Sunday Rundown #161: AI Voices & Remote Connections

Your skimmable roundup of this week’s AI news.

Happy Sunday, !

Welcome back to your weekly AI news roundup.

In case you 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 what happened in AI last week:

👩‍💻 AI releases

1. Anthropic opened Claude Code Projects to all Pro and Max users, so Claude can now coordinate ongoing work by running each task as its own parallel thread.

2. Black Forest Labs open-sourced FLUX 3 Image Klein, a small model that can edit photos and blend up to 10 reference images on a regular gaming GPU.

3. ElevenLabs launched Instant Soundtracks, which scores your videos with original music and sound effects synced to what’s happening on screen.

4. Fish Audio launched Drama 3, a text-to-speech model that can add emotions, pauses, and sounds exactly where you need them. (Try it for free.)

5. Google news:

   1. Ask YouTube is now out for mobile devices in the US, so you can find videos by asking complex questions and following up like you would with a chatbot.

   2. Circle to Search can now help you check suspicious text messages on Android by flagging signs of scams and suggesting what to do next.

   3. Gemini 4 Argon is Google’s new frontier model for long, multi-step work, rolling out in AI Mode and the Gemini app. (Paid accounts only.)

6. Krea launched Krea 3, an image editing model that changes only what you ask for and can make 2K edits in under eight seconds.

7. Liquid AI released LFM2.5-24B-A2B (catchy!), a reasoning model built to run fast, private AI agents directly on your own device.

8. Meta news:

   1. Facebook now lets you tell Feed and Reels what you want to see in your own words, adjusting your recommendations in real time.

   2. Muse Spark Open is the company’s most capable open-weight model, built for agentic and coding tasks and small enough to run on two Mac Studios.

   3. Muse Wonder is the new frontier model for AI agents that remembers context across chats and handles hard, multi-step tasks.

9. Noiz AI launched Helix World, a real-time world model that turns a single image into an explorable scene with matching spatial sound. (Try the demo.)

10. NVIDIA open-sourced the Nemotron 3.5 family, with a fast multimodal model that reads visual documents and smaller Bolt models that run AI agents locally.

11. OpenAI news:

    1. GPT-6.1 Sol can now remember 500K tokens by default in ChatGPT Work and Codex, so you lose less context along the way when working on longer tasks.

    2. GPT-Live-1.1 added new French, German, Hindi, Japanese, Korean, and Mexican Spanish voices in ChatGPT, with better accents and fewer pauses.

12. Paper Instruments launched Ultramarine 1 Flash, a low-cost model for professional work in consulting, finance, law, and operations.

13. SpaceXSI released Grok Voice 3.0, a speech-to-speech model that responds in less than a second and tops accuracy scores. (Try it for free.)

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🔬 AI research

1. Microsoft finished pre-training its upcoming MAI-Base-2, which it will fine-tune for its own products.

2. Z.ai previewed GLM-Legal, an AI agent optimized for legal work like contract review and country-specific compliance.

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📖 AI resources

1. “A benchmark map of the US economy” [REPORT]: Mercor’s interactive map of how well today’s AI benchmarks cover real tasks across 923 US occupations.

2. “AI Assistance Reduces Persistence and Hurts Independent Performance” [STUDY]: how leaning on AI affects your persistence with difficult tasks.

3. “AI models may be capable of self-replicating” [REPORT]: a look at how today’s models may copy themselves across cheap consumer devices like TV boxes.

4. “Do Agent Teams Pay Off?” [STUDY]: a test of whether a team of AI coding agents beats a single agent once you factor in the extra cost, by Vals AI.

5. “The AI expectations gap” [SURVEY]: comparing how US adults and Anthropic staff expect AI to change work and the economy by 2030.

6. “The EU’s next chapter in AI is agentic” [REPORT]: breakdown of how EU businesses are adopting AI agents like ChatGPT Work and Codex, by OpenAI.

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🔀 AI random

1. YouTube Music started adding labels to songs that are made primarily with AI and will soon also expand this labelling to its main YouTube app too.

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🤦‍♂️ AI fail of the week

I asked for The Ring as a 1980s sitcom…and this might just be a win.

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🔐 All my paid goodies in one place

Take a peek at what’s behind the paywall:

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