Speaker 1Which of these sound most exciting to you? A new ability for Claude to use a browser window to be able to do tasks for you. The ability for ChatGPT to effectively switch in and out of temporary mode as suits you. A new voice model that not only can faithfully transcribe what you actually say, but even clean it up and get at your intent. A new video model from Google with massively more controllability for actually generating videos that you can use for real things. Or a totally different video model that takes you less time to generate the video than it does to watch it. These are just some of the new features, models, and tools that released this week. The AI Daily Brief is a daily podcast and video about the most important news and discussions in AI. All right, friends, quick announcements before we dive in. First of all, thank you to today's sponsors, KPMG, Harbor, Blitzy, and HyperAgent. To get an ad-free version of the show, go to patreon.com.ai daily brief, or you can subscribe on Apple Podcasts. To learn more about sponsoring the show, send us an email at kpmg.com. And lastly, if you listen to today's episode and think to yourself, man, I want to use all those features, but I feel behind. I need to catch up in my AI skills. The next cohort of super intelligent training programs, which are incubated over here at AIDB are coming up in September. You can find a link to them on the AI Daily Brief website, or you can just go to training.besuper.ai. Kicking off confirmation that Hugging Face is being sold and that yes, it is to NVIDIA. The information broke the story late on Wednesday night following the earnings call with their sources saying, that NVIDIA has agreed to buy Hugging Face for $12.9 billion. Now, rumors of the deal only started emerging over the weekend. And while, of course, this could have all been going on before anyone externally knew, it seems like it might have been a pretty speedy negotiation. Much of the reporting focused on the strong valuation multiple. Hugging Face only has $150 million in annualized revenue, meaning that NVIDIA is technically paying around 80 times revenue as a price. As a point of reference, SpaceX's $60 billion acquisition of Cursor was around 15 times revenue. Well, as I said the other day when I talked about the potential of this deal, NVIDIA is very much not buying Hugging Face for their revenue. Instead, the deal seems to confirm that NVIDIA is acquiring their way into a full-stack open business model. Hugging Face is the premier distribution channel for open models. NVIDIA's $6 billion licensing deal with Poolside announced last week allowed them to hire about 100 veteran AI researchers to staff up their team, and other investments like their strategic partnership with Perplexity give them solid harnesses as well as an app layer play. What's more, over the course of around six months, NVIDIA has taken their open model series, Numotron, from a tech demo to a real contender among open models. Akash Gupta suggests that as much as it might be an offensive play, it's also a defensive play. He writes, Google has run its own TPUs for a decade. The labs writing NVIDIA the largest checks are the ones working hardest to stop. Open models are the counterweight. When Meta or Mistral or DeepSeek releases weights, millions of developers download them, fine-tune them, and serve them, overwhelmingly on NVIDIA GPUs through CUDA. Custom Silicon has no answer for that ecosystem. I think the defensive positioning is not just relative to NVIDIA's chip business, but also its positioning for the world that we keep talking about, where companies simply use a diversity of models. And many of their common and core day-to-day processes are run not on the state-of-the-art frontier models, but on something open, lighter, more nimble, more customizable. A while ago, NVIDIA spotted that opening and has been careening towards it ever since. Now, in terms of how folks are receiving it, no one has a hard time understanding why NVIDIA made the move. Fumbler writes, NVIDIA clearly don't just want to sell the picks and shovels, they want to own more of the AI economy built on top of them. Jen Luca writes, NVIDIA owns the GPUs, CUDA owns the developers, Hugging Face owns the open-source AI ecosystem, Jensen is slowly putting the whole stack together. NVIDIA is becoming much more than a chip company. Others, though, are wondering if people will stick around Hugging Face given its new ownership. Todd Saunders writes, Hugging Face is valuable partly because it is perceived as independent and broadly neutral. Their users include researchers, startups, enterprises, cloud providers, hardware companies, and competitors to NVIDIA. Today, developers can use the platform without believing that it is designed to push them towards one vendor. It's partially what they love about it. An NVIDIA acquisition could threaten that trust, but this could be a home run. Pratham thinks that this is a bigger trend as well. They write, The real question isn't why NVIDIA bought Hugging Face. It's what happens to open-source AI when its biggest players start buying the places where it lives. Eric Hartford thinks that we will see an opportunity. He writes, I'm happy for Hugging Face for their