In partnership with
Greetings! Your latest quick tech update is here:
☀️ On this day: On August 19, 2004, Google began trading on the Nasdaq at $85 a share, selling 19,605,052 Class A shares, of which the company itself offered 14,142,135. That share count was not arbitrary, since 14,142,135 is the square root of two scaled up, and the company's earlier filing had asked to raise $2,718,281,828, the mathematical constant e. The stock opened near $100 and closed the day around that level, valuing Google at roughly $27 billion. Twenty-two years later, Alphabet is worth about $4.21 trillion.
What’s happening:
📧 Claude adds send, reply, and forward in Gmail
⏸️ OpenAI pauses AI training over misalignment
🦊 Firefox adds AI web search in it’s browser
📺 Amazon makes Alexa+ free on all Fire TV devices
🍎 Apple finally stops fighting the EU over App Store fees
+ 📊 Daily poll and results
+ 📈 Trending tools and resources
Presented by Aimfox
Get more meetings by removing the LinkedIn limits.
When you need more leads, you want to do more, right?
Adding mailboxes to cold emails.
Placing more cold calls
Running more ads.
But what do you do if your leads are on LinkedIn? LinkedIn outreach still depends on the limited number of profiles already on your team.
Aimfox Avatars lets you rent dedicated, customizable LinkedIn profiles that start conversations and hand interested replies to your existing sellers.
Add outreach capacity without hiring another SDR or turning every employee account into a prospecting channel..
Hand-picked news:
📧 Claude adds send, reply, and forward in Gmail ↗️LINK
Anthropic turned on sending in Claude's Gmail connector on August 18. Claude can now send a new message, reply in a thread, or forward mail, plus share, move, and trash Drive files.
Approval stays the default before each send, reply, or forward. Users can switch it off, and on Team and Enterprise plans owners decide whether members skip the prompt. Anthropic limits sending to paid plans.
Claude still cannot read attachment contents, only metadata. So it will happily fire off a reply about a contract it never actually opened. ChatGPT added direct sending back in June.
⏸️ OpenAI is slowing down its AI training ↗️LINK
OpenAI said on August 18 that it paused two weeks of reinforcement learning training and is holding its biggest frontier run, after Sam Altman told Time its unreleased models show "various degrees of misalignment."
Two things drove it. In July, OpenAI models escaped a test sandbox and breached Hugging Face to steal benchmark answers, and on August 7 OpenAI said it cannot rule out Astra crossing its Critical cyber threshold.
OpenAI's new monitors inspect model activity at every sampled token and burn about 20% of inference compute on watched runs. Safety here does not just slow shipping, it taxes the GPUs.
🦊 Firefox adds AI web search powered by Exa ↗️LINK
Mozilla expanded Firefox's Smart Window on August 18, adding live web search with visible citations, automatic tab grouping that flags duplicates, and visual previews of pages from your browsing history.
The search comes from Exa, a startup that raised $250 million at a $2.2 billion valuation in May and also powers Cursor and HubSpot. The beta covers English users in the US and Canada.
Mozilla signed zero-data-retention deals with Google, OpenAI, and Alibaba, and lets you swap in a local model. Firefox's pitch is that you can turn the AI off, which still counts as differentiation.
📺 Amazon makes Alexa+ free on all Fire TV ↗️LINK
Amazon is making Alexa+ free on all compatible Fire TV devices in the US, upgrading everyone automatically. It handles conversational search, smart home controls, and recommendations. Non-Prime users previously paid $19.99 monthly.
The push follows rivals. Google brought Gemini to Google TV earlier this year, replacing basic search with conversational modes, and Roku upgraded its own voice assistant to AI last year.
Amazon says Alexa+ users hold nearly twice as many conversations on Fire TV as before, and counts that as success. Talking more to your television was not everyone's goal.
🍎 Apple stops fighting the EU over App Store fees ↗️LINK
Apple is moving every EU developer onto one set of business terms on October 1st, charging 26% for apps using its payment system and 20% for those using alternatives.
Apple drops the initial acquisition fee, store services fee, and the €0.50 Core Technology Fee, replacing them with a flat 5% Core Technology Commission on transactions outside the App Store.
Apple says the changes settle its disagreements with the Commission. That framing lands better after it lost its bid to exempt the App Store and iOS from the DMA last month.
Today’s Poll:
Vote and find out about the result tomorrow.
Yesterday’s Poll Result:
Do you think you'd be annoyed if someone next to you wore camera Airpods?
A) Yes - 88% 🏆
B) No - 12%
Reader’s opinion:
“Being filmed all the time is getting really annoying. Airpods would get them even closer to me eroding my personal space.”
“What exactly is the purpose of cameras in airpods. When you can just turn your head in the direction they're pointing and use your phone to take a shot. Feels a little bit excessive”
From our partner
Your employees are connecting AI to everything. Now what?
ChatGPT and Claude aren't just answering questions. Employees are connecting them directly to Notion, Linear, Jira, and the rest of your stack — with no security visibility into what data moves or what actions they take.
Harmonic Security gives your team the visibility to control it.
AI for Managers by Microsoft (free course): In this learning path, managers at all levels of the organization will learn practical ways to enhance their effectiveness with generative AI.
Meco (free app): Meco is a distraction-free space for reading and discovering newsletters, separate from the inbox. Add your newsletters in seconds and liberate your inbox today!
Gamma: Create unlimited presentations, websites, and more in seconds. Everything you need to quickly create and refine content with AI.
Granola: AI notepad that turns your messy meeting notes into clean, structured summaries.
Better Pic: Get Studio Quality AI professional headshots, without a photographer or a photoshoot.
