Amazon’s recent AI browser agent

Good morning, AI enthusiasts. Amazon is the most recent tech giant to get into the AI agent game — releasing Nova Act, a browser-controlling system outperforming similar offerings from OpenAI and Anthropic.

Set to be introduced to hundreds of thousands of users via the upcoming Alexa+ revamp, will Nova Act be one among the primary mainstream moments for real-world agentic adoption?

In today’s AI rundown:

• Amazon’s Nova Act AI browser agent

• Runway’s recent Gen-4 video model

• Place your products into any scene

• AI turns brain signals into fast speech

• 4 recent AI tools & 4 job opportunities

LATEST DEVELOPMENTS

AMAZON

🤖 Amazon’s Nova Act AI browser agent

The Rundown: Amazon AGI Labs just unveiled Nova Act, an AI agent system that may control web browsers to perform tasks independently, alongside a developer SDK that permits the creation of agents able to completing multi-step tasks across the online.

The main points:

• Nova Act outperforms competitors like Claude 3.7 Sonnet and OpenAI’s Computer Use Agent on reliability benchmarks across browser tasks.

• The SDK allows devs to construct agents for browser actions like filling forms, navigating web sites, and managing calendars without constant supervision.

• The tech will power key features in Amazon’s upcoming Alexa+ upgrade, potentially bringing AI agents to hundreds of thousands of existing Alexa users.

• Nova Act was developed by Amazon’s SF-based AGI Lab, led by former OpenAI researchers David Luan and Pieter Abbeel, who joined the corporate last yr.

Why it matters: Amazon hasn’t been the primary name that involves mind for AI, but its massive Alexa user base will make it one among the primary to bring the tech to mainstream consumer applications. With current agents still error-prone, Nova Act’s real-world performance could make or break initial public trust in autonomous AI assistants.

TOGETHER WITH UNSTRUCTURED

⛽ Fuel MCP with data from anywhere

The Rundown: Connecting LLMs to real-world apps just got easier — and now it’s time to make your data just as accessible. On this live session, Unstructured shows how you can supercharge MCP with data from anywhere.

Join to learn:

• The important thing components of an MCP server and how you can construct and deploy one

• How MCP standardizes data access and enhances interoperability between AI tools

• integrate MCP with the Unstructured API for automated document processing

Register here to affix live or to get the recording.

RUNWAY

🎬 Runway’s recent Gen-4 video model

The Rundown: Runway just introduced Gen-4, a brand new AI model that brings increased consistency and control to video generations – with enhancements designed to be incorporated into skilled cinematic workflows.

The main points:

• Gen-4 shows strong consistency in characters, objects, and locations throughout video sequences, with improved physics and scene dynamics.

• The model can generate detailed 5-10 second videos at 1080p resolution, with features like ‘coverage’ for scene creation and consistent object placement.

• Runway describes the tech as “GVFX” (Generative Visual Effects), positioning it as a brand new production workflow for filmmakers and content creators.

• Early adopters include major entertainment corporations, with the tech getting used in projects like Amazon productions and Madonna’s concert visuals.

Why it matters: AI video has seen the identical leap in quality and control that AI images initially went through — and this next generation of models will go a great distance towards taking the tools from unreliable novelties to capabilities that may readily be incorporated into workflows for creating skilled movies, ads, and more.

AI TRAINING

🖼️ Place your products into any scene

The Rundown: On this tutorial, you’ll learn how you can use Google Gemini’s image editing capabilities to quickly insert your products into any scene with only a product image and easy text prompts.

Step-by-step:

1. Head over to Google AI Studio, select the Image Generation model, upload your base scene, and sort “Output this exact image” to ascertain the scene.

2. Upload your product image that you should place within the scene.

3. Write a selected placement instruction like “Add this product to the table within the previous image.”

4. Save the creations and use Google Veo 2 video generator to remodel your images into smooth product videos.

Pro tip: You may create a series of product placements showing different angles and uses before converting to video for more engaging content.

PRESENTED BY SANA

📈 Do real work with AI

The Rundown: Sana’s AI agent platform transforms your organization’s collective knowledge into powerful AI assistants that understand your enterprise context and automate complex workflows across departments.

With Sana, you possibly can:

• Create specialized AI agents for any team or role without writing code

• Bring all of your AI capabilities together under a single, intuitive interface

• Seamlessly integrate into existing tools and data sources with enterprise-ready security

Launch powerful AI agents in your teams.

AI RESEARCH

🧠 AI turns brain signals into fast speech

The Rundown: Researchers at UC Berkeley and UCSF developed an AI that may transform brain signals into speech with only a one-second delay — a breakthrough in brain-computer interfaces and a significant improvement over previous systems.

The main points:

• Signals are decoded from the brain’s motor cortex, converting intended speech into words almost immediately in comparison with the 8-second delay of earlier systems.

• The AI model can then generate speech using the patient’s pre-injury voice recordings, creating more personalized and natural-sounding output.

• The system also successfully handled words outside its training data, showing it learned fundamental speech patterns reasonably than simply memorizing responses.

• The approach is compatible with various brain-sensing methods, showing versatility beyond one specific hardware approach.

Why it matters: A complete recent world is coming for patients who’ve lost the flexibility to talk resulting from conditions like ALS, stroke, or severe paralysis. By solving the latency problem, this tech could dramatically improve quality of life and normalcy in communication for patients, restoring speech in a way previously thought not possible.

QUICK HITS

🛠️ Trending AI Tools

• 🤖 Gemini 2.5 Pro Exp – Google’s No. 1 ranked LLM, now available to free users

• 🗣️ ElevenLabs RAG – Equip your voice agent with large knowledge bases

• 🎥 Higgsfield DoP – AI video model with camera effects, motion, and control

• 👨‍💻 HeroUI Chat – Turn prompts or screenshots into production-ready UIs

💼 AI Job Opportunities

• 🅿️ Metropolis – Senior Operations Manager

• 🧑‍💻 Waymo – Software Engineer, Evaluation Infrastructure

• 🛡️ C3 AI – Site Reliability Engineer

• 🤝 Faculty – Senior People Partner

📰 Every thing else in AI today

OpenAI raised $40B from SoftBank and others at a $300B post-money valuation — marking the largest private funding round in history.

Sam Altman announced that OpenAI will release its first open-weights model since GPT-2 in the approaching months and host pre-release dev events to make it truly useful.

Sam Altman also shared that the corporate added 1M users in an hour resulting from 4o’s viral image capabilities, surpassing the expansion during ChatGPT’s initial launch.

Manus introduced a brand new beta membership program and mobile app for its viral AI agent platform, with subscription plans at $39 or $199 / mo with various usage limits.

Luma Labs released Camera Motion Concepts for its Ray2 video model, enabling users to regulate camera movements through basic natural language commands.

Apple pushed its iOS 18.4 update, bringing Apple Intelligence features to European iPhone users—alongside visionOS 2.4 with AI smarts for the Vision Pro.

Alphabet’s AI drug discovery spinoff Isomorphic Labs raised $600M in a funding round led by OpenAI investor Thrive Capital.

Zhipu AI launched “AutoGLM Rumination,” a free AI agent able to deep research and autonomous task execution — increasing China’s AI agent competition.

COMMUNITY

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See you soon,

Rowan, Joey, Zach, Alvaro, and Jason—The Rundown’s editorial team