exit, but this is going to be a loss for open-source AI. HF is no longer hardware agnostic. This is an opportunity for a new standard bearer to arise. Still, that's the kind of concern that people always have around acquisitions. And relative to expecting that to be the case, I would suggest that there is a lot more optimism around this particular acquisition than you normally see, which shows what a good job NVIDIA has done building trust in the AI community. Conrad Art writes, I can't think of a better company to buy Hugging Face other than NVIDIA, and it makes sense as it aligns with what they are doing as a whole. Conrad Art writes, I can't think of a better company to buy Hugging Face. I bet we will be seeing loads of more amazing features and ways to train and use models on Hugging Face going forwards. Ramaznam writes, such a great fit and such a great push towards plural AI. NVIDIA sells compute. Hugging Face makes it easy to access a plethora of ways to turn that into value, reduces the odds that any one lab, company, or nation will monopolize frontier AI. The world is better with plural AI. NVIDIA also reported earnings this week and kind of blew the doors off. Revenue growth accelerated to 106% over the past year, 21 points higher than their growth rate at the end of Q1. Quarterly sales for the quarter came in at 96.2 billion, tantalizingly close to the $100 billion a quarter milestone that only five other companies have achieved. Still, while forecasts were ahead of expectations, NVIDIA is still flagging that growth will slow slightly to 89.5% for Q3. CFO Colette Kress said that supply chain snarls would continue to weigh on growth, limiting NVIDIA to 70% for fiscal year 2027. NVIDIA also disclosed that major customers are asking for more time to pay. Free cash flow fell by 50% compared to a year ago, coming in at $21 billion. This fall was mirrored by a 50% rise in accounts receivable. NVIDIA said the cause was, quote, extended payment terms on large multi-quarter agreements with certain investment-grade customers. Certainly, this was the big red flag for investors, with days' sales outstanding rising from 45 days to 60 days. Alongside the numbers, NVIDIA announced that they are officially back in the Chinese market. They reported a small volume of sales of H200 chips under new export control rules, but noted that the figure was well out of the total permitted by the Trump administration. Ultimately, while there was room to find some negatives in the report, it's difficult to overlook the raw sales numbers. NVIDIA was already shipping an incredible number of chips by last summer, and they've almost doubled sales since then. Reinforcing that point, Amazon announced that they would be buying an additional 2 million NVIDIA chips as they accelerate their data center build-out. NVIDIA doesn't disclose how many total chips they sell per year, but it's believed to be less than 10 million, meaning that this is a huge additional order that will keep demand solid for years into the future. The earnings were enough to drive investors back to NVIDIA, setting the stock up by 4.8% in after-hours trading. One interesting substory given the unique role that NVIDIA is increasingly playing in the AI ecosystem, the company has paused revenue-sharing deal with Neoclouds as they rethink their approach to industry backstops. Less than two months ago, NVIDIA announced that they would start offering new financing deals where customers could receive credit support in exchange for a cut of the profits. This was seen at the time as an improvement on NVIDIA's previous model, where they would guarantee data center demand and hope that translated into cheaper financing from private credit firms or banks. Sources told the Wall Street Journal that this program has been put on hold after some employees expressed concerns. There is a belief that the arrangement could attract scrutiny for antitrust, and there were sensitivities around how much control NVIDIA would exert over customer businesses. The Journal noted that the precise reason for the pause couldn't be learned, and so theoretically the program could return in the future with some tweaks. NVIDIA for their part denied the reporting and stated, quote, access to the fast-growing AI ecosystem is still in place and continues to evolve due to high demand. Now, staying on Wall Street for a minute, believe it or not, Salesforce, who we will talk about in the main episode as well, is leading a SaaS comeback with a strong earnings report. Six months ago, one major market narrative was that software was done for, and companies would soon be vibe-coding their own SaaS replacements. This was the much-discussed SaaSpocalypse, if you remember that term. That level of disruption obviously did not play out, and increasingly, what we're actually seeing is adoption of AI tools within traditional software products is leading to a revenue boost. That was certainly the story on Wednesday night, when Salesforce reported that their AgentForce product is on track to deliver $1.5 billion in revenue this year, up from a forecast of $1.2 billion in the first quarter. Overall, sales were $11.5 billion for the quarter, growing at an 11% pace, so AI revenue is still a relatively modest part