Apple chases Meta’s AI glasses lead

Good morning, AI enthusiasts. Mark Zuckerberg said glasses are the “ideal form factor” for private AI, and Apple appears to be a believer.

The tech giant just reportedly scrapped its Vision Pro overhaul to go all-in on smart glasses that compete with Zuck’s successful Ray-Ban lineup. But with Apple’s AI issues already mounting, can they really compete?

In today’s AI rundown:

• Apple to hitch smart glasses race

• Mira Murati’s startup unveils first product

• Create knowledgeable headshot with Gemini

• Google’s AI agent masters Minecraft via simulation

• 4 latest AI tools, community workflows, and more

LATEST DEVELOPMENTS

OPENAI

🕶️ Apple to hitch smart glasses race

The Rundown: Apple just canceled plans to overhaul its Vision Pro headset, in keeping with a brand new report from Bloomberg — as an alternative shifting focus toward AI smart glasses projects designed to compete with Meta’s Ray-Ban lineup.

The small print:

• The corporate halted work on a lighter, cheaper Vision Pro variant planned for 2027, reassigning teams to fast-track development of several glasses designs.

• A 2027 release will connect with iPhones without its own screen, with one other version with an integrated display aiming to rival Meta’s Display glasses.

• The devices will reportedly lean on voice controls and AI features, with speakers, cameras, and health tracking powered by the upcoming Siri upgrade.

• Meta expanded its smart glasses line in September with a brand new Display and Neural Band, an athlete-focused Oakley option, and Ray-Bans Gen 2.

Why it matters: 2023’s Vision Pro release seems like an eternity ago within the AI world, however the hype was real — though a high price point, heavy design, and poor adoption have turned it into an afterthought. While Meta has shown a fit out there, Apple must stick to the Siri redesign before being considered a player within the AI wearable space.

TOGETHER WITH VANTA

📶 Scaling security for the AI era

The Rundown: Security teams are facing more buyer expectations, regulatory demands, and business risk — meaning compliance has to scale even faster. Join experts Ashish Rajan (CISO at Kaizenteq) and Faisal Khan (GRC Expert at Vanta) for a tactical conversation on maturing compliance, risk, and trust within the AI era.

On this live session, you’ll walk away with:

• A roadmap for prioritizing your next program improvements

• Top workflows for AI to assist extend your impact

• Techniques to prove value across product, sales, and your board

Register today.

THINKING MACHINES

⚙️ Mira Murati’s startup unveils first product

The Rundown: Pondering Machines Lab, the AI startup founded by ex-OpenAI CTO Mira Murati and several other distinguished researchers, introduced Tinker — an API that allows developers to customize frontier models without managing complex infrastructure.

The small print:

• Tinker supports fine-tuning each supervised and reinforcement learning methods on models like Meta’s Llama and Alibaba’s Qwen.

• The models might be adapted for specialised applications like solving math problems, analyzing chemistry data, and other tasks with easy code.

• Early users including Princeton, Stanford, and Berkeley, have applied Tinker to construct custom AI systems for math proofs, scientific reasoning, and research.

• The corporate is accepting applications for early access starting today at no initial cost, with plans to introduce paid tiers in the approaching weeks.

Why it matters: Creating AI models from scratch requires significant resources, but customizing existing models may very well be a greater path for many organizations. Murati and co. are betting that the longer term is just not to who builds the largest all-purpose AI, but to who could make it easiest to create tons of hyper-specialized ones.

AI TRAINING

📸 Create knowledgeable headshot with Gemini

The Rundown: On this tutorial, you’ll learn to rework an off-the-cuff selfie into a cultured skilled headshot using Gemini 2.5 Flash, with no expensive studio session required.

Step-by-step:

1. Go to gemini.google.com and toggle on “Create Images” at the highest of the prompt box

2. Upload your selfie and paste this prompt: “Transform my selfie right into a fresh but skilled image suitable for a social media profile. The lighting ought to be natural, flattering, and multi-dimensional. My head is barely tilted so it doesn’t look stiff, and it should appear like I’m in a contemporary, vibrant office with a blurred background”

3. Review the result and tweak the prompt if needed, and adjust the background description or lighting until it feels right

4. Download your finished headshot to make use of for LinkedIn, résumés, web sites, or speaking profiles

Pro tip: Mess around with different backgrounds like “warm café,” “neutral studio,” or “outdoor blurred park” to see which one aligns together with your skilled brand.

