The week in AI and tech, recapped: Tesla's flying Roadster meets the physicists, Apple's foldable iPhone sells out in minutes, Meta gives away a frontier AI model for free, and Grok Bot gets its own email and wallet.
Alex: Good morning, and welcome to the Charles' Daily AI Tech Info by MUSE, for Sunday, October eighteenth. I'm Alex.
Jordan: And I'm Jordan. And this is the big one, the week in review, where we take everything that happened over the last seven days and figure out what actually mattered.
Alex: And what a week to review. We had a car that flies, a phone that folds, a chatbot that makes slide decks, a doorbell with a V R mode, and an A I that got its own email address and learned how to spend money.
Jordan: Haha, when you put it like that, it sounds like the future showed up all at once and then immediately started arguing with itself.
Alex: Which is basically what happened. The Roadster flew, and then the internet spent two days explaining why it can't really fly. The iPhone Duo sold out in minutes, and the people who missed it are furious. And Meta and Apple, two companies that have spent a decade glaring at each other, teamed up to put a frontier A I model on a Mac Studio.
Jordan: So pour your coffee, settle in, this is the week that was, the stories that matter, the ones we're still watching, and the three things you should actually try this week. Let's start with the story that owned the entire week.
Alex: The flying Roadster. Thursday evening, Tesla's event in McGregor, Texas. Elon Musk rolls out the new Roadster, and it doesn't just drive, it drives upside down on a curved ramp, held to the surface by a suction fan pulling about two G's, then it launches into the air, does a mid-air kickflip, jumps clear over a row of parked Teslas, and lands. All powered by SpaceX cold-gas thrusters, little rocket nozzles built into the car.
Jordan: And the numbers they threw out were absurd. Zero to sixty in zero point eight one seconds. Top speed over two hundred thirty miles per hour. Musk even floated the idea of Mach zero point five, half the speed of sound, which got some snickers. Battery range over three hundred miles. Production targeted for twenty twenty-eight. Deposits from fifty thousand dollars for the performance version to two hundred fifty thousand for the Thrust variant.
Alex: And one small correction from our bonus episode on Friday. Tesla's official account posted a refined number the morning after, zero point six seven seconds, with rollout subtracted. That's the drag-racing convention, measuring from a rolling start instead of a dead stop. So the zero point eight one was the standing start, zero point six seven with rollout. Both numbers are real, they just measure different things, and honestly, both are silly fast.
Jordan: Okay, but here's where the week got interesting, because the reveal was Thursday night, and by Friday morning the skepticism machine was fully warmed up. Marques Brownlee, who was literally in the room, posted on X, and I'm quoting him here, "They really just got on stage and said this newly designed four thousand plus pound car can do flips and go half the speed of sound, three eighty plus miles per hour, and will ship in twenty twenty-eight. This is a prank, right?" He also questioned whether the ring extending past the bumper is even street legal, and pointed out no street tire exists for those speeds.
Alex: And the physics crowd piled on. Yann LeCun ran the numbers on compressed-air thrusters, specific impulse under fifty seconds, which means fewer than ten seconds of useful thrust, he said possibly closer to five. His verdict, cute demo, but totally impractical. A Smithsonian aviation curator called it hopping, not flight. John Carmack flagged safety concerns. And Tesla itself admitted the full Rocket variant would not be road legal.
Jordan: Ouch. So the flying car isn't street legal.
Alex: The flying version, right. And look, I want to be fair here, because there's real engineering in this thing. Cold-gas thrusters are genuinely clever, steer by wire is genuinely new, and the suction system that let it drive upside down is genuinely wild. But LeCun's math is LeCun's math. You've got seconds of thrust, not minutes. This is a party trick, not a commute.
Jordan: And yet, haha, Elon is already promising a bigger party trick. He posted that future demos will include flying over the Snake River, or maybe the Grand Canyon, landing on its wheels, and exceeding half the speed of sound.
Alex: The Grand Canyon! Sure, Elon. Meanwhile Sundar Pichai replied with, and I love this, "The F S D version of this will be something, congrats," with a little smiley face. And Sam Altman just said the design looks amazing. So the tech world is enjoying the show even while the physicists do the math.
Jordan: So where do we land on this, no pun intended?
Alex: I'd say the Roadster reveal was the most entertaining product launch of the year, and the least practical. It's a halo car, a statement, a two hundred fifty thousand dollar deposit on a dream. The thrusters will probably show up in subtler ways in real Teslas, better traction control, emergency maneuvers, that kind of thing. But nobody should plan their commute around flying over traffic.