of the picture. This was still enough, though, for the market to identify AgentForce as a successful and growing product. The stock was up a staggering 22% on Thursday, with Salesforce now just 5% away from filling the entire drawdown from the SaaSpocalypse period. Taking a step back, one by one, we have seen some of the most beaten-down software stocks deliver solid financials and surge back to life. ServiceNow, Figma, Atlassian, CrowdStrike, Okta have all staged major comebacks over the past months. Key bank analyst Jackson Adder noted that these companies haven't even needed to post blockbuster earnings to generate a huge return. Said Adder, We're all coming around to the idea that things are going to be more durable and are not going away. That's why you see Salesforce and Adder working together. Salesforce come out with fine but not stellar results, but you see a really outsized reaction. Benioff certainly took a victory lap on the earnings call, saying, I really want to start here at the beginning and talk about the SaaSpocalypse. Skeptics said that seats would decline, and AgentForce, sales, service, and slack, all seats grew year over year. Skeptics said customers would leave, but attrition was near its lowest level ever. Skeptics said pricing power would erode, but bookings more than doubled quarter over quarter, and contract length terms improved across all segments, new business, and renewals. And agentic use of the platform surged six-fold via model context protocol calls and CLA calls. calls. Apps are not dying. Former AI czar David Sachs pounced on the news, posting, the AI capex is a bubble and the SaaS is dead narratives getting shredded this morning. Box's Aaron Levy writes, this week's tech earnings call were a critical reminder of how valuable the relationship is between software and AI. Software and agents are going to work together and ultimately grow the size of the IT TAM dramatically as a result over time. Now, bringing the booming revenue story to the app layer, according to new numbers sourced by the information, Cognition has hit 900 million in annualized revenue. That's more than a 3x increase since the beginning of the year for the creators of Coding Agent Devin. And it appears to be a similar story across the board. Higgs Field, an interface wrapper for video and image models, has also tripled this year to reach 700 million in annualized revenue. Perplexity has tripled their run rate to 750 million. Open Evidence, the chatbot for doctors, has doubled to 300 million. And even Manus, after the messy unwind of the meta acquisition, claims they have a run rate of 400 million, quadrupling from last year. And if the total numbers still remain far behind the U.S., leading Chinese AI companies are seeing similar types of growth. The information again reports that DeepSeek has generated 70 million in revenue this year, which is a 10x increase from their full-year numbers for 2025. Now, as we round the corner, a quick check-in on the policy side of the house. A new executive order on AI regulation has stalled out after drafts were quietly circulated in recent weeks. Reports say that the Trump administration recently proposed an executive order that would create a self-regulatory body for the AI industry. You might remember this idea starting to gather support after DeepMind chairman Demis Hassabis formally proposed it in a July blog post. The new body would be modeled on FINRA, the self-regulatory organization for the financial services industry. Essentially, this approach would require AI labs to share notes on security issues, conduct safety testing for new models, and create regulations that govern the industry. Treasury Secretary Scott Besant, who, for whatever reason, has a key role in AI policy, supported the idea. Reportedly, senior officials drafted and circulated an executive order that would create this new body over the past month. And while it's not totally clear exactly why the effort has stalled out, some sources flagged opposition from former White House AI czar David Sachs as a potential cause. During last weekend's episode of the All In podcast, Sachs called FINRA for AI a, quote, horrible idea and a Trojan horse for an open-source model ban. He believes that once the body is set up, the frontier labs will push for standards that apply equally to all models, i.e. standards that open model developers will find impossible to comply with. Sachs also pointed out that FINRA doesn't have a good reputation for promoting competition and innovation. Many startups looking to enter the financial industry view FINRA as largely concerned with using regulation to protect incumbents. Whatever the case for now, no FINRA for AI, but that doesn't mean that industry self-regulatory efforts are not happening. Notably, OpenAI and Anthropic and more than 100 other companies have called for an urgent new approach to cyber defense. The call came in the form of an open letter signed by companies, across the tech, finance, and industrial sectors. Alongside Google, Microsoft, and AWS, the list also includes companies like Visa, General Motors, and PwC. The letter warned, we have a limited window to strengthen cyber defenses. In the coming months, AI-enabled cyber attacks will