Greetings! Your latest quick tech update is here:

☀️ On this day: On June 24, 1967, the first Consumer Electronics Show (CES) opened in New York City, drawing 200 exhibitors and 17,500 attendees to the Hilton and Americana hotels over four days. The featured products were pocket radios and televisions built with the new integrated circuits, and the kickoff speaker was Motorola chairman Bob Galvin. CES turns 59 today and now fills Las Vegas each January with well over 100,000 attendees.

What’s happening:

  • 🤖 Anthropic launches Claude Tag for Slack teams

  • 🔮 Meta is building a prediction market app

  • 🩺 China just landed two big medical AI wins

  • 📺 Instagram tests episodic shows and live TV

  • 🎮 GTA VI preorders start today, $80 base price

  • + 📊 Daily poll and results

  • + 📈 Trending tools and resources

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Hand-picked news:

🤖 Anthropic launches Claude Tag for Slack ↗️LINK

  • Anthropic launched Claude Tag, letting teams tag @Claude inside Slack channels to hand off work. The agent breaks each task into stages, runs them with approved tools, and reports back in the thread.

  • Claude Tag runs on Opus 4.8 and replaces the older Claude in Slack app for Enterprise and Team customers. It builds memory per channel, works across days, and flags updates itself when admins enable ambient mode.

  • Anthropic says 65% of its product team's code now comes from an internal Claude Tag, so the tool partly built itself. Karpathy calls it the third major redesign of LLM interfaces, which sounds bold but tracks.

🔮 Meta is building a prediction market app ↗️LINK

  • The New York Times reports Zuckerberg has told a small Meta team to build a Polymarket-style app, codenamed Arena. It would run separately from Facebook and Instagram, but Meta would funnel its own users toward it.

  • Arena would skip real money at first, running on a video game-style points system, though Meta has not ruled out cash bets later. It chases Polymarket and Kalshi, which now clear tens of billions in trading volume.

  • Meta already tried this once with Forecast, which it launched in 2020 and killed in 2022. A points-only app also earns nothing, so the real bet is that Meta's billions of users eventually want to wager cash.

🩺 China just landed two big medical AI wins ↗️LINK

  • Two Chinese medical AI wins landed in one week. MicroPort MedBot's Toumai became the first remote surgical robot to earn the EU's CE mark, while Baichuan's M4 model topped OpenAI's HealthBench medical benchmark.

  • The CE mark opens 30+ European markets and follows the UK's first telesurgery using Toumai in March. Baichuan reports M4 beat GPT-5.5 by 15.9 points on HealthBench Hard with a 3.3% hallucination rate.

  • HealthBench comes from OpenAI and uses rubrics from 262 doctors across 60 countries. A Chinese model winning OpenAI's own medical test, the same week a Chinese robot cleared Europe, makes for tidy timing.

📺 Instagram tests episodic shows and live TV ↗️LINK

  • Instagram is exploring longer-form videos, episodic series, and Live TV for its television app, pushing past short Reels to compete with streaming services like Netflix and Amazon Prime Video for living room attention.

  • The expansion lands as Instagram for TV reaches Samsung sets across the US, joining Amazon Fire TV and Google TV. New features add interest-based channels, phone-to-TV casting, horizontal video, and Stories on the big screen.

  • Meta is already recruiting creators to make episodic content, which puts it squarely in microdrama territory where TikTok moved first. A 30-second Reels star holding a couch audience to minute 20 remains the open question.

🎮 GTA VI preorders start today, $80 base price ↗️LINK

  • Rockstar priced GTA VI at $80, with a $100 Ultimate Edition, and opens preorders June 25 before its November 19 launch. That matches Nintendo's Mario Kart World, not the $100 some analysts had floated.

  • The game stays exclusive to PS5 and Xbox Series X|S, with no PC or Switch 2 version at launch. Every copy is digital, so even physical boxes just hold a download code instead of a disc.

  • Rockstar says the $100 edition threads exclusive "action" across Jason and Lucia's whole story, which reads less like bonus cosmetics and more like chunks of the actual game sitting behind a $20 wall.

Today’s Poll:

Do you feel optimistic about AI taking a bigger role in healthcare?

Login or Subscribe to participate

Vote and find out about the result tomorrow.

Yesterday’s Poll Result:

Do you feel like AI smart glasses are still a gimmick?

  • A) Yes - 69%

  • B) No - 31%

Reader’s opinion:

“Having worn a pair at a tech trade show, they are not. think about getting almost immediate translation both of written and spoken language... ”

adi_jo***@***uk (voted B)

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Claude 101 (free course): Learn how to use Claude for everyday work tasks, understand core features, and explore resources for more advanced learning on other topics.

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