Alterego debuts “near-telepathic” AI wearable

Good morning, AI enthusiasts. Imagine texting, coding, or having full conversations without moving your lips or making a sound — an MIT spinout just made it possible with a ‘near-telepathic’ AI wearable that reads your intention to talk.

With tiny cameras tracking muscle movements to decode silent speech “on the speed of thought,” Alterego’s viral demo is likely to be a glance right into a future type of how we interact with each AI and the world around us.

In today’s AI rundown:

• Alterego’s “near-telepathic” AI wearable

• Microsoft eyes Anthropic’s Claude for Office 365

• Create miniature product photos with Nano Banana

• Claude gains latest file creation capabilities

• 4 latest AI tools, community workflows, and more

LATEST DEVELOPMENTS

AI WEARABLES

🤫 Alterego’s “near-telepathic” AI wearable

The Rundown: Boston startup and MIT Media Lab spinoff Alterego just introduced a “near-telepathic” wearable that uses AI to detect subtle movements and interpret a user’s silent communication “on the speed of thought” without speaking out loud.

The main points:

• The headset uses tiny cameras to detect small muscle movements in a user’s jaw and throat when interested by speaking, turning signals into commands.

• The demo shows founder Arnav Kapur completing tasks like coding, texting, visual queries, and direct speaking with other wearers using “Silent Sense.”

• The team claims Alterego works in noisy areas, and might handle multilingual speech, visual cues, and each mouthed and motionless “intent to talk.”

• The project originated within the MIT Media Lab in 2018, but spun out as a for-profit startup in 2025 — though no timelines for availability were provided.

Why it matters: The quote that involves mind is Arthur C. Clarke’s “any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” The capabilities demoed are what we’d expect from invasive BCI devices, not a wearable. This tech is a possible future form for a way we interact with each AI and the world around us.

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MICROSOFT AND ANTHROPIC

📊 Microsoft eyes Anthropic’s Claude for Office 365

The Rundown: Microsoft is set to achieve a deal to integrate Anthropic’s AI models into Office 365 alongside OpenAI’s tech, in keeping with The Information, marking the software giant’s first major AI diversification away from its OpenAI partnership.

The main points:

• Microsoft reportedly found Claude Sonnet 4 models to be more capable at creating spreadsheets and PowerPoint presentations than OpenAI’s GPT-5.

• The rumored deal comes as Anthropic rolls out latest file creation capabilities for Claude, including PDFs, PowerPoints, and spreadsheets (more on this below).

• The corporate is prone to access Anthropic’s models through Amazon Web Services, paying its cloud rival for usage despite having free access to OpenAI.

Why it matters: While Microsoft has publicly shot down any negativity surrounding its high-profile AI partnership, its actions speak louder — and moves like releasing in-house models and a possible Anthropic partnership show the tech giant’s approach is becoming more pragmatic and proactive than loyal to a potentially hostile partner.

AI TRAINING

🎨 Create miniature product photos with Nano Banana

The Rundown: On this tutorial, you’ll learn learn how to use Nano Banana to generate luxury miniature product photos held between fingers, creating scroll-stopping visuals perfect for e-commerce and social media ads.

Step-by-step:

1. Go to the Gemini app, locate the tools menu, and toggle on “Create Image” (Nano Banana can also be available through Freepik or Adobe Firefly)

2. Use this prompt template: “A high-resolution promoting photo of a [PRODUCT] held between thumb and index finger. Clean white background, soft shadows, studio lighting. Product is hyper-detailed, accurate, and small. Shallow depth of field. Emulates business minimalist luxury photography”

3. Test with luxury items first — Hermès Birkin bags, Cartier watches, or mix it up with Jeep Rubicons and architectural landmarks just like the CN Tower

4. Download and use directly in your store or ads — keep the fingers for scale reference or erase them for floating product shots

5. Upload to your e-commerce store, social campaigns, or product mockups

Pro Tip: Add a small disclaimer in your product page in regards to the scale and actual sizing.