become far more widespread and sophisticated, as models around the world become increasingly capable. The companies and public services our communities depend on, from hospitals to water treatment plants to the infrastructure that powers the internet, are at risk. Today's AI advances are already giving defenders new way to fight cyber attacks. They're already giving defenders new way to fight cyber attacks. They're already giving defenders new way to fight cyber attacks. They're already giving defenders new way to fight cyber attacks. They're already giving defenders new way to fight cyber attacks. They're weaknesses that have accumulated for years. If we act decisively, we can use the defender's window to make our digital world much more secure. The letter proposes a collective response. It asserted that the status quo isn't going to cut it, with long-standing bugs, unpatched vulnerabilities, and technical debt across all computerized systems. The letter called for cyber defenders to be provided with access to better AI tools, as well as better coordination across industries. A global response is necessary, it argues, requiring new partnerships to raise security standards and find new solutions for emerging cyber threats. Remarkingly, on the open letter, Sam Albin positioned security as more important than competition, posting, This is a critically important moment for cyber defense with AI. There is not much time to act. We are happy if you want to work with us or any of our competitors or partners, but please take this moment seriously. Only an urgent and intense collective response will work. Putting an exclamation point on it, Professor Ethan Malek writes, Your organization is not spending enough of its effort bolstering cybersecurity during the window before Openweight's mythos class models and harnesses become available. The Hugging Face incident shows us you don't even need intentional bad actors to be exposed to AI hacking. Like I said, quite a meaty headlines to end the week, but for now, let's move into the main episode and talk about the slew of new features and tools that you could be using and trying right now. A new study from KPMG and the University of Texas at Austin found that when people work with AI, similar skills don't guarantee similar outcomes. Researchers studied more than 500 early career professionals and found that the best performers consistently amplified the value of AI by guiding, evaluating, and refining its outputs. These top performers, called AI amplifiers, weren't defined by what they knew alone, but by how they worked with AI. Learn more about what separates AI amplifiers from everyone else at kpmg.com slash US slash AI amplifiers. If you listen to this show, you likely have a thesis. Maybe it's enterprise adoption. Maybe it's compute. Maybe it's a specific lab. Harbor Capital's AI Lab Ecosystem ETFs let you express it via five actively managed ETFs, each seeking exposure to the ecosystem around one major lab. Anthropic, OpenAI, DeepMind, Meta, or SpaceX AI. Your view of the AI race in ETF form. Harbor Capital Advisors' AI Lab Ecosystem ETF suite gives investors a way to invest in the AI ecosystem they believe is best positioned for success. Search Harbor AI Lab Ecosystems ETFs wherever you invest or follow at Harbor Capital on X to learn more. Visit harborcapital.com for a prospect. containing investment objectives, risks, fees, expenses, and other important information. Read and consider it carefully before investing. Risks include principal loss and artificial intelligence-related risks. Harbor ETFs are distributed by Foresight Fund Services, LLC. Harbor is not affiliated with AI Daily Brief, and the funds are not affiliated with, sponsored by, or endorsed by any AI lab. This is a paid advertisement and not personalized investment advice. Investing involves risk, including possible loss of principal. Blitzy's understanding of massive code bases unlocks autonomous security fixes, modernization, and new features. So what happens when there's no risk? What happens when there's no risk? What happens when there's no legacy code at all? Greenfield is supposed to be the easy part. Clean slate, no technical debt. But even Greenfield moves at human speed, one sprint at a time. Blitzy changes the unit of work from the developer to the project, autonomously planning, building, testing, and validating entire applications from scratch. Hundreds of thousands of lines of production-ready code. One Blitzy customer stood up a brand new application, 534,000 lines of code, compressing a 65-week roadmap into two weeks. Another shipped an entire application with no front-end software. Legacy or Greenfield, the answer is the same. Software at the speed of compute. Build what's next at Blitzy.com. That's B-L-I-T-Z-Y dot com. This episode of the AI Daily Brief is brought to you by HyperAgent, where you run fleets of agents your team can manage together. New users get $1,000 in inference. Forget local agents and chat workflows waiting on your laptop to be prompted. HyperAgent deploys always-on agents in the cloud, doing real work across the tools your team already uses. Marketing's agent turns competitor moves into landing pages. Sales is agent enriches leads, drafts emails, and