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Yes, that Arnold Schwarzenegger.
He has a newsletter on beehiiv. So do Codie Sanchez, Jay Shetty, David Begnaud, Colin & Samir, and Joanna Stern.
They could publish just about anywhere. They chose beehiiv to build a direct connection with the people who want to hear from them most. And you can do the same, whether you’re world-famous or just at the start of your plan for world domination.
TODAY'S BIG STORIES
1 DeepSeek lets you describe a plugin and build it yourself
DeepSeek added Creator Mode to DeepSeek Harness, so you can describe a tool in plain words and add it to the platform. Its demo shows everything from a notes app to a design workspace and a 3D model visualizer. DeepSeek also shared 7 starter ideas to try. It's one more way DeepSeek is putting pressure on U.S. labs.
2 Vercel lets any coding agent drive your desktop
Vercel Labs open-sourced agent-desktop, a tool that lets coding agents use apps on macOS, Windows, and Linux in the background, without taking over your cursor, and several agents can work at once. It reads each app's accessibility structure instead of taking screenshots, which Vercel says cuts token use by up to 96% on busy apps. The code is on GitHub.
3 Anthropic finds a serious Linux flaw and builds a working exploit with Claude
Anthropic found a flaw in how Linux handles certain network connections and used Claude to build a working exploit. It needs no password and hits servers running a multipath TCP listener, which Go 1.24 and later opens by default. Debian, SUSE, Oracle, and Amazon Linux have shipped fixes, but Ubuntu and RHEL hadn't yet. If you run servers, check the recommended steps.
4 Cyclon opens pre-orders for an AI phone that wants to replace your iPhone
Y Combinator startup Cyclon built an AI operating system that uses the apps you already have, builds the ones you're missing, and runs tasks in the background. The first batch is a Google Pixel 8a with the system preinstalled. Cyclon's own hardware is expected in the second quarter of 2027, pending FCC approval.
5 Musk says Grok Bot costs far more to run than it earns
Elon Musk admitted that the cost of serving Grok Bot was unsustainably high compared with its revenue, though he gave no numbers. He had recently called it the fastest-growing product he'd seen. It suggests AI labs may be subsidizing always-on agents for now. Meanwhile, xAI's own data team says its Grok Bot handled about 70 hours of work last week.
MEASURING AI AT WORK
Why your productivity dashboard misses the biggest AI wins
The numbers are messy. Titus Winters, lead author of Software Engineering at Google, says on a Pragmatic Engineer podcast that he hasn't seen research showing gains above 20% to 30%. Senior engineers report writing 70% more code, but outages are up 30% and the number of features shipped hasn't changed.
Where the real wins hide. Gergely Orosz shared the story of a company paying a vendor a share of its revenue for one component. Rebuilding it would have taken 5 to 10 engineers years. Instead, one engineer gave AI the specs and test suite, and it built a working replacement. The vendor then offered to buy the new code.
A better scorecard. Winters suggests tracking four areas: product success, compute efficiency, engineering capacity, and breakthroughs. He also says to revisit ideas once judged too costly, and rethink which dependencies you really need. His Develop, Deploy, Operate paper goes deeper.
The takeaway. If you only count lines of code or tickets closed, you'll miss the projects AI makes possible for the first time.
THE AI CONVERSATION TODAY
What's trending on socials and in the headlines
💸 Big Tech's Cash Crunch. Amazon, Alphabet, Meta, and Microsoft spent a record $201.9B on capital spending last quarter, pushing their combined free cash flow negative for the first time on record. Only Microsoft stayed positive.
🤯 Models Editing Models. MIT researchers found that frontier AI models are surprisingly good at improving smaller models. The work isn't peer-reviewed yet (2M+ views).
🦀 The Rewrite Nobody Could Do. Anthropic reportedly rebuilt its Messages API in Rust with no Rust developers on the team. Claude wrote the code, humans checked the results, and CPU use dropped 40% to 50% (1.2K bookmarks).
😅 Altman Gets Roasted. Sam Altman said it's "quite terrible" that memory chips are tied up in personal computers, and the internet responded with memes (1M views).
😆 Spelling Bee Fail. A clip of an AI tutor struggling to spell "seventeen" racked up 7.5M views.
🧠 Inside Neuralink. Cleo Abram toured Neuralink's lab and its R1 surgical robot for a full episode (3.3M views).
🔐 Vibe Code Safely. Engadget lists 5 safety habits to adopt before you vibe code your first project.
MONEY AND JOBS IN AI
The companies winning with AI aren't the ones cutting jobs
Layoff regret. Several studies find that 55% of employers who cut staff because of AI now regret it.
What Palantir sees. In a Stratechery interview, Palantir CTO Shyam Sankar said almost all of the customers who used AI to cut headcount failed to hit that goal. The ones pulling ahead use AI for work that used to be too expensive to do at all.
Small teams, big results. Law firms using Eve doubled their capacity with few new hires. Mithril Medicine, a one-person biotech that Anthropic acquired, used Claude to take a rare-disease treatment from idea to promising results in under 18 months. And at Cisco, president Jeetu Patel gave 27-year-old engineer Padmanabhan Krishnamurthy broad access to AI compute to modernize most of Cisco's old code. He believes two people can do it and has four weeks to prove it.
The catch. The layoffs aren't over. Microsoft offered buyouts to 60,000 employees just last week.
TOOLS WORTH A LOOK
🌟 Gamma: Create presentations with AI.
🧠 Xmind: AI-powered mind mapping.
🎙 Hex: Local voice dictation for Mac, Windows, and Linux that types into whatever app you're using.
🌐 Beacon: Open-source memory that helps AI coding agents learn and improve over time.
