Open letter demands ASI freeze

Good morning, AI enthusiasts. A brand new open letter demanding a halt to superintelligence development has emerged, and the signatures include some recent heavy hitters.

But while AI godfathers Bengio and Hinton join forces with tech figures, politicians, celebrities, and more, the absence of those from frontier labs speaks volumes — making it hard to stop a race when not one of the runners conform to pause.

In today’s AI rundown:

• Open letter demands halt to superintelligence development

• Amazon deploys AI-powered glasses for delivery drivers

• Create an email campaign generator with Construct mode

• Meta trims 600 jobs across AI division

• 4 recent AI tools, community workflows, and more

LATEST DEVELOPMENTS

ASI

🚨Open letter demands halt to superintelligence development

The Rundown: Public figures across tech and politics have signed a Way forward for Life Institute letter demanding governments prohibit superintelligence development until it’s proven controllable and the general public approves its creation.

The small print:

• The letter cites concerns including ‘human economic obsolescence,’ ‘losses of freedom, civil liberties, dignity, and control,’ and ‘potential human extinction.’

• Leadership from OpenAI, Google, Anthropic, xAI, and Meta were absent, though current OAI staffer Leo Gao was included within the signatories.

• The org also released data showing that 64% of Americans want ASI work halted until proven secure, with just 5% preferring unregulated advances.

• Others featured included ‘godfathers of AI’ Yoshua Bengio and Geoffrey Hinton, Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak, and Virgin’s Richard Branson.

Why it matters: This isn’t the primary public push against AI acceleration, however the calls appear to be getting louder. But with the entire frontier labs notably missing and a still vague notion of each what a “stop” to development looks like and how one can even define ASI, that is one other effort that will find yourself drawing more publicity than real motion.

TOGETHER WITH TRIPLE WHALE

📈 Supercharge your BFCM performance with AI Agents

The Rundown: During Black Friday and Cyber Monday, every second counts — and types that depend on manual evaluation are already behind. Learn how one can use AI agents to show this holiday season’s data chaos into decisive, profitable execution.

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• Detect performance shifts in minutes, not hours

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AMAZON

📦 Amazon deploys AI-powered glasses for delivery drivers

The Rundown: Amazon just introduced recent smartglasses for its delivery fleet that project navigation instructions and package info directly right into a driver’s vision, marking the e-commerce giant’s latest infusion of AI tech into its efficiency push.

The small print:

• The glasses display turn-by-turn directions, package scanning data, and delivery confirmations, eliminating constant phone checking during deliveries.

• Drivers wear a controller clipped to their vest containing swappable batteries for all-day operation, plus an emergency button for immediate assistance.

• Amazon said future versions will detect wrong-address drop-offs in real time, ID hazards like pets, and adjust display brightness for low-light conditions.

Why it matters: These glasses seem like the visual interface sci-fi has long predicted, with the ‘augmentation’ of human staff equipped with real-time data and insights. Efficiency gains are clear, but workplace surveillance and constant digital guidance concerns could determine if this becomes standard across industries.

AI TRAINING

📧 Create an email campaign generator with Construct mode

The Rundown: Construct a whole email campaign generator using Google AI Studio’s Construct Mode, turning a straightforward idea right into a working web app with copywriting and image generation in minutes.

Step-by-step:

1. Open Google AI Studio chat mode with Gemini 2.5 Pro and prompt: “Create a product requirements doc for an email campaign generator tool. List key features, user flow in bullet points under 100 words”

2. Click “Construct” tab, enable “AI Powered Chatbot” and “Generate Images with a Prompt,” then paste: “Construct an email campaign generator based on this PRD: [your PRD]. Include chatbot for copy refinements and image generation for 3 campaign visuals”

3. Hit “Construct” and wait 1–2 minutes, then click “Preview” to check with inputs like “Holiday gadget sale” — confirm it generates 3 subject lines, HTML email body, and three banner images

4. Refine outputs by prompting “Make subject lines more urgent” or “Regenerate images with warmer colours” within the chatbot

5. Click “Share” icon, toggle “Publish your App,” copy the link to share along with your team — anyone can generate campaigns without dev skills

Pro tip: Repurpose this workflow for other marketing tools by swapping the PRD for a social media caption generator, blog post outliner, or ad copy brainstormer. The identical process works for any content creation tool you would like.