updates the CRM. Ops agent chases the paperwork and tracks the budget. Every agent has access to shared context and follows your rules about scope and approvals. It's time you add agents that feel like teammates. Hire yours at HyperAgent, built by the team at Airtable. Claim your $1,000 in inference at hyperagent.com slash AI Daily Brief. Welcome back to the AI Daily Brief. Just like it is nearly impossible to keep up with the onslaught of AI news, so too is it extremely difficult for any one person to keep track of all of the new features and models and tools that come out in any given week. Mostly our attention just goes to when there are big model announcements that might more fundamentally shift how we interact with AI, although over the course of 2026 we've also gotten a lot more adept at harness updates as well. Still, sometimes it's worth going through and just taking an inventory of all of the feature updates, quality of life upgrades, and new capabilities that the model and harness companies have released to see if any of them can be relevant for the way that we work. And with that in mind, today we are going through, I don't know, a dozen updates that I have seen over the last seven days or so that are things that you might find extremely useful and practical in the immediate term. First up, we have an update for Cloud. Cloud Cowork now has a built-in browser to make web-based tasks more convenient. If your task includes something that happens on a website, like filling out a form, interacting with a web app, a browser window will open alongside your session for Cloud to use. The feature can also be used for agentic browsing, similar to some of the early features that caught people's attention from AI browsers like Perplexity's Comet or Dia from the browser company. Cloud points out that there is nothing new to install, that it's built directly into the desktop app and stays separate from your own browsers and logins. In other words, this is its own browser, it's not taking over yours. Although for those who want to stay in their own browser, that feature exists via Cloud and Chrome. For many, this one was a big old finally. Dan Shipper from Every says, they did it, folks. Santi from MercadoLibre writes, it was about time. Very good feature. Vaibhubs to Sinti gets at why, although this seems like a small feature update, when you combine it with ChatGPT work and other new things like Grokbot, it all adds up to a fairly meaningful inflection. AI, he writes, went from writing text to browsing the web on your behalf in the same month. Or as Enums put it, feels like the line between AI assistant and AI operator just got a lot thinner. Sally Stockholm writes, this feels like a much bigger update than just Cloud got a browser. The interesting part is that Cloud can now actually do the web work instead of telling you how to do it. Need to research something, navigate a website, fill out forms, or complete a task? The browser opens inside Cowork and Claude handles the process alongside you. We're slowly moving away from AI that just gives answers. The next phase is AI that opens the tab and gets the job done. Now, as some pointed out, Anthropic is at least a little late to the party here. Token Gremlin says OpenAI has already had basically this in ChatGPT work for weeks. Julia's CEO Rahul points to the browser agent that they released back in July and basically said welcome to the party. Still, for many, the obvious inspiration for this was Grokbot. When Grokbot was released, the ability for it to work in its own browser was one of the things that people latched onto as really powerful and, frankly, most likely to be copied by all the other labs. A16Z's Martin Casado writes, I find ChatGPT work more like fancy RPA. It works well, but it is more workflow-oriented, where Grokbot really is a virtual go-worker. Give it its own browser, chat over Slack. It does a great job adapting to your style and preferences. Now, in terms of how you can use it, there's a lot of different ways to use it. For example, in terms of ChatGPT Work's version of this feature, the official ChatGPT account, they write, you can ask it to set up utilities for a new apartment, book a DMV or passport appointment, check reimbursement costs through your insurance, find and book an in-network doctor around your availability, check when your car registration expires and prepare the renewal paperwork, compare your rental insurance policy with an issue you're emailing your landlord about, find and save apartment listings that match your criteria, restock something just by uploading a given our ongoing conversations about the balance between AI for life and AI for work, i.e. consumer AI versus B2B AI, it's interesting to me that they're pitching all of these much more life-oriented tasks as a new capability for ChatGPT Work. OpenAI's head of developer experience, Romain Hewitt, writes, ChatGPT Work now has its own computer in the cloud. When it can use the web and take action for you, the possibilities start to feel almost limitless. Now, one other small quality of life upgrade from ChatGPT, the company realized recently that they need a better way to use the web, and that's by using ChatGPT.com. for people to switch back and