TOP AI TALENT, STARTUPS ARE TURNING TO COLD HARD CASH

High-growth AI startups are flush with venture capital. Combined with a wildly competitive talent market, this has caused increasingly creative incentive structures and more cash-heavy offers. Startups are focusing on hiring the best as they need to stay lean and small. This is creating a split economy in the tech industry where the top 5% to 10% of candidates are getting all of the offers and the rest are struggling.

SEEING LIKE A SPREADSHEET

AI will see much further than the spreadsheet ever could. It will allow businesses to accomplish incredible things, and make possible coordinations of labor and capital more ambitious than anything we can imagine today. However, as corporations become dominated by AI systems, the most human elements of organizations may be devalued or discarded entirely. Great organizations are great because of something irreducible about the collection and organization of particular people toward particular ends.

VEBLEN & JEVON WALK INTO A DATA CENTER

Jevon's Paradox states that the cheaper a product becomes, the more it is consumed, and Veblen goods are those whose demand increases with price - it is unknown which way the AI industry will go.

META TESTING PAID INSTAGRAM SERVICE THAT LETS USERS SECRETLY VIEW STORIES

Instagram Plus is being tested in select markets, including the Philippines, Japan, and Mexico, with the plans costing the equivalent of $2 USD per month.

COST TO IMPLEMENT VS COST TO VERIFY

The cost to implement is the time and expertise needed to produce code, and the cost to verify is the time and expertise needed to confirm the code is correct.

YOUR TICKET IS A PROMPT

Tickets are now handled by agents, and they only have the words on the ticket, and no other context.

APPLE STEPS UP CRACKDOWN ON VIBE CODING APPS, PULLS ‘ANYTHING' FROM THE APP STORE

Apple is not okay with apps that can change their own behavior by generating and running code outside of App Store review.

AI AGENTS COULD MAKE FREE SOFTWARE MATTER AGAIN

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INTRODUCING CODEX PLUGIN FOR CLAUDE CODE

The Codex plugin for Claude Code gives users a simple way to pull Codex into their Claude Code workflow. It is useful for normal Codex reviews, a more adversarial review, and handing work off to Codex when a second pass from a different agent is required. The plugin delegates through the local Codex CLI and Codex app server, so it uses the system's existing local auth, configuration, environment, and MCP setup.

QWEN3.5-OMNI: SCALING UP, TOWARD NATIVE OMNI-MODAL AGI

Qwen3.5-Omni is a full omnimodal large language model that understands text, images, audio, and audio-visual content. It can process more than 10 hours of audio input and over 400 seconds of 720P audio-visual input at 1 FPS. The model is trained on a massive amount of text and visual data, and more than 100 million hours of audio-visual data. It supports speech recognition in 113 languages and dialects and speech generation in 36 languages and dialects.

MICROSOFT 365 COPILOT GETS CRITIQUE AND COUNCIL MODES

Microsoft 365 Copilot has introduced Critique and Council modes to enhance research capabilities. Critique uses a dual-model system to generate and refine research drafts, outperforming single-model solutions by 13.88% on the DRACO benchmark. Council allows parallel report generation using Anthropic and OpenAI models for impactful comparison and insight aggregation.

A MIRROR TEST FOR LLMS

The proposed "Mirror Test" assesses LLM self-awareness by challenging models to identify their own outputs without explicit cues. Testing reveals that Anthropic's Opus 4.6 model shows notable self-recognition capabilities due to its distinct token outputs, outperforming OpenAI's GPT models, which fail to recognize self-generated tokens. Despite indications of attempted self-marking, no LLM demonstrated consistent self-awareness, as none effectively communicated using message passing.

AI INFRASTRUCTURE ROADMAP: FIVE FRONTIERS FOR 2026

The first generation of AI was a world where progress meant bigger weights, more data, and stellar benchmarks. The landscape has now changed. Big labs are now designing AI that interfaces with the real world. Infrastructure optimized for scale and efficiency won't get us to the next phase. What's needed now is infrastructure for grounding AI in operational contexts, real-world experiences, and continuous learning.

AI APPLICATIONS AND VERTICAL INTEGRATION

AI application companies are increasingly becoming "full-stack" by vertically integrating either downward into the model layer or upward into the service layer. Companies like Cursor and Intercom achieve differentiation and cost efficiency by developing proprietary models, while others, such as Crosby AI and WithCoverage, focus on delivering end-to-end services. As AI capabilities evolve, these strategies allow companies to enhance performance, reduce costs, and offer comprehensive solutions.

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AGENT LABS: WORKLOAD-HARNESS FIT

Workloads vary by volume, value, verification property, time horizons, and other dimensions. This affects how agent labs focus their research efforts. The taxonomy of workloads governs which end markets justify training versus agent engineering. Labs also need to know what it actually costs to execute.

TIMESFM

TimesFM is a pretrained time-series foundation model for time-series forecasting. The model is based on pretraining a patched-decoder style attention model on a large time-series corpus. It works well across different forecasting history lengths, prediction lengths, and temporal granularities.

COMPOSER 2 TECHNICAL REPORT

Composer 2 introduced a two-stage training approach combining continued pretraining and reinforcement learning to improve long-horizon coding, achieving strong results on software engineering benchmarks.

PLENTIFUL, HIGH-PAYING JOBS IN THE AGE OF AI

AI might not eliminate high-paying human jobs due to potential constraints like limited computing power and energy usage. These constraints could lead to the principle of comparative advantage, where humans remain employed in roles despite AI's superior capabilities, because the opportunity cost of allocating AI to all tasks would be too high. As AI advances, human roles could change, but new tasks and increased wealth might sustain or even increase compensation for human jobs.

AUDIT CLAUDE PLATFORM ACTIVITY WITH THE COMPLIANCE API

The Compliance API on the Claude Platform enables admins to audit logs, monitor user activities, and integrate data into existing compliance systems. It tracks admin and system activities, as well as resource activities like file creation or deletion. To access it, organizations should contact their account team and create an admin API key.

CHINA'S DEEPSEEK SUFFERS RARE OUTAGE LASTING SEVERAL HOURS

China's DeepSeek experienced one of its longest outages since the launch of its R1 and V3 models, resolving only after more than eight hours.

STARCLOUD RAISES $170 MILLION SERIES A TO BUILD DATA CENTERS IN SPACE

Starcloud raised $170 million in Series A funding, valuing it at $1.1 billion, to develop data centers in space.

THE STATE OF CONSUMER AI. PART 3: TIME IS MONEY

🚀 TRANSFORMERS.JS V4

Transformers.js v4 features a new WebGPU Runtime that allows the same transformers.js code to be used across a wide variety of JavaScript environments.

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ADOBE ILLUSTRATOR NOW LETS YOU ROTATE 2D VECTORS IN 3D SPACE

Adobe Turntable is now fully available in Adobe Illustrator, allowing creators to instantly generate up to 74 editable multi-angle views—including full rotation and tilt—from a single vector illustration while preserving its 2D style. First previewed as Project Turntable at Adobe MAX 2024, the feature dramatically reduces work that once took hours to seconds, enabling animators and game designers to quickly produce character turnarounds, concept art, and production-ready assets.