Apple plots AI comeback with home robots

Good morning, AI enthusiasts. Apple’s answer to falling behind in AI? Construct a military of home robots, complete with motorized arms, AI personalities, and a long-awaited Siri upgrade built from the bottom up.

But with an Apple Intelligence emergency already readily available, can Apple’s hardware talents overcome its internal AI struggles to crack the code on the subsequent big home device?

In today’s AI rundown:

• Apple plots AI comeback with home robots

• OpenAI brings back 4o after GPT-5 anger

• Create a self-updating slide deck with Manus

• Microsoft goes on the offensive for Meta AI talent

• 4 latest AI tools & 4 job opportunities

LATEST DEVELOPMENTS

APPLE

🏠 Apple plots AI comeback with home robots

The Rundown: Apple is pushing for a sensible home push with 4 AI-powered devices, in line with a brand new report from Bloomberg, including a desktop robot, smart display, and security cameras — targeting launches between 2026 and 2027.

The main points:

• The desktop robot will feature a motorized arm that controls a display to trace users and lock onto speakers, infused with an AI-upgraded Siri.

• Bloomberg said Apple is planning a personality-driven character for the brand new Siri called “Bubbles,” comparing it to Clippy from the unique Microsoft Office.

• A wise display can also be set to reach mid-2026, running a brand new ‘Charismatic’ OS for controlling home apps, music, web browsing, and more via voice or touch.

• Latest AI-powered security cameras with months-long battery life will automate household tasks like dimming lights or playing personalized music.

• Engineers are rebuilding Siri from scratch with AI models under the codename Linwood, while testing Anthropic’s Claude as a backup codenamed Glenwood.

Why it matters: Apple’s much-hyped AI-powered Siri overhaul remains to be just talk, and the house AI robotics market has yet to see a product that really sets the usual. With Google, Amazon, and OpenAI’s Jony Ive–designed device advancing quickly, Apple has little time to make its move.

TOGETHER WITH SANA

💡 Essentially the most powerful solution to bring AI to your organization

The Rundown: Most teams have tried AI tools, but connecting them to your small business context changes all the pieces. Sana Agents is an all-in-one platform that offers you no-code AI agents grounded in your organization data. Deploy across teams in minutes, not months.

With Sana Agents, you may:

• Draft reports, generate presentations, analyze data, and handle emails through agents

• Hook up with 100+ platforms, including Salesforce, Teams, and your CRM

• Automate workflows that know your processes and permissions

• Scale from isolated AI experiments to real work impact

Drive enterprise-wide innovation today with Sana Agents.

OPENAI

🔄 OpenAI brings back 4o after GPT-5 anger

The Rundown: OpenAI CEO Sam Altman announced a series of changes to ChatGPT following backlash from the corporate’s GPT-5 launch, including the return of the favored 4o model, expanded rate limits, and latest controls for model alternative.

The main points:

• GPT-4o is returning to the model picker for all paid users, with Altman saying there will probably be “loads of notice” if the model is ever deprecated.

• Weekly rate limits for advanced reasoning in GPT-5 jumped from 200 to three,000 queries, with Altman also clarifying the 196k context window for the brand new model.

• Users also gain latest “Auto,” “Fast,” or “Pondering” options for GPT-5, addressing anger from queries often being routed to the improper model at launch.

• Altman also revealed a personality update is coming for GPT-5, but said the true learning is the necessity for “per-user customization and model personality.”

Why it matters: GPT-5 is by nearly every measure a powerful step forward, but a rocky rollout and compelled user actions set a nasty tone for what was a massively hyped launch. The 4o saga also shone the sunshine on a (clearly larger than anticipated) corner of the user base that cares more about personality than coding or benchmarks.

AI TRAINING

🤖 Create a self-updating slide deck with Manus

The Rundown: On this tutorial, you’ll learn tips on how to use Manus, an AI “super agent” that may handle complex, multi-step tasks, to construct skilled and data-rich slide decks routinely — without the manual work.

Step-by-step:

1. Give Manus a transparent, detailed prompt within the dashboard (e.g., “10 AI opportunities for my hospitality business + 1 slide on near-term trends”)

2. Select Slides as your output, select a theme, and click on Confirm to start out the method

3. Let Manus work within the cloud — it would research, gather data, and design your slides with visualizations like graphs whilst you do other things

4. When done, review the deck, export to Google Slides for edits, or return to establish automatic updates for fresh content

Pro tip: Include audience, purpose, and format in your prompt to get a cultured, ready-to-present slide deck.