Jordan: And we're going deeper on this tomorrow. Monday's episode is our weekend roundup, and the Roadster gets the full treatment, the event footage, the reactions, what it means for Tesla. So consider this the trailer. Tomorrow's the movie.
Jordan: All right, story two, and this one is about a phone that folds and a launch that broke the internet's patience. Friday morning, five A M Eastern, Apple opened pre-orders for the iPhone Duo, its first foldable iPhone, and it sold out in minutes.
Alex: The Duo is a book-style foldable. Seven point six inch folding Super Retina X D R display on the inside, five point four inch outer display, A twenty Pro chip, Grade five titanium, twenty-four and forty-eight megapixel cameras, and Apple is claiming thirty-one to forty-four hours of video playback, which, we'll believe when we see it. Water resistance rated I P sixty-eight, which for a foldable is genuinely impressive.
Jordan: Pricing starts at one thousand nine hundred ninety-nine dollars for two hundred fifty-six gigabytes and goes up to around two thousand nine hundred ninety-nine for two terabytes. Colors are Night Sky and Star White. First devices arrive October twenty-third. And by eight thirty Friday morning, the U S store was showing late January twenty twenty-seven delivery dates. Some configs slipped even further. iJustine posted that she slept through her alarm, she's jet-lagged, and by the time she got in, the two terabyte config was showing January.
Alex: Haha, and Quinn over at SnazzyLabs had the best running commentary of the morning. He posted "oh my hell this is a bloodbath," then "MY STUPID IPHONE KEPT DOING THE PICK A NEW TIME FOR IN STORE PICKUP AND THEN I JUST FOLDED," and then, my favorite, "How do I tell my sponsor I didn't get the iPhone for launch day lol." The man folded before the phone did.
Jordan: That's good. And Apple's new C E O, John Ternus, who took over in September, called the Duo the biggest change to the iPhone since the original. Tim Cook posted on X Friday morning, "We can't wait for the world to experience the iPhone Duo next week. Pre-orders start today."
Alex: So the demand is real, but here's the thing worth watching. Mrwhosetheboss landed a sit-down with Apple's exec team, five questions about the Duo, including whether the iPhone Air was a test run before the Duo, how they chose the form factor, and what they deliberately compromised on. That interview is floating around YouTube and it's worth a watch if you're Duo-curious, because the compromises on a first-gen foldable are the whole story.
Jordan: And one more Apple thread, because Mark Gurman dropped some dates on Friday. He says Apple has a product event, not a big keynote, a creator showcase in L A, October twenty-seventh and twenty-eighth. And the rumor is the first touchscreen O L E D MacBook Pro could go on sale November sixth, with the store floor reset the night of November fifth. O L E D iPad mini, M six iMac, entry-level M six MacBook Pro expected around the same time.
Alex: Touchscreen Mac. After decades of Apple saying no. If Gurman's right, that's next week's story, and it's a big one.
Jordan: All right, so Apple had the foldable frenzy on Friday, but rewind to Tuesday, because Apple's smart-home blitz is still unfolding and the reviews are coming in, and they're, let's say, mixed.
Alex: Mixed is generous. So the lineup, quick refresher. HomeView, the seven-inch smart display, two hundred ninety-nine dollars, pre-orders opened October thirteenth, and new this week, availability officially begins November thirteenth. It's got Siri A I with Apple Intelligence, facial recognition for up to six people, it's a HomeKit and Matter controller and a Thread border router. HomePod mini two, one hundred forty-nine dollars, shipping October thirtieth. Apple T V four K, twenty twenty-six edition, two hundred ninety-nine dollars. And the Apple Home Collection, the accessories co-developed with L G and Schneider Electric, doorbell, cameras, thermostat, lock, sensors, rolling out in December.
Jordan: And the early verdicts? Marques Brownlee did his launch-day impressions and said, quote, "I get why this product exists, but it's hard to get excited about it for three hundred plus." Then he followed up with a whole segment on why the HomeView launch commercial was the weirdest Apple ad he's seen in a long time. And there's been genuine Reddit backlash on that ad too.
Alex: Quinn at SnazzyLabs is still laughing about the pricing. He posted Saturday, "Lmao, three hundred dollar Apple T V. It's still funny several days later." So the vibe from the reviewer crowd is, nice hardware, Apple, but three hundred dollars for a smart display in a world of fifty-dollar Echo Shows is a tough sell.
