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Greetings! Your latest quick tech update is here:

☀️ On this day: On August 7, 1944, IBM formally presented the Automatic Sequence Controlled Calculator to Harvard University, a 51-foot electromechanical machine built from 765,000 components and hundreds of miles of wire. At the dedication, Howard Aiken gave IBM no credit for funding or building it, which infuriated Thomas Watson Sr. and ended the partnership on the spot. Harvard renamed it the Mark I, ran it for 15 years, and split the remains between its own campus and the Smithsonian.

What’s happening:

  • 💬 ChatGPT free users now get unlimited chats

  • 📍 Google Maps adds food ordering and hotel search

  • 🔊 OpenAI's smart speaker is a $400 donut

  • 🖥️ Meta launches Muse Code, its first AI coding agent

  • 🦠 AI just wrote 16 working viruses from scratch

  • + 📊 Daily poll and results

  • + 📈 Trending tools and resources

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Hand-picked news:

💬 ChatGPT free users now get unlimited chats ↗️LINK

  • OpenAI is dropping message limits on text chats for all ChatGPT users, including free accounts, starting next week. Limits on files, images, voice, and image generation stay in place.

  • The change lands as ChatGPT passes one billion weekly users. A new GPT-5.6 Luna model replaces GPT-5.5 as the default for Free and Go accounts, adding a Think button.

  • OpenAI says its own testing found Luna makes 62% fewer factual errors than GPT-5.5-Instant. Unlimited chats plus fewer mistakes sounds great, though the company grades its own homework here.

📍 Google Maps adds food ordering ↗️LINK

  • Google upgraded Ask Maps on Thursday with agentic features that handle multi-step tasks. The assistant finds open restaurants along your route, then drops your requested dish into a cart for checkout.

  • Ordering runs through Square and Toast at launch, with Uber Eats coming later. A new Personal Intelligence setting connects Gmail so Maps can factor in flights and reservations, off by default.

  • Maps stops short of finishing anything. You pick the restaurant, you pay, and hotel and event links push you to partner sites. Google automates the search, not the transaction.

🔊 OpenAI's smart speaker is a $400 donut ↗️LINK

  • Bloomberg reports OpenAI's first smart speaker will sell for $300 to $400, land in 2027, and take a donut shape so people can move it between rooms.

  • Sources describe a metal build with a premium look and moving parts. OpenAI is designing the device with LoveFrom, the studio former Apple designer Jony Ive founded.

  • Amazon's smart speakers top out near $240, and the category has struggled to turn a profit. OpenAI is betting people will pay a premium for a talking donut.

🖥️ Meta launches its first AI coding agent ↗️LINK

  • Meta released Muse Code in beta on Wednesday, announced by Mark Zuckerberg on X. The terminal agent installs with one command and plans changes, writes code, and validates results across large repositories.

  • Muse Code runs on Muse Spark 1.2, which Meta trained alongside the agent. Pay-as-you-go costs $1.25 per million input tokens. A cheaper contributor tier requires developers to share data for training.

  • Wang frames the pitch as price, not capability, and his 10x claim measures against Meta's own pay-as-you-go tier rather than rivals. Cheap access costs developers their data instead.

🦠 AI designed 16 working viruses that kill bacteria ↗️LINK

  • Stanford and Arc Institute researchers used the Evo AI models to design roughly 700,000 viral genomes, synthesized about 300 in the lab, and got 16 working bacteriophages. Science published the study Thursday.

  • Drug-resistant bacteria drive the interest. A cocktail of the AI phages rapidly overcame resistance in three E. coli strains, and the viruses infect bacteria only, so they cannot harm humans.

  • Johns Hopkins biosecurity experts warned in Science that the technology has outrun the rulebook. The low hit rate offers some comfort: 16 viable viruses out of roughly 700,000 attempts.

Today’s Poll:

Do you feel comfortable knowing AI can now write working genetic code from scratch?

Login or Subscribe to participate

Vote and find out about the result tomorrow.

Yesterday’s Poll Result:

Do you think labs should be fined when their agents go rogue in testing?

  • A) Yes - 85% 🏆

  • B) No - 15%

Reader’s opinion:

“Companies have always been obligated to use software (even malware under testing) responsibly and own the outcomes, even when it behaves in unexpected ways. It should be the same with agents: you break it, you pay for it.”

tjodo***@***com (voted A)

“Fines don't go far enough. The offending lab should be shut down until they can prove that they have their agents under control.”

jjvaz***@***me (voted A)

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