PRESENTED BY IBM

💡3 actions to assist boost agentic AI impact

The Rundown: Businesses face many challenges going from AI ambition to implementation. Success requires greater than adopting recent technology. It involves intentionally aligning AI with workflows, data, and goals. As AI evolves right into a business-wide opportunity, leaders must ensure the correct AI is applied to the correct challenges.

Explore IBM’s playbook on 3 challenges & approaches to spice up agentic AI impact:

• Finding your AI problem

• Creating a transparent AI plan

• Integrating AI with the tools you employ on a regular basis

Read the playbook.

META

✂️ Meta trims 600 jobs across AI division

The Rundown: Meta just eliminated roughly 600 positions across its AI division, based on a memo from Chief AI Officer Alexandr Wang — with the corporate’s FAIR research arm reportedly impacted but its superintelligence group TBD Lab left intact.

The small print:

• Wang told employees the reductions would create smaller teams requiring fewer approvals, with those cut encouraged to use to other Meta positions.

• Cuts targeted Meta‘s FAIR research unit, product teams, and infrastructure groups, while sparing TBD Lab, which Wang oversees directly.

• The corporate has continued its aggressive recruiting from rivals, recently hiring OAI scientist Ananya Kumar and TML co-founder Andrew Tulloch.

• The moves follow friction earlier this month when FAIR researchers, including AI pioneer Yann LeCun, pushed back on recent publication review requirements.

Why it matters: Meta’s superintelligence poaching and major restructure was the talk of the summer, but there was tension brewing between the brand new hires and old guard. With Wang and co. trying to move fast and pave a wholly recent path for the tech giant’s AI plans, the normal FAIR researchers could also be caught within the crossfire.

QUICK HITS

🛠️ Trending AI Tools

• 🌐 Atlas – OpenAI’s recent AI-integrated web browser

• 🤖 Manus 1.5 – Agentic system with faster task completion, coding improvements, and more

• ❤️ Lovable – Recent Shopify integration for constructing online stores via prompts

• 🎥 Runway – Recent model fine-tuning for customizing generative video models

📰 Every part else in AI today

Anthropic is reportedly negotiating a multibillion-dollar cloud computing cope with Google that might provide access to custom TPU chips, constructing on Google’s existing $3B investment.

Reddit filed a lawsuit against Perplexity and three other data-scraping corporations, accusing them of circumventing protections to steal copyrighted content for AI training.

Tencent open-sourced Hunyuan World 1.1, an AI model that creates 3D reconstructed worlds from videos or multiple photos in seconds on a single GPU.

Conversational AI startup Sesame opened beta access for its iOS app featuring a voice assistant that may “search, text, and think,” also announcing a brand new $250M raise.

Google announced that its Willow quantum chip achieved a significant milestone by running an algorithm on hardware 13,000x faster than top supercomputers.

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 Anonymous in Loveland, CO:

“As a brand new product developer (physical products), I even have all the time desired to draft and file my very own patents. Using each ChatGPT and Gemini in tandem, I even have been in a position to generate my very own claims sets in addition to skilled line drawings. Once complete, I ask the LLMs to act as my ‘seasoned patent attorney’ and review every little thing for accuracy. I then turn it over to my attorney for final review, for now.”

How do you employ AI? Tell us here.

🎓 Highlights: News, Guides & Events

• Read our last AI newsletter: OpenAI enters browser war with Atlas

• Read our last Tech newsletter: ‘ChatGPT for doctors’ hits $6B

• Read our last Robotics newsletter: Unitree’s ‘bionic face’ humanoid

• Today’s AI tool guide: Create an email campaign generator with Construct

• RSVP to our next workshop @ 4PM EST Friday: Learn context engineering

See you soon,

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