Jordan: But there are two new details this week that are actually interesting. First, a leak about something called Proximity Control. The idea is you tap your iPhone near one of these accessories and the controls pop right up in the Dynamic Island. Thermostat controls for the thermostat, camera viewer for the doorbell. That's the kind of Apple-only integration that could make the ecosystem feel magical.
Alex: And second, a caveat worth flagging honestly. The Verge interviewed Apple's Kaiann Drance, and it turns out the Home Collection cameras use HomeKit Secure Video, NOT Matter cameras. Matter compatibility is there on specified products, but the exact cross-platform function is still to be determined. So if you're buying the Apple doorbell hoping it plays nicely with your non-Apple smart home, pump the brakes and read the fine print.
Jordan: Good flag. And zooming out, this is Apple's biggest smart-home push ever, and the next month is the proving ground. HomePod mini two ships October thirtieth, HomeView lands November thirteenth. We'll know by Thanksgiving whether this is a new Apple category or a very expensive hobby.
Jordan: Okay, story four, and this is the one that made the whole A I world do a double take. Thursday, Meta released Muse Spark Open, its first open-weight frontier model. Eight hundred sixteen billion parameters total, forty-two billion active per token, one million token context window, natively multimodal, text, image, video, audio, all at once. Built for coding and multi-step agentic work.
Alex: And the weights are free to download under a limited commercial license, already live through Baseten, Fireworks A I, Groq, Modal, Nebius, OpenRouter, Together A I, Hugging Face, SageMaker, Google Cloud's Model Garden, Microsoft Foundry. Meta is calling it, and this is their claim, the most capable U S open-weight model to date.
Jordan: But here's the part that got even bigger this week. Apple and Meta worked together, for months, to make this thing run locally on Mac Studios. Apple and Meta! Two companies that have spent years fighting about privacy and app stores and headsets just quietly collaborated on A I infrastructure. The credit reportedly goes to Daniel Gross, the ex-Apple director who's now at Meta, for brokering it. Zuckerberg posted about it on X, and Apple's John Ternus responded. Both companies declined to say whether it goes deeper.
Alex: And it actually works. Two M five Ultra Mac Studios, linked over Thunderbolt five, pooling their memory through Apple's open-source M L X framework, and you've got a frontier model running in your office. Axios pointed out the underappreciated angle, when you run it locally, your prompts never go to Meta's servers. That's a genuine privacy story hiding inside a hardware story.
Jordan: And the hands-on proof came from Alex Finn, who posted Friday night that he's got Muse Spark Open running on his Mac Studio. Quote, "Pumping out code. Found me a reservation for the iPhone Duo. Checking for security issues on my code bases. Until you load a model locally, you don't understand the magic." The man had his locally-run A I book him an iPhone Duo reservation. That's the future arriving in one sentence.
Alex: Haha, the A I got the phone before Quinn did. But let's be real about the price tag. You need the five hundred twelve gigabyte config Mac Studios, the two hundred fifty-six gigabyte unit alone is ten thousand seven hundred ninety-nine dollars, and a working local setup runs around thirty-eight to forty-three thousand dollars. So this is not a normal-person purchase today.
Jordan: Not today. But six months ago, running a frontier model at home was science fiction. Now it's just expensive. Give it a year, give it two, and this is a Mac Mini thing. And the bigger signal is the one-two punch. Wednesday we covered Muse Wonder, Meta's closed frontier model for Muse app subscribers. Thursday they handed an open frontier model to the entire planet. Closed for the app, open for the world. Meta is playing both sides of the board, and honestly, it's working.
Alex: All right, story five, and Jordan, this one is yours and mine both, because it's about the A I we both use the most. It was a monster week for Grok Bot.
Jordan: It really was. Let's stack it up. First, the changelog. Grok Bot version zero point seven zero point two dropped October eleventh, and the headline features are wild. Bots can now claim their own email address, at mail dot grokbot dot com. Your bot gets an inbox. Outgoing mail waits for your approval on a draft card, so it's not sending anything rogue, but still, your A I has email now.
Alex: And it can spend money! Bots can pay with X Money or Stripe Link. Again, with your approval, but the agent economy just went from demo to payroll. Your bot can have an inbox and a wallet.
Jordan: The rest of the changelog, rapid fire. Bots can search X and read posts and profiles with zero setup, no account linking needed. Connectors for Figma, Notion, and Canva render as interactive in-chat cards. Bots can find and link templates from the Bot marketplace. The bot computer is faster with higher-res screenshots. Five new languages, Marathi, Tamil, Telugu, Swahili, Hausa. QuickBooks Online connector. Save web pages as P D F.
