Claude comes to Main Street

Plus, Amazon replaces Rufus

May 15, 2026

Welcome back! Mark Zuckerberg says Meta just launched the first major AI product where there is “no log of your conversations stored on servers.” Incognito Chat with Meta AI uses end-to-end encryption and processes everything in a Trusted Execution Environment. Not even Meta can read your messages. 

Meanwhile, ChatGPT users are suing OpenAI, claiming their private chats are being shared without consent. Google keeps temporary Gemini chats for up to 72 hours. Claude? At least 30 days. Privacy in AI just became a competitive feature.

— Matt, Catherine, and the Future Tools team

Your Next Home Might Come With a Built-in Data Center

NVIDIA and a startup called SPAN are working on something pretty wild: mini data centers built into the walls of new homes. 

The units would take unused electrical capacity in the house to run AI inference workloads locally. And each unit packs a whopping 16 NVIDIA Blackwell GPUs, 4 AMD EPYC CPUs, and 3TB of RAM. The idea is that future homes could ship with AI built in the same way they ship with internet or HVAC. You'd run your own models on your own hardware instead of pinging ChatGPT or Claude.

But here's where it gets really interesting: What if you could rent out your unused compute?

  • Think solar panels. When you generated extra energy, you used to be able to sell it back to the grid.

  • Or think Bitcoin mining. Idle hardware doing work in the background and earning you something for it.

  • Companies like OpenAI and Anthropic are starving for compute. If your house has a stack of Blackwell GPUs sitting idle at 3 a.m., why not let them use it for a cut?

My POV: I'm inferring a lot here, but I think this could genuinely shift how AI infrastructure gets built. Instead of mega data centers chewing up small towns' electricity (a whole topic we covered two days back), compute could end up distributed across millions of homes that voluntarily opt in and get paid for it.

There are real concerns, obviously—energy costs, who owns the data flowing through your walls, whether you actually want to share infrastructure with Big Tech. But the model is interesting enough that I don't think it stays a concept video for long. Someone's