PRESENTED BY GLEAN

🤔 Is your organization paying the “AI tax”?

The Rundown: In The State of AI At Work in 2025, Glean explains how leading orgs are avoiding inefficiencies by centralizing their AI capabilities on unified platforms.

Inside, you’ll find out about:

• Where organizations are investing in 2025

• The hidden “AI tax” that arises from fragmented tools

• How centralized AI platforms cut through fragmentation, unifying governance, security, and reducing costs

Read it now and future-proof your org.

GOOGLE DEEPMIND

⛏️ Google’s AI agent masters Minecraft via simulation

The Rundown: Google DeepMind researchers unveiled Dreamer 4, an AI that masters video game tasks by training inside its own mental simulation, becoming the primary agent to gather Minecraft diamonds using only offline data, without touching the actual game.

The small print:

• Dreamer 4 trains by practicing in a predictive world model that simulates Minecraft’s physics in real-time, executing over 20k actions from visual input.

• The training is in stages: learning Minecraft from videos, adding decision-making abilities, and improving via practice — all without playing the actual game.

• The world model achieved latest highs in accuracy, with testers completing 14/16 tasks in Dreamer 4’s simulation in comparison with 5 in rival models like Oasis.

• Dreamer also beat OpenAI’s Minecraft VPT agent while learning from 100x less data, and outperformed systems built on Gemma vision-language models.

Why it matters: It’s at all times cool to still see games like Minecraft getting used to check next-level agentic training and capabilities, but Dreamer 4’s skills translate far beyond gaming — with learning through simulation opening safer and more efficient development paths for robots that may replace costly and sometimes dangerous IRL testing.

QUICK HITS

🛠️ Trending AI Tools

• 🎥 Sora 2 – OpenAI’s latest SOTA video generation model

• 🤖 GLM-4.6 – Open LLM with improved reasoning, agentic, coding capabilities

• ⚙️ Tinker – Pondering Machines’ API for fine-tuning language models

• 🗣️ Octave 2 – Hume AI’s next-gen multilingual text-to-speech model

📰 The whole lot else in AI today

Google unveiled Gemini-powered upgrades to its Home hardware, featuring AI Nest Cams and Doorbells, a redesigned app and Home Speaker, and a brand new paid plan.

OpenAI’s latest Sora social app surged to No. 3 on Apple’s App Store behind just Google Gemini and ChatGPT, following its viral invite-only launch.

Hume AI launched Octave 2, a brand new multilingual text-to-speech model that supports 11 languages and includes latest voice conversion and phoneme editing features.

Character AI removed Disney characters, including Elsa, Moana, Spider-Man, and Darth Vader, from its platform following a cease-and-desist from the corporate.

Pew Research Center found that 9% of U.S. adults are getting news from AI, with a 3rd of them finding it hard to find out what’s true and half getting inaccurate news.

Google launched latest visual search capabilities in AI Mode, allowing users to look with images or text and streamline shopping across over 50B product listings.

Zhipu AI released GLM-4.6, a brand new open-source LLM with a 200k context window that beats out Claude Sonnet 4 and DeepSeek-V3.2 across a series of benchmarks.

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 Cynthia L. in Jupiter, FL:

“I’m an instructional designer of eLearning courses and am constructing my personal portfolio. I’m using AI to develop scripts and quizzes, images and videos, TTS, and visual design briefs (for color palettes, typography, imagery style and iconography, layout and interface elements). I still should construct the course, but AI saves me so many hours of labor!”

How do you utilize AI? Tell us here.

🎓 Highlights: News, Guides & Events

• Read our last AI newsletter: Sora 2 breaks the web

• Read our last Tech newsletter: Microsoft launches ‘vibe working’ AI

• Read our last Robotics newsletter: Google’s robots learn to ‘think’ first

• Today’s AI tool guide: Create knowledgeable headshot with Gemini

• RSVP to our next workshop @ 4 PM EST Friday: Vibe coding for non-devs

See you soon,

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