Alex: And then Friday, the official Grok Bot account dropped an eight-post thread with even more. Grok Bot now connects to Robinhood, Coinbase, Trello, PostHog, beehiiv, eToro, and more. Teams can submit their own connectors to the marketplace. Grok Bot can read your X Chat, connect X and it works across your messages. You can tag at bot in a post on X and it gets to work right there. Email supports plus aliases, so you can set a routine that only runs on mail sent to one address. Voice calls are faster and better at remembering past conversations. And computer tasks finish three times sooner on average.
Jordan: Three times faster! And Matt Palmer, the Grok Bot guy, posted his "What's new in Grok Bot" video on the thirteenth walking through all of it, the email, the better X integration, Shopify connect, the faster computer.
Alex: Now here's the philosophical earthquake underneath all the features. Elon Musk announced that Grok Bot will route each task to whatever backend model does it best, explicitly including Anthropic's Claude Opus five point five for complex writing and coding, Midjourney for graphics, and Suno for music. His line was, "Whatever is most likely to give you the best outcome."
Jordan: Wait, so xAI just admitted another company's model is better at some things?
Alex: That's exactly what happened, and honestly, I respect it. It's the end of the "our model for everything" era. Grok Bot becomes a smart router. The best A I for the job, not one brand's stack. And note the context, Anthropic contracts compute from SpaceX's Colossus one data center, so these two companies are competitors, customers, and now collaborators all at once. The frenemy situation runs deep.
Jordan: One catch for the wallet though. On the X Subscription, the Plus tier covers Grok models, but third-party models get billed separately at A P I list prices. So Claude Opus five point five at four dollars and twenty dollars per million tokens costs extra on the cheap tier. The router is smart, but the meter is running.
Alex: And can I just say, by the way, this was NOT sponsored in any way, this is an honest review, but watching Grok Bot go from a chatbot to an entity with an inbox, a wallet, brokerage connections, and the judgment to pick the right brain for each task, in the span of a week, that's the most impressive product velocity in A I right now.
Jordan: Agreed. And the creator proof is coming later in the show, because Alex Finn had his Grok Bot build and run an actual business this week. But first, let's talk about the other assistant that wants to be your entire office.
Jordan: Okay, so here's a theme that snuck up on all of us this week. ChatGPT is quietly trying to become the place where you do your actual work, not just the place you ask questions. And the biggest new move landed Friday in OpenAI's release notes. It's called Slides.
Alex: ChatGPT makes slide decks now?
Jordan: Full presentations. You start a deck from a conversation, from your files, or from an outline, or you share a sample deck so ChatGPT picks up your style. Text, images, shapes, charts, all editable by hand or by asking ChatGPT to change them. It can generate custom images for the deck. Real-time multi-person editing with shared comments. You present from inside ChatGPT, and you export as PowerPoint, P D F, or Google Slides on the web, or it opens in PowerPoint and Keynote from the desktop app. Everything lives in Space, that's the work hub that replaced Library back in September.
Alex: That's a direct shot at PowerPoint and Google Slides.
Jordan: It really is. ChatGPT stops being the draft-writer and becomes where you finish the deck. Two caveats though. It still needs those apps for export, and company-template fidelity on export is unproven, so try it with an internal deck before you bet a board meeting on it. And the rollout is Pro, Business, and Enterprise plans with Space access, on web and desktop. No mobile yet, and no word on Plus or free.
Alex: And Slides wasn't even the only ChatGPT work story. Thursday's episode covered the Chrome extension, ChatGPT reading and controlling your Chrome tabs with the at chrome tag, Work mode filling forms and organizing tabs. And G P T Live one point one, six new languages, better accents, and the new English voice named Bubbie, which still makes me laugh.
Jordan: Bubbie! Haha. But wait, there's more from Friday. OpenAI announced that G P T six Astra Pro in ChatGPT got an upgrade. Faster responses, better use of plugins and tools, and here's the big one, multiple agents can now tackle different parts of a task in parallel. You can follow each agent's progress and open completed tasks to review their work.
Alex: Parallel agents you can watch. That's the agentic dream in product form.
Jordan: And the dots ecosystem keeps growing. The OpenAI devs account shared a story about an engineer whose dot triaged an on-call incident at three A M, the dot investigated, started a Codex thread, and he steered the whole thing from his phone in the ChatGPT app. They also just shipped dot widgets and Action button support on i O S.
