Good morning, AI enthusiasts. A new open letter demanding a halt to superintelligence development has emerged, and the signatures include some new heavy hitters.

But while AI godfathers Bengio and Hinton join forces with tech figures, politicians, celebrities, and more, the absence of those from frontier labs speaks volumes — making it hard to stop a race when none of the runners agree to pause.

In today’s AI rundown:

• Open letter demands halt to superintelligence development

• Amazon deploys AI-powered glasses for delivery drivers

• Create an email campaign generator with Build mode

• Meta trims 600 jobs across AI division

• 4 new AI tools, community workflows, and more

LATEST DEVELOPMENTS

ASI

🚨Open letter demands halt to superintelligence development

Image source: Future of Life Institute

The Rundown: Public figures across tech and politics have signed a Future of Life Institute letter demanding governments prohibit superintelligence development until it's proven controllable and the public approves its creation.

The details:

• The letter cites concerns including ‘human economic obsolescence,’ ‘losses of freedom, civil liberties, dignity, and control,’ and ‘potential human extinction.’

• Leadership from OpenAI, Google, Anthropic, xAI, and Meta were absent, though current OAI staffer Leo Gao was included in the signatories.

• The org also released data showing that 64% of Americans want ASI work halted until proven safe, with just 5% preferring unregulated advances.

• Others featured included ‘godfathers of AI’ Yoshua Bengio and Geoffrey Hinton, Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak, and Virgin’s Richard Branson.

Why it matters: This isn’t the first public push against AI acceleration, but the calls seem to be getting louder. But with all of the frontier labs notably missing and a still vague notion of both what a “stop” to development looks like and how to even define ASI, this is another effort that may end up drawing more publicity than real action.

TOGETHER WITH TRIPLE WHALE

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• Detect performance shifts in minutes, not hours

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AMAZON

📦 Amazon deploys AI-powered glasses for delivery drivers

Image source: Amazon

The Rundown: Amazon just introduced new smartglasses for its delivery fleet that project navigation instructions and package info directly into a driver’s vision, marking the e-commerce giant’s latest infusion of AI tech into its efficiency push.

The details:

• The glasses display turn-by-turn directions, package scanning data, and delivery confirmations, eliminating constant phone checking during deliveries.

• Drivers wear a controller clipped to their vest containing swappable batteries for all-day operation, plus an emergency button for immediate assistance.

• Amazon said future versions will detect wrong-address drop-offs in real time, ID hazards like pets, and adjust display brightness for low-light conditions.

Why it matters: These glasses look like the visual interface sci-fi has long predicted, with the ‘augmentation’ of human workers equipped with real-time data and insights. Efficiency gains are clear, but workplace surveillance and constant digital guidance concerns could determine if this becomes standard across industries.

AI TRAINING

📧 Create an email campaign generator with Build mode

The Rundown: Build a complete email campaign generator using Google AI Studio’s Build Mode, turning a simple idea into a working web app with copywriting and image generation in minutes.

Step-by-step:

1. Open Google AI Studio chat mode with Gemini 2.5 Pro and prompt: “Create a product requirements doc for an email campaign generator tool. List key features, user flow in bullet points under 100 words”

2. Click “Build” tab, enable “AI Powered Chatbot” and “Generate Images with a Prompt,” then paste: “Build an email campaign generator based on this PRD: [your PRD]. Include chatbot for copy refinements and image generation for 3 campaign visuals”

3. Hit “Build” and wait 1–2 minutes, then click “Preview” to test with inputs like “Holiday gadget sale” — verify it generates 3 subject lines, HTML email body, and 3 banner images

4. Refine outputs by prompting “Make subject lines more urgent” or “Regenerate images with warmer colors” in the chatbot

5. Click “Share” icon, toggle “Publish your App,” copy the link to share with your team — anyone can generate campaigns without dev skills

Pro tip: Repurpose this workflow for other marketing tools by swapping the PRD for a social media caption generator, blog post outliner, or ad copy brainstormer. The same process works for any content creation tool you need.

PRESENTED BY IBM

💡3 actions to help boost agentic AI impact

The Rundown: Businesses face many challenges going from AI ambition to implementation. Success requires more than adopting new technology. It involves intentionally aligning AI with workflows, data, and goals. As AI evolves into a business-wide opportunity, leaders must ensure the right AI is applied to the right challenges.

Explore IBM’s playbook on 3 challenges & approaches to boost agentic AI impact:

• Finding your AI problem

• Creating a clear AI plan

• Integrating AI with the tools you use everyday

Read the playbook.

META

✂️ Meta trims 600 jobs across AI division

Image source: Reve / The Rundown

The Rundown: Meta just eliminated roughly 600 positions across its AI division, according to a memo from Chief AI Officer Alexandr Wang — with the company’s FAIR research arm reportedly impacted but its superintelligence group TBD Lab left intact.

The details:

• Wang told employees the reductions would create smaller teams requiring fewer approvals, with those cut encouraged to apply to other Meta positions.

• Cuts targeted Meta‘s FAIR research unit, product teams, and infrastructure groups, while sparing TBD Lab, which Wang oversees directly.

• The company has continued its aggressive recruiting from rivals, recently hiring OAI scientist Ananya Kumar and TML co-founder Andrew Tulloch.

• The moves follow friction earlier this month when FAIR researchers, including AI pioneer Yann LeCun, pushed back on new publication review requirements.

Why it matters: Meta’s superintelligence poaching and major restructure was the talk of the summer, but there has been tension brewing between the new hires and old guard. With Wang and co. looking to move fast and pave an entirely new path for the tech giant’s AI plans, the traditional FAIR researchers may be caught in the crossfire.

QUICK HITS

🛠️ Trending AI Tools

• 🌐 Atlas - OpenAI’s new AI-integrated web browser

• 🤖 Manus 1.5 - Agentic system with faster task completion, coding improvements, and more

• ❤️ Lovable - New Shopify integration for building online stores via prompts

• 🎥 Runway - New model fine-tuning for customizing generative video models

📰 Everything else in AI today

Anthropic is reportedly negotiating a multibillion-dollar cloud computing deal with Google that would provide access to custom TPU chips, building on Google’s existing $3B investment.

Reddit filed a lawsuit against Perplexity and three other data-scraping companies, accusing them of circumventing protections to steal copyrighted content for AI training.

Tencent open-sourced Hunyuan World 1.1, an AI model that creates 3D reconstructed worlds from videos or multiple photos in seconds on a single GPU.

Conversational AI startup Sesame opened beta access for its iOS app featuring a voice assistant that can “search, text, and think,” also announcing a new $250M raise.

Google announced that its Willow quantum chip achieved a major milestone by running an algorithm on hardware 13,000x faster than top supercomputers.

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 Anonymous in Loveland, CO:

“As a new product developer (physical products), I have always wanted to draft and file my own patents. Using both ChatGPT and Gemini in tandem, I have been able to generate my own claims sets as well as professional line drawings. Once complete, I ask the LLMs to act as my ‘seasoned patent attorney’ and review everything for accuracy. I then turn it over to my attorney for final review, for now.”

How do you use AI? Tell us here.

🎓 Highlights: News, Guides & Events

• Read our last AI newsletter: OpenAI enters browser war with Atlas

• Read our last Tech newsletter: 'ChatGPT for doctors' hits $6B

• Read our last Robotics newsletter: Unitree's 'bionic face' humanoid

• Today’s AI tool guide: Create an email campaign generator with Build

• RSVP to our next workshop @ 4PM EST Friday: Learn context engineering

See you soon,

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