forth between temporality and permanence. On X, they posted, We heard your feedback that sometimes a temporary chat becomes something worth saving. Now you can choose to personalize a temporary chat with your existing memories, custom instructions, and plugins, and save it to your history if you want to keep it. Temporary chats don't create new memories and stay out of your sidebar unless you choose to save them. In other words, for people who have a little bit more concern around privacy and who would want to be perhaps default using the temporary chat feature, as opposed to saving everything that they do by default, this feature now makes it easier to pull in relevant ChatGPT context even into temporary chats, as well as to upgrade them to non-temporary when it makes sense to. Another big quality of life upgrade, one which will frankly punch way above its weight class in terms of its newsworthiness, I noticed just before I started recording. Jason from OpenAI writes, Multiple Gmail accounts available in plugins now. In other words, instead of connecting only one Gmail, you can connect multiple. This has, long been on many power users' wishlists, given that the normal course of business for people of this folks is to have, I don't know, a half dozen different emails that you interact with in some meaningful way. How IAI's Claire Vo was recently raving about how this was, in fact, her favorite feature of the new Grokbot, that it didn't constrain connectors to a single Gmail or a single Slack. And boy, howdy, is this one where I don't care who did it first, as long as they all do it. Speaking of that, many of you will always be quite happy to use whatever tools the big companies give us access to. And I'm sure a lot of you will be happy to use it. I'm sure a lot of you will be happy to use it. I'm sure a lot of you will be happy to use it. I'm sure a lot of you will be happy to use it. I'm sure a lot of you will be happy to use it. I'm sure a lot of you will be happy to use it. I'm sure a lot of you will be happy to use it. I'm sure a lot of you will be happy to use it. Whether it's OpenAI or Anthropic or SpaceX AI or Google or whomever. But for those who want more control, and who maybe got hooked on the flexibility that something like OpenClaw enabled, it's worth keeping an eye on the Hermes agent. The team over at Hermes is clearly watching everything that the harness and model companies are doing. Because as soon as anything useful gets announced from those companies, inevitably it finds its way over to Hermes extremely quickly. So for example, on Thursday this week, they announced that the Hermes agent can now seamlessly browse as you. They write, turn on real profile browsing and your agent acts with your logins from a managed copy of your existing Chrome profile. This follows from about 10 days ago, right after the GrokBot announcement, when the company introduced bot mode for Hermes desktop. With bot mode, they write, your agent profiles become a series of named bots. Each bot has its own role, model, memory, skills, and profile picture. Bots can use any model and even communicate with each other. Build a specialist bot once to use it. Forever. Articulating why this might be of interest to some folks, the Noose research account who makes Hermes writes, Hermes agent has its own remote computer too. You just aren't locked into using it and it costs a few dollars per month instead of 200. Some other big differences, connect any provider, sub, or model. Use it completely free on your own machine or with one of several free models on Noose portal. Switch between bot mode and classic sessions mode. Self-improving agents that learn to execute tasks cheaper and more effectively. Open source so you can modify anything you want about the agent itself to suit your needs. Again, this is not going to be necessary for everyone, but I think it is pretty rad from a consumer choice perspective that Hermes is very much keeping pace with all of the major harnesses as these new feature upgrades and capabilities come online. And by the way, Hermes isn't just copying things. They're also doing some really cool experimentation on their own as well. They have a Hermes HUD mode, which is basically a seamless overlay where you can keep track of things going on in your work life as you're doing other stuff like playing a game. The official Noose account writes, I just play games all day and get back to work. Get my work done in that little text box now. Now, if Hermes is on one end of the spectrum, the new collaboration between Salesforce and Claude has to be on the other. Salesforce and Anthropic are teaming up for a partnership that they are calling, wait for it, ClaudeForce. At its core, this is a new set of plugins and skills to allow Salesforce users to access their CRM using Claude agents. They can use Salesforce data as context and thanks to Salesforce's AI harness, which they call AI force, agentic actions can be taken while respecting the data. So, if you're a salesperson and you're a salesperson and you're a salesperson and you're a salesperson and you're a salesperson, you can use Salesforce data to protect your existing governance guardrails. In their press release, Salesforce writes, for