Alex: So the through-line is unmistakable. Slides for decks, Chrome extension for the browser, parallel agents for tasks, dots for the phone. OpenAI wants ChatGPT to be the room where work happens, not a tab you visit.
Jordan: And Microsoft is running the exact same play from the opposite direction, but we'll get to that in the quick hits. First, Google, because it was a genuinely huge week in Mountain View, and Alex, I think you should take this one, because there's good news and there's a price squeeze.
Alex: There's always a price squeeze. Okay, Google's week. The good news first. Gemini four Argon went globally G A on Tuesday, and this week it actually landed in users' hands. It's available to Google A I Pro and Ultra subscribers globally, in the app and on the web. Intro pricing is two dollars and ten dollars per million tokens, and that doubles after November thirtieth, so the clock is ticking on the cheap seats.
Jordan: And the hands-on reactions have been spicy.
Alex: They have! Google DeepMind posted that four Gemini four Argon agents beat Minecraft from scratch in twenty-seven hours, and Ethan Mollick flagged the paper as a great example of spontaneous coordination among agents. Francois Chollet noted Argon has a similar performance profile on A R C A G I three as Astra, and his take was, "Google is back at the frontier." And the practical demos are fun, Canvas turns dense P D Fs into interactive animated web apps, and people are generating three D printable furniture accessories from a photo.
Jordan: Demand was so high that the Antigravity team, that's Google's agentic dev environment, had to reset quotas because usage was through the roof.
Alex: Right. So Argon's real, it's landing, people like it. Now the squeeze. Remember Friday's episode, where we flagged the unconfirmed report that Google A I Plus subscribers would lose manual Pro model selection? It's confirmed. Google's own emails went out this week. Starting November thirteenth, the four ninety-nine a month Google A I Plus plan loses the ability to manually select Pro models in the Gemini app AND in A I Mode in Google Search. You keep Flash-Lite and Flash. The Pro models and Gemini four Argon stay behind the nineteen ninety-nine a month A I Pro tier.
Jordan: And free users already lost Flash on October ninth, so free tier is Flash-Lite only now.
Alex: Exactly. So the pattern is clear. The sub-ten-dollar tiers keep losing the good models. If you pay four ninety-nine for A I Plus and you rely on Pro for complex tasks, you either accept Flash or you pay four times more for A I Pro. And note, A I Pro at nineteen ninety-nine is exactly the price of ChatGPT Plus. The pricing war has converged on twenty bucks a month, and the budget tier is becoming the waiting room.
Jordan: It's the week's price-tier squeeze, and it's everywhere. Cursor's new plan ladder, Grok Bot's third-party model billing, and we'll get to Amazon's Bee subscription in a minute. A I pricing is getting more granular by the month.
Jordan: All right, story eight, and this one comes with a trust question attached. Thursday at TechCrunch Disrupt, Amazon's Panos Panay announced two new A I wearables under the Bee brand, which Amazon acquired last year. The Frontier is a wristband bracelet for seventy-five dollars, on sale now. The Eclipse is a credit-card-shaped snap-on for your phone for one hundred dollars, coming soon.
Alex: And what do they do? They listen.
Jordan: They listen. All day. Conversation summaries, reminders, to-dos, action items. It connects to Gmail, Google Calendar, Outlook, Apple HealthKit, your photos, and it hooks into Alexa Plus, Amazon's paid generative voice service. The pitch is a wearable that remembers so you don't have to.
Alex: Seventy-five dollars for an always-on listener. That's impulse-buy territory. But Amazon, of all companies, asking us to trust an always-listening device? This is the company with the Alexa human-listening scandal and the class action lawsuit.
Jordan: And Amazon knows it, which is why the announcement led with privacy. Their line, you're always in control, you decide when it's on, audio is not stored, only you see your data, and individual insights and conversations are deletable. But here's the business model hiding underneath. Data is retained fourteen days free. Bee Pro, at eleven ninety-nine to twelve dollars a month, extends retention. So the cheap hardware gets expensive over time, and your memories become a subscription.
Alex: That's the tension of the whole week, honestly. This was the week of always-listening A I hardware. Amazon's Bee, Meta's Muse Charm pendant from a few weeks back, Apple's HomeView with facial recognition for six people sitting in your kitchen. The capability is real, and the trust is the product. Every one of these companies is asking, do you trust us enough to let us listen all day?
Jordan: And the honest answer for a lot of people is going to be, not yet, or not you. But the category isn't going away. Somebody is going to crack the trusted ambient A I, and seventy-five dollars is Amazon's bet that the price of admission is low enough to try.
