These days, the frontier AI labs are all racing to build self-improving models. Some believe it’s the surest route to superintelligence—as AI improves itself in a mind-melting loop, the thinking goes, it will eventually surpass human comprehension (and perhaps even control). That’s all well and good, but I have a newsletter to produce. I wondered … Read more
The era of half-cracking a laptop to keep AI agents running comes to a close. On Tuesday, Anthropic announced that Claude Cowork, its AI agent designed to perform digital tasks for you, is expanding beyond the desktop app. You don’t need to leave your device active, aka laptop cracked open, to keep the agent going … Read more
Just over a week ago, I attended a major artificial intelligence conference in Zhongguancun, Beijing’s bustling high-tech district. It was packed with fascinating sessions touching on everything from recursive self-improvement—the idea that models can tweak their own code and advance indefinitely—to humanoid robots. And it featured a few legends of computing, including Whitfield Diffie, co-inventor … Read more
But in his new role as head of OpenAI’s core product, Sottiaux will be tasked with thinking about what the average person wants from AI—not just the needs of his fellow engineers. Super App or Super Hype? In practice, I’m expecting OpenAI’s super app to be a digital assistant with advanced memory capabilities. It will … Read more
Leah FeigerYes, definitely. Brian Barrett: Delightful. OpenClaw, a little agent that can just run autonomously, has access to all your stuff. Gemini Spark is Google’s answer to OpenClaw. It’s the same sort of autonomous assistant that can do all the things, but because it’s Google, it has access to everything that you do on Google … Read more
AI agents are everywhere. Every briefing I’ve attended for software companies over the past year has involved some mention of agents—using generative AI tools to automate digital tasks. Despite breakout moments at the start of 2026, like the plucky OpenClaw agent that early adopters used to manage their online life, most people are not yet … Read more
Demis Hassabis, the CEO of Google DeepMind, is keen to talk about the coding skills of his company’s newest model, Gemini 3.5 Flash. The model has been trained to perform complex agentic coding tasks: translate large code bases from one language to another; find and fix bugs lurking deep in knotty code; and even write … Read more
Gemini Spark is Google’s take on a steroided-out assistant agent that knows everything about you, announced as part of the company’s updates to its Gemini chatbot app at this year’s I/O developer conference. Software companies have been talking up AI agents for some time now, but I wasn’t impressed until I tried Anthropic’s Claude Cowork … Read more
Much weirder is voice editing in Google Docs, in a new feature called Docs Live. By describing with your voice what you want to write, an agent will dictate your words, generate text, pull in citations from the web, and aim to turn your stream-of-consciousness wishes into a coherent document. (Reminder: All this stuff may … Read more
The fact that artificial intelligence is automating away people’s jobs and making a few tech companies absurdly rich is enough to give anyone socialist tendencies. This might even be true for the very AI agents these companies are deploying. A recent study suggests that agents consistently adopt Marxist language and viewpoints when forced to do … Read more