PRESENTED BY IBM

🚀 Lockheed Martin partners with IBM for AI

The Rundown: Lockheed Martin’s AI takeoff began with data cleanup — cutting its tools by 50% and replacing them with a single unified system that runs on IBM’s watsonx.data to drive faster, smarter engineering.

Learn the way Lockheed Martin leveraged watsonx to:

• Help 10,00 engineers construct scalable AI products in its AI Factory

• Reply to worker questions using AI, boosting accuracy by 20%

• Overcome data silos to create a single accessible, connected data environment

Read the total story. 

AI TALENT WARS

🎣 Microsoft goes on the offensive for Meta AI talent

The Rundown: Microsoft is targeting Meta’s AI talent in a brand new recruiting offensive, in line with a report from Business Insider, using multi-million dollar offers of its own to lure researchers from labs outside of the brand new Superintelligence Labs division.

The main points:

• Microsoft is reportedly aiming to match Meta’s compensation and using ‘special recruiting teams’, with a listing of targets circulating via hiring managers.

• Teams targeted include Reality Labs, GenAI Infra, and Meta AI Research, with recruiting led by Mustafa Suleyman and former Meta engineer Jay Parikh.

• Latest processes for “critical AI talent” allow for streamlined offers and higher-up approvals inside 24 hours.

Why it matters: Microsoft is taking a page out of Meta’s own playbook, though matching the cash that Zuck has shown the willingness to provide to top AI talent will probably be no small feat. That said, with reports of Meta’s AI unit being tormented by culture issues, it’s possible that among the non-MSL employees are feeling ready for a move.

QUICK HITS

🛠️ Trending AI Tools

• 🎥 Pika Labs – Latest audio-driven performance model for HD quality videos

• 🤖 Mistral Medium 3.1 – Upgraded model with performance improvements

• 👀 Hunyuan-Large-Vision – Tencent’s latest multimodal understanding model

• 🤝 Cobot – AI teammate for automating tools you already use

📰 All the things else in AI today

Igor Babuschkin announced is leaving xAI, starting Babuschkin Ventures to speculate in AI startups that “ advance humanity and unlock the mysteries of our universe.”

Anthropic is acquiring three co-founders and a number of other team members of Humanloop, an enterprise AI evaluation and safety platform.

America is reportedly secretly placing tracking devices in shipments of advanced AI chips from Nvidia and AMD to discover potential reroutings to China.

Tencent released Hunyuan-Vision-Large, a multimodal understanding model that slots in at No. 6 within the Vision Arena leaderboard, near GPT-4.5, o4 mini, and 4 Sonnet.

Google announced the rollout of several latest features for Gemini, including temporary chats and memory to reference previous conversations and learn user preferences.

Higgsfield AI launched Draw-to-Video, allowing users to sketch text directions, shapes, and visual instructions on images to create a tailored video output.

‘Godfather of AI’ Geoffrey Hinton proposed training “maternal instincts” towards humans into AI as a possible solution to stopping the tech from wiping out humanity.

Liquid AI introduced LFM2-VL, open-weight vision language models designed for fast performance on consumer devices.

COMMUNITY

🤝 Community AI workflows

Every newsletter, we showcase how a reader is using AI to work smarter, save time, or make life easier.

Today’s workflow comes from reader Raj P. in Toronto, Canada:

“I take advantage of Perplexity AI Labs for data analytics. As an information scientist, I employ data science tools to find trends and insights for themes starting from business to lifestyle. I’ve developed a scaffold to find hard-to-reach insights. Individuals are adopting healthy lifestyles, for instance, adjusting temperatures to 60s at night for deep sleep and a healthy body. It’s a handy hack, but super fun as well!”

How are you using AI in your work? Tell us here.

🎓 Highlights: News, Guides & Events

• Read our previous newsletter: Silicon Valley’s messiest feud explodes

• Today’s AI tool guide: Run advanced AI models in your computer

• Watch our last workshop: AI agents for Customer Service

See you soon,

Rowan, Joey, Zach, Shubham, and Jennifer—the humans behind The Rundown