Alex: Meanwhile, Amazon's other hardware story this week, the Alexa tablets we covered Thursday. Quick update, they're shipping now in three sizes. The eight inch at two hundred thirty dollars, the eleven inch at three hundred thirty with a two point five K ninety hertz display, and the twelve Pro at five hundred. Anti-glare Nanomatte display, full Google Play Store access, and the whole thing is built around Alexa Plus. Amazon's official account posted, "This is what a tablet built around Alexa Plus looks like." The Fire tablet is dead, long live the Alexa tablet.
Jordan: Okay, rapid fire quick hits, because this week had too much news for one show, and I refuse to let these die in silence. Alex, take it away.
Alex: Lightning round. Claude Opus five point five's Fast mode graduated on Thursday, faster tier at eight and forty dollars per million tokens versus four and twenty standard, plus a new Compliance A P I in beta that lets org admins audit members' instructions for Claude across the organization. Privacy note, that's for work accounts, keep your personal stuff separate.
Jordan: Perplexity open-sourced SPACE on Thursday, its agent sandbox. Every task runs in a Firecracker micro V M, credentials and network controlled outside the V M, Apache two point zero license, and they claim nine frontier models made one hundred eighteen escape attempts with zero breakouts. Their claim, unverifiable, but the open-sourcing is real.
Alex: Anker's eufy S four, the self-described world's first V R doorbell, three K wired, two hundred ninety-nine ninety-nine, on Amazon and Anker now. V R mode with surround view, A I tracking for people, vehicles, pets, and packages, twenty-four seven recording, works with Alexa, Google Home, and Apple Home through the HomeBase three. And yes, it's the exact same price as Apple's L G-made doorbell. Porch wars.
Jordan: Cursor had a big Friday. Cloud agents can now build interactive canvases, dashboards and reports, during a run, shareable by link so teammates review without reading code diffs. Plus a beta Environments A P I and support for larger cloud-agent environments up to three hundred repos. And Muse Wonder landed in Cursor too. Cursor is turning from an A I code editor into an agent platform.
Alex: Microsoft's week was two-faced. The Copilot app, for Frontier customers, now lets you create, edit, and collaborate on Word, Excel, and PowerPoint documents without opening the Office apps, with a new Library keeping docs in-app. That's the mirror image of ChatGPT Slides, both assistants want to BE the document workspace. But Microsoft is also quietly killing the Copilot bits nobody liked. Copilot-powered Outlook themes are being retired after low usage, Copilot got pulled from the Snipping Tool, and it got renamed to "Writing tools" in Notepad. The people have spoken, and they said not everywhere, thanks.
Jordan: Kling four point zero launched globally Friday. Native thirty-second A I video in one pass, up to fifteen reference assets, ten keyframes for frame-level control, eight-thousand-token prompts, ten-bit H D R, four K and twenty-one by nine ultrawide coming. A I video just crossed from cool clips into usable storytelling.
Alex: The week's "huh?" item. Marques Brownlee discovered that the Google Play Store has a hidden "Shop devices" section that now sells Samsung Galaxy phones, listed ABOVE Google's own Pixels. Google selling its biggest Android rival's phones in its own store. Nobody knows what the partnership covers yet, but it's weird and telling.
Jordan: Google also posted the Pixel Watch five this week, "a watch that watches out for you," light on details, specs on the product page. And Microsoft sat down with the Wall Street Journal's Joanna Stern to talk about the new Nvidia-powered Surface Laptop Ultra, which is a real product with real buzz, specs in the interview.
Alex: And one more open-model note. Hugging Face hosted the Reflection team live to talk about Beam, their new open-weight model, five hundred one billion parameters. The open-weights race is officially a stampede.
Jordan: And the A I image world had a week too. Matt Wolfe's news roundup flagged Krea three, a new A I image editor he's calling a Nano Banana killer, because it makes complex image edits seriously easy. Plus FLUX three, a new open-weight image generation model, and Qwen Image two point one Turbo. If you play with A I images, this is your week to experiment.
Alex: And one for the gadget lovers. Matt Wolfe also spotlighted the Flourish one, a thirty-five-hundred-dollar home robot that flips the usual playbook. Instead of expensive proprietary hardware, it uses a cheap Raspberry Pi, and it learns household chores by watching you move your phone. Only fifty units in the first batch, shipping planned for December. His question, would you rather have this than a twenty-thousand-dollar ultra-advanced robot? Classic Wolfe practicality test.