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• Start with 60 high-quality articles a month

• Get indexed on Google in as little as 2 weeks

• Be featured in ChatGPT and Perplexity answers

• Enjoy full automation for topics, writing, and publishing

Get leads from Google and ChatGPT on Autopilot.

ANTHROPIC

📊 Claude gains latest file creation capabilities

The Rundown: Anthropic rolled out latest productivity features to Claude, including the flexibility to create and edit Excel sheets, Word documents, PowerPoint slides, and PDFs directly in chat, difficult OpenAI’s dominance within the workplace AI space.

The main points:

• Claude gains a non-public computing environment where it could actually write and run code to create files, turning data into reports with charts, evaluation, and formulas.

• Users also can convert between formats, turning PDF reports into slide decks or meeting notes into formatted documents.

• The feature is rolling out to Max, Team, and Enterprise subscribers, with Pro users gaining access in the approaching weeks.

• Anthropic really useful starting with “straightforward” tasks, also warning of potential data risks with giving Claude access to the web.

Why it matters: The AI work productivity wars are coming directly into our files, which is a fully massive unlock for the tools many employees use probably the most. Similar to we’ve seen with AI coding tools, using Excel and spreadsheets is increasingly going to change into a straightforward natural language conversation over understanding complex formulas.

QUICK HITS

🛠️ Trending AI Tools

• 📈 Unframe – Scale AI efficiently and securely with enterprise solutions tailored to your unique business*

• 📓 NotebookLM – Latest tools like flashcards, quizzes, and redesigned reports

• 🎨 Ideogram Styles – Create consistent aesthetics and stylized typography

• 🎆 HunyuanImage 2.1 – Tencent’s latest open-source text-to-image model

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📰 All the things else in AI today

Apple was quiet on AI updates at its hardware event, with the one interesting update being Apple Intelligence-powered live translation and health monitoring features.

ByteDance Seed introduced Seedream 4.0, a brand new image generation and editing model that competes with Nano Banana with 4K outputs and multimodal capabilities.

Baidu launched ERNIE X1.1, a brand new reasoning model that nears GPT-5 and Gemini 2.5 Pro in benchmarks with significant hallucination reduction.

Anthropic released an official report confirming issues in response quality over the past month, reiterating that the corporate “never intentionally degrades model quality.”

Drugmaking giant Eli Lilly announced the discharge of TuneLab, an AI drug discovery platform trained on over $1B price of its proprietary research data.

Tencent open-sourced HunyuanImage 2.1, a brand new image generation model with high-quality realism, prompt following, and text rendering.

Meta is entering a $140M multi-year partnership with Black Forest Labs to make use of its AI image tech, coming on the heels of the corporate’s recent deal with Midjourney.

Google added latest capabilities to its Veo 3 and Veo 3 Fast models, including vertical video outputs, 1080p HD resolution, and a 50% decrease in price.

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 Chiara M. in Belgium:

“I help my students learn languages, and to enhance their listening, I take advantage of original content on YouTube. I take the unique bit, get the transcription, after which I get an AI version with ElevenLabs where the speed is comparable, but words are clearly pronounced… I also submit the notes of my classes into Notebook LM and get an audio version for my students to revise either of their native language in the event that they’re beginners or within the goal language in the event that they’re more advanced.”

How do you employ AI? Tell us here.

🎓 Highlights: News, Guides & Events

• Read our last AI newsletter: ‘Critterz’ tests Hollywood’s AI takeover

• Read our last Tech newsletter: Apple’s ‘thinnest’ iPhone’ ever debuts

• Read our last Robotics newsletter: Tesla offers Musk $1T pay raise

• Today’s AI tool guide: Create mini products with Nano Banana

• RSVP to next workshop @4PM Friday: Construct reliable AI assistants

See you soon,

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