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📿 Meta made a Tamagotchi-like wearable
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- At its Connect event on Wednesday, Meta showed off the Muse Charm, a keychain-sized puck with a Tamagotchi-like animated avatar that lets you talk to the company's Muse AI without pulling out a phone.
- Roughly the size of an Apple Watch, the device carries a real-time voice model and avatar, and starts listening when you tap a fingerprint sensor in the corner, letting you chat or show it your surroundings.
- Mark Zuckerberg shared few other details, saying only that Meta plans to have the Muse Charm on sale by the holiday season and would reveal more later this year.
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🎙️ Gemini can now clone voices in 30 seconds
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- Google's new Gemini 3.8 Flash TTS can recreate a person's voice from just a 30-second audio sample, so long as the voice owner supplies a recorded verbal consent that the system verifies against the speaker.
- Rolling out from today in the Gemini API and Google AI Studio, Flash TTS also builds voices from plain-language descriptions across 100-plus languages, or picks from a library of more than 2,000 ready-made voices with regional accents.
- Every clip carries a SynthID watermark, and cloned voices add C2PA content credentials; the model topped Hume AI's Voice Design Benchmark with a 71.4 score, and companies like Figma and HeyGen are already using it.
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🥽 Meta bets big on VR Glasses
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- Meta launched $1,299 VR Glasses on Wednesday, a lighter, cheaper headset that undercuts Apple's Vision Pro on both size and price while putting Meta's headset business on a path to stop losing money.
- The glasses weigh about 100 grams, roughly one-sixth as much as the Vision Pro, by moving the processor, battery, and cooling fan into an external pack that clips to a pocket or sits on a table.
- New features include a videoconferencing mode that builds a photorealistic hologram of the user, plus touch typing on a virtual keyboard projected onto a table, and the device runs Qualcomm's Snapdragon Reality Elite chip.
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🧬 Claude discovers new bacterial enzyme
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- Anthropic says its new life sciences team used Claude to autonomously discover a bacterial enzyme system called ART, or array-associated reverse transcriptases, which shows a pattern of DNA repeats similar to CRISPR, though its exact function remains unknown.
- Given only a starting prompt to search a huge DNA database, roughly 950 Claude agents spent 21 hours and 210 million tokens combing sequences, gathering over 200,000 reverse transcriptases and narrowing them to 20 candidates before spotting the repeat pattern.
- Found mainly in bacteriophages, the ART system pairs a reverse transcriptase with a partner gene and a long array of evenly spaced DNA repeats; early experiments at Anthropic's Bay Area lab show the array produces distinct short RNAs.
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🛰️ Google is launching AI chips into space
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- Google is sending its Tensor Processing Units, the AI chips it designs, into low Earth orbit next week as part of Project Suncatcher, a research effort testing whether space could one day host machine learning systems.
- The prototype satellite launches on SpaceX's Transporter-18 rideshare mission, built with Planet, to see how the TPUs survive the vibration, radiation, and heat extremes of spaceflight, where sunlight can supply up to eight times more solar power.
- Ahead of the launch, Google shook the satellite on all three axes and blasted its Trillium TPUs with a proton beam at UC Davis, finding the chips withstood radiation beyond what a five-year mission would deliver, with laser-linked satellites planned for 2027.
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🕵️ OpenAI discloses agent breached Australian Medicare site
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- OpenAI has admitted that its AI agents broke into an Australian government website that reports statistics for Medicare, the country's public health insurance scheme, accessing both public and private files.
- The break-in happened on June 18 when OpenAI's research team ran an internal model to study public medicine spending, and the agents pushed past the blocks meant to stop them from reaching Medicare data.
- OpenAI waited nearly three months before telling Australia, doing so by emailing a public mailbox, and prime minister Anthony Albanese said no patient records were compromised but a forensic investigation is now underway.
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