decades, enterprise software required users to manually navigate static UI to get work done. Now that agents can access the data, workflows, and rules directly, software is a system that powers every interface. The move underscores that there is an inevitable shift in how we interact with things like CRM, making it easier for agents to more natively do so. Salesforce CEO Mark Benioff said, here, the UI is the AI, allowing you to build custom apps dynamically and answer any questions you have. So, if you're a salesperson and you're a salesperson and you're a enterprise question, probabilistic intelligence alone doesn't run a company, and deterministic systems don't reason. Which, by the way, is just about the fanciest way to say that AI and software both have roles to play that you could have possibly imagined. Benioff continues, by fusing Claude's extraordinary reasoning with the trusted data, workflows, and governance every enterprise runs on, we're delivering a dynamic interface that thinks, reasons, and acts. This is how every business will run. And yes, it even got a new Matthew McConaughey ad. Now, for some, especially as Dario appeared next to Benioff on CNBC, this was a moment for cracking jokes. Entrepreneur Varun Ramganesh writes, Anthropic, while raising VC money, our TAM is the US economy, we are the ultimate intelligence, we are killing the entire app layer, we are going to create 50% unemployment, and make the entire human workforce redundant. Anthropic, in reality, excited to announce Claudeforce in partnership with Salesforce. But this sort of joking massively undersells just how much of the enterprise world actually runs on things like Salesforce. Thomas, for example, said, Claudeforce is notable enough to make me rethink my priors. The competitive signal is shifting. Beyond the headline, what I find most notable is that the Anthropic's CCO saying that CRM integration is the first of many. Realistically, software vendors always should have been the Frontier Labs' largest customers. Up to now, however, it seemed like Anthropic and OpenAI had decided to go direct instead. Their strategy is changing, and in a dynamic market, when the facts change, your view has to change. Anthropic is clearly recognizing that it's hard to display software outright, and it's hard to display software outright, and it's hard to display When the agentic guardrails, governance, and infra doesn't exist in the enterprise and won't for another one to two years. The question now is, do customers still want to move data out of systems of record to build natively and avoid paying software platform API fees? Or will they accept the utility of enabling AI on an existing software infrastructure? The narrative is shifting, and intuitively, these native integrations should deliver customers the value they want from AI without as much of a lift. Hard to be bearish on enterprise software at present, given the nature of the world we live in, and the nature of the world we live in, the nature of the world we live in, and the nature of the world we live in, the nature of the world we live in, the nature of the world we live in, and the nature of the world we live in, the nature of the world we live in, the nature of the world we live in, are still the moats for software, and Anthropic is sending a market signal acknowledging the persistence thereof. And look, obviously it's just a handful of anecdotal examples. But the folks that I spoke to about this CloudForce deal that actually interact with systems like Salesforce were extremely excited about it, and at least one who had been planning on potentially building some alternatives to Salesforce, or at least exploring down that path, basically threw the brakes on that so they could figure out if this just did what they wanted in a way that it justified the cost. So while the exposters may get their yucks, over in the real enterprise world, some of you I imagine are sitting here thinking that this is the biggest deal of anything I've said so far. Now already we've gone through a ton of features, but there are a couple models that are worth noting, and this week they were clustered around audio and video. Gemini was back in the news this week, with the release of a new version of their speech-to-text model, Gemini 3.5 Transcribe. The model supports more than 85 languages, and Google says they've made some huge strides in usability. The model can function in verbatim mode if you need a direct transcription, or you can use it in Smart Translate mode, which strips away filler words, condenses rambling thoughts, and handles self-corrections to deliver a clean version of user intention. You can even create custom vocabulary to enhance the model's ability to deal with jargon and slang. Google says the model performs well in noisy environments and can distinguish between up to three different speakers. The model can be used across Google's AI suite if voice mode is your preferred way of interacting with AI, and is also available as an API to power third-party apps. This is then playing very much in the space of something like WhisperFlow, although built in not just to be an end application in itself, but also a key piece of infrastructure for other people who can build on top of it. AI