The Rundown AI / Articles / AI / Meta's new open-source brain AI

Meta's new open-source brain AI

PLUS: Use Perplexity Computer as a personal shopper

Zach Mink

March 27, 2026

Good morning, AI enthusiasts. AI companies keep trying to build systems that think like a brain. Meta went the other direction… Building one that reads them.

TRIBE v2 can predict how your neurons fire in response to anything you watch, hear, or read — a breakthrough for researchers studying the brain, and a pretty significant data point for the world's largest social media and advertising company.

In today’s AI rundown:

Meta's brain model beats real fMRI scans
Apple to unlock Siri for rival AI assistants
Use Perplexity Computer as a personal shopper
Wikipedia bans AI from writing its articles
4 new AI tools, community workflows, and more

LATEST DEVELOPMENTS

🧠 Meta's brain model beats real fMRI scans

Image source: Meta

The Rundown: Meta just open-sourced TRIBE v2, an AI model trained on brain scans from 700+ people that simulates neural activity across vision, hearing, and language — with its synthetic predictions actually outperforming real fMRI recordings.

The details:

Trained on 1,000+ hours of brain data, v2 leaps from 1,000 brain regions to 70,000, with 700+ subjects up from just 4 volunteers in the original.
TRIBE v2's predictions matched population-level brain activity better than most real scans, which often get clouded by heartbeats, movement, and noise.
The team replicated decades of neuroscience findings in software, correctly pinpointing brain regions for faces, speech, and text with zero scans.
Meta open-sourced the code, weights, and a live demo, letting any researcher start running virtual brain experiments without building from scratch.

Why it matters: Neuroscience has long required putting people inside expensive scanners for every new experiment, a bottleneck that's kept entire fields moving one study at a time. TRIBE v2 could do for brain research what AlphaFold did for protein structure: compress months of scanning into seconds of compute.

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APPLE

📱 Apple to unlock Siri for rival AI assistants

Image source: Apple

The Rundown: Apple plans to open up the upcoming Siri revamp for other models starting with iOS 27, according to Bloomberg — ending ChatGPT's exclusive integration and letting users choose which AI handles their queries directly from the assistant.

The details:

Users will be able to pick their preferred AI in ‘extensions’ settings and route questions to models of their choice via Siri with the incoming iOS 27.
ChatGPT is currently the only model compatible with Siri commands via its 2024 deal, but use of that integration has reportedly been ‘minimal’.
Bloomberg said chatbots in the App Store could also be a revenue stream, with Apple taking a cut of AI subscriptions purchased across its devices.
Apple is expected to introduce the new Siri AI overhaul powered by Gemini at its WWDC developer event in early June.

Why it matters: Google is already rebuilding Siri's underlying tech with Gemini, and ChatGPT has had a spot since 2024. Now, Apple is letting the rest of the field in to provide more user choice. It’s a smart move — skip the model war entirely, layer the best AI on top of a billion iPhones, and let its hardware moat do the rest.

AI TRAINING

🛍️ Use Perplexity Computer as a personal shopper

The Rundown: In this guide, you will learn how to use Perplexity's Computer agent search feature (for Max subscribers or Pro users with credits) to shop for you, find items in stock in your size, and save a ton of time.

Step-by-step:

Go to Perplexity’s website or app (latest version), and look for the Perplexity Computer toggle
Prompt: “Find me a good deal on [item]. I prefer brands like [brands]. Start with the item type, then add brand preferences, cosmetic style, and sizing”
Computer will delegate sub-agents to browse product listings and compile a report for you. It is really good at formatting the report without you telling it to
If you want to watch prices or do daily market research, you can prompt: “Turn this into a daily/weekly automation,” and Perplexity will schedule it for you

Pro tip: To save a little bit on tokens, you can switch the orchestrator model to Claude Sonnet.

PRESENTED BY INNOVATING WITH AI

💼 How Dan built a 6-figure AI consultancy from scratch

The Rundown: Dan had no tech background and no business experience — just a love for AI and a hunch it could become something more. Through The AI Consultancy Project, he landed his first clients, found a niche, and built a six-figure consultancy that let him quit his 9-to-5 in under a year.

Dan’s case study breaks down:

How he went from zero clients to a six-figure AI consultancy in 12 months
The early stumbles and the system that finally worked
The exact niche and mindset shift that unlocked everything

Read the full case study for free.

WIKIPEDIA

❌ Wikipedia bans AI from writing its articles

Image source: Wikipedia

The Rundown: Wikipedia's volunteer editors banned the use of AI to write articles on the foundation’s English-language site, a move the policy's author called a "pushback against enshittification and forceful push of AI by so many companies”.

The details:

Prior attempts at broad AI rules failed to reach consensus, but mounting AI-generated errors pushed editors to a near-unanimous 40-2 vote.
The ban covers writing or rewriting articles with LLMs, with editors still allowed to use AI for grammar fixes and translations with human review.
The policy's author said the change could "spark a broader change" and "empower communities on other platforms" to set AI rules on their own terms.
StackOverflow and German Wikipedia have enacted similar bans, with Spanish Wikipedia going further to fully ban the use of AI, even for editing purposes.

Why it matters: AI text reportedly surpassed human output for the first time in 2025, and Wikipedia is trying to hold the human line, all while Elon pushes Grokipedia (an AI-created version of Wikipedia) in the exact opposite direction. The internet's most-used knowledge base bet against the current, but how long that holds is anyone’s guess.

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📰 Everything else in AI today

Google rolled out Gemini 3.1 Flash Live, a new voice AI with upgrades in speed, task completion, and realism, to power convos across Search, Gemini Live, and its API.

Mistral released Voxtral TTS, a lightweight voice AI that clones any speaker from a 3-second clip and generates natural-sounding speech across 9 languages.

OpenAI has reportedly shelved its planned erotic chatbot mode indefinitely after pushback from staff and investors.

Novo Nordisk is deploying AI agents across clinical trial ops, with the pharma giant saying the tech is trimming approval timelines and reducing the need for contractors.

Suno launched v5.5 of its AI music generator, adding voice cloning, custom model tuning, and personalized style learning for Pro subscribers.

Cohere released Transcribe, a free open-source speech recognition model that tops HuggingFace's accuracy leaderboard across 14 languages — taking the No. 1 spot.

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 Hugh F. in Sandwich, MA:

"I play keyboard in an open mic group, but need to simplify song piano scores to two pages to avoid having to turn pages mid-song, and also to make the piece suitable for an accompaniment.

Feeding a PDF version of a full score to Claude and requesting such a simplification has resulted in quite acceptable pieces. So, less time adapting piano scores, which has resulted in more time practicing, which has itself resulted in more applause. Thanks, Claude!"

How do you use AI? Tell us here.