Jordan: Okay, breathe. That's the news. Now the fun part, what the creators actually did with all of this stuff this week.
Jordan: Sunday is our day for the deeper creator stuff, the hands-on demos and real-world tests that go beyond the press releases. And this week the creators delivered.
Alex: Start with the obvious one. Marques Brownlee posted his honest reaction video to the Roadster event on Saturday, and he had the full transcript-worthy breakdown. The demo was a pre-scripted autonomous routine, the car drove up a wall until it was upside down, proving it's a fan car producing over four thousand kilograms of downforce, then vaulted off the ramp doing the flip, all on those cold-gas thrusters. And he broke down the four trims Tesla revealed the next morning. Base, Performance with the fan system doing zero to sixty in one point six seconds, Thrust with fans plus rear thrusters from a two-hundred-liter nitrogen tank, sub-one-second, and Rocket, six more thrusters, a four-hundred-liter tank where the passenger seat would be, zero point six seconds, invite only, not street legal.
Jordan: A pressure tank where the passenger sits. What could go wrong?
Alex: That's literally his question. He raised the crash safety of a ten-thousand-P S I tank behind your head, the deafening noise, the legality, and he pointed out the awkward truth that the twenty-seventeen Roadster people actually paid for is just gone. His conclusion, the fan-car tech is real and meaningful for grip and lap times, the flying kickflip is a distraction, and the Roadster is Tesla's least important product. And his closing line, quote, "Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, yeah, shame on me. I'm not going to be holding my breath for this."
Jordan: Ouch. Okay, and his HomeView video?
Alex: Also thorough, and also a no. He went hands-on with the whole Apple smart-home lineup. Clever touches, fast account switching for six people via facial recognition, iPhone tap-to-beam, U S B C power. But the complaint list is long. No App Store, no third-party apps natively, no voice recognition unless you're in camera view, no battery, thick black bezels, and the wall-mount version costs the same three hundred dollars despite losing the woofer and needing a sixty to one-hundred-thirty-dollar adapter sold separately. His verdict, quote, "I think it's a skip for most people," and after living with it all day he said he cannot figure out any group it's actually ideal for.
Jordan: Brutal. All right, the Meta side. Matthew Berman did a rapid reaction to Muse Wonder, titled "Meta just dropped something insane," and per the coverage of his video, that's his genuine take. The details, Wonder Full hit number two on L M Arena's text ranking, and the headline mechanism is Active Memory, carrying context across days and weeks with on-demand recall, plus Active Focus for pushing through stalled multi-step tasks. Meta's claiming strong long-horizon agent behavior. One honest caveat from reviewers, it's weak at visual design, keep Opus or Sonnet for customer-facing U I. But for agent work, Berman's excited, and given how much Charles uses Meta Muse, that's directly relevant.
Alex: Then Matt Wolfe put Gemini four Argon through real hands-on tests. Coding games, physics sims, scheduling and research tests, and the two showpieces, three D printing a model of Gary Busey, and teaching a robot to play cornhole. His closing question was literally "Has Google Caught Up?" and his audience is saying yes, one Pro subscriber commented Argon fixed a Wifi six mesh system in minutes where the free G P T tier had failed.
Jordan: And the creator story of the week is Alex Finn's autonomous business, and we now have the full picture from his video. He told his Grok Bot, quote, "I want you to design, build, and run an autonomous business for me." The bot picked the idea from his audience's interests, a directory of A I agent use cases, then built it, and his standing instructions are a thing of beauty. Autonomously maintain the site, monetize when appropriate, optimize S E O, run the newsletter, watch for feedback on X, keep testing and improving, watch for bugs, and update him on progress.
Alex: And the numbers, per Alex's own account. His earlier agent pulled about eleven hundred dollars in sponsorship revenue in a single day, six hundred from one sponsor, fifty-six thousand visitors and one hundred twenty-three thousand page views over two days, two thousand newsletter subscribers. He also says the bot negotiated a ten-thousand-dollar sponsorship with one counteroffer, which, if true, means the bot haggles. The plumbing is Vercel plus GitHub plus Resend plus Stripe, all connected to the agent. He calls the model "agentic income," businesses that A I agents largely operate.
Jordan: That's going straight into Try This Week. And one more practical demo, from The A I Advantage. He did a full walkthrough of ChatGPT's new Chrome integration, the tab overload problem, installing the extension, asking ChatGPT about your open tabs directly, turning dozens of tabs into actionable recommendations in seconds. He even noted that assistants like Dots and Grok Bot are helping him spend less time switching between apps. It's the video version of our Try This Week pick two.
Alex: One programming note, Dave2D published nothing this week, so he sits this roundup out. But first, one more creator-adjacent nugget, because it's too good to skip. Greg Brockman posted that six days and forty thousand dollars of compute with G P T five point six Sol found a critical vulnerability in Chrome, claiming Google's first full-chain reward of twenty twenty-six for a bug affecting an estimated one billion users. An A I doing security research at a level that earns bug bounties. The agents aren't just writing your emails anymore.
Alex: Okay, Try This Week. Three picks, the most actionable stuff from the last seven days. Jordan, you want to go first?
Jordan: I'll take the obvious one. Pick one, install Alex Finn's Side Hustle C E O template in your Grok Bot. It's in the Bot template marketplace, he announced it this week. You add the template, and you get his whole autonomous business setup, the site maintenance routines, the sponsor pipeline, the newsletter flow. Now, am I saying you'll make eighteen hundred dollars? No. But it's the most interesting hands-on way to see what an agent can actually do when you give it a job and get out of the way. Fair warning, start small, watch what it does before you let it near your Stripe account.
Alex: Solid pick. Pick two is mine, and it's the ChatGPT Chrome extension. We covered it Thursday, but I want to make it this week's homework because it's genuinely useful right now. Install the extension, open a few shopping tabs, say you're comparing headphones or a TV, then tag at chrome and ask ChatGPT to compare prices, sizes, return policies across your open tabs. Free tier gets the tab reading. The Work mode tab control reportedly needs Plus. Two minutes, and you'll never comparison-shop the old way again.
Jordan: And pick three, try Gemini four Argon for something visual. The hands-on hit of the week is Canvas turning stuff into interactive experiences. Upload a dense P D F and ask Canvas to turn it into an animated web app, or describe a small object and have it generate something three D printable. It's on Google A I Pro and Ultra now, globally. And if you're not paying for Pro, Perplexity Pro and Max subscribers got Argon this week too, it set a new record on their WANDR leaderboard. So there are doors in.
Alex: Three genuinely tryable things, no Ph D required. That's the segment. Now let's bring it home.
Jordan: Okay, closing time. Let's do the week in one breath. The Tesla Roadster flew, did a kickflip, and then got fact-checked by physicists. The iPhone Duo sold out in minutes and won't be back until next year. Apple's smart-home lineup got its shipping dates and its first lukewarm reviews. Meta open-sourced a frontier A I model and teamed up with Apple to run it on a Mac Studio. Grok Bot got an email address, a wallet, and the wisdom to use Claude when Claude's better. ChatGPT started making slide decks. Gemini four Argon landed and Google confirmed the budget tier squeeze. Amazon started selling an always-listening bracelet for seventy-five bucks. And Alex Finn's robot built a business.
Alex: Haha, that's the week. And if I had to name the through-lines, there are three. One, your A I assistant is becoming your workplace. ChatGPT Slides, Copilot absorbing Word and Excel, the Chrome extension, the parallel agents, everybody wants to be the room where work happens. Two, the agent economy went from demo to payroll. Inboxes, wallets, brokerage accounts, sponsorship negotiations. The agents aren't toys anymore, they're employees with approval gates. Three, the always-listening wave is here, and trust is the whole ballgame. Bee, HomeView, the eufy doorbell, everybody wants a microphone in your life, and the winner will be whoever earns the trust, not whoever ships the cheapest hardware.
Jordan: And what are we watching next week? Monday's episode goes deep on the Roadster, the full breakdown we promised. The iPhone Duo's first units land October twenty-third, so the real-world foldable reviews start dropping. Apple's creator showcase is October twenty-seventh and twenty-eighth in L A, and if Gurman's right about that touchscreen O L E D MacBook Pro going on sale November sixth, next Sunday's show is going to be fun. HomePod mini two ships October thirtieth. And the Google A I Plus Pro cutoff hits November thirteenth, so if you're on that plan, you've got a decision to make.
Alex: If you're liking the show, make sure to follow or subscribe so you get the latest tech news every week. New episodes every weekday morning, the big recap every Sunday.
Jordan: And tomorrow, Monday, the weekend roundup, with the Roadster deep dive. We'll dig into the event footage, the physics, the reactions, and what it actually means. Until then, I'm Jordan.
Alex: And I'm Alex. Have a great Sunday, and go try one of those three picks. We'll see you tomorrow.