developer Jan Kronberg wrote, This is the kind of release a lot of people are going to miss. Until next time. now, voice input required you to basically speak the way you write. Punctuation, well-structured sentences, fewer corrections along the way. Gemini 3.5 Transcribe flips that around. You speak the way you actually think, and the system produces the text you probably wanted to write, cleaning it up and organizing it as you speak. Now, as an aside, it is really hard to do that cleanup well. For example, I am constantly switching back and forth on WhisperFlow from the version where it does light cleanup to the version where it does no cleanup. No cleanup really does look like rambles without good punctuation and sometimes gets unclear, but even on the lightest cleanup setting, WhisperFlow strips away words that I am using as connectors rather than filler, assuming that they are filler. In any case, for that reason alone, I'm excited to see if Google offers something different here. SpaceX AI also dropped Grok Voice Think Fast 2.0, noting that it's now number one on the Artificial Analysis Speech-to-Speech Index. They write, this index measures whether voice agents can reason over the speech it hears, resolve real customer issues, and correctly complete tasks using AgentX. At Starlink, they continue, we're using Grok Voice to resolve over 15,000 inbound customer support and sales calls a day. Grok diagnoses hardware issues, ships replacements, and fulfills over 3,000 orders a week via voice calls and chat. A bunch of people showed demos exploring just how much the speed and latency upgrades really change what you can do with voice in the agentic context. We also, however, got a new video model from Google as well. The model is called Gemini Omni 1.1 Flash, and they write that with this update, you can extend your scenes, specify starting and ending, and extend your scenes. In other words, this is 100% an update that is not just about quote-unquote better video, it's about massively more usability of video generation in general. Now, once again, we got some new benchmarks. Arena says that Omni 1.1 Flash hit number one in the text-to-video arena and number two in the image-to-video arena, although when it comes to a new video model, the proof is in the pudding. It seems like people's first impression is that this is indeed a new model, and they're not sure what they're going to do with it. The biggest upgrade is the voice, and it sounds noticeably better, more natural, and it also generates more realistic videos than Omni Flash. Some found, however, that when they compared it to Seed Dance 2.5, it wasn't as clearly an improvement if it was an improvement at all. On the video front, Fall also introduced H3 Max, which they pitched as having better prompt understanding and being just way, way faster. They claimed an average latency of 3.49 seconds compared to Seed Dance 2.5, which is just way, way faster. They claimed an average latency of 3.49 seconds compared to Seed Dance 2.5, which is just way, way faster. They claimed an average latency of 3.49 seconds compared to Seed Dance 2.5, which is just way, way faster. They claimed an average latency of 3.49 seconds compared to Seed Dance 2.5, which is just way, way faster. They claimed an average latency of 3.49 seconds compared to Seed Dance 2.5, which is just way, way faster. And Gemini Omni Flash is 26.7 seconds. Justine Moore from Andreessen Horowitz writes, This is an insane model from Fall. I can't describe how wild it feels to generate a long clip in just 15 seconds. This will be transformative for the space. Adam Holter writes, Very fuzzy on the detail here, but this generated fast in 1.3 seconds for 20 cents. That's ridiculous. H3 Max is a big deal. Alex the AI Ads Guy writes, H3 Max is a big deal. Alex the AI Ads Guy writes, H3 Max first impressions. 15 second generation time. Audio is amazing. Voices sound good and sound effects too. Incredibly prompt adherent. It does exactly what you tell it to. Needs more testing, but it's hard to beat the balance and price of H3 Max. Writes Ethan Mollick, A line in AI video was crossed. In my experiments with just the web interface, H3 Max can now create reasonably high quality AI video in less time than it takes you to watch it. Investor Steve Jang responds, Yes, the ramifications are super interesting. It opens up live interactive visual environments as a fully generated world. One can have massively multiplayer and completely responsive and unique user experiences with no visible cutting or waiting. Now for those of you who want to try H3 Max out, you can do it over on Venice.ai. Venice is a privacy-focused AI alternative that recently crossed the threshold of 100 million in ARR, suggesting that more privacy-conscious AI has a market. So with all of that, from little quality of life upgrades to entirely new video generation models, there is a lot of new stuff to go through. So if you're interested in learning more about H3 Max, go out there and play with. Hopefully this episode gave you a few ideas for something you want to jump in and try. For now, that's going to do it for today's AI Daily Brief. Appreciate you listening or watching, as always, and until next time, peace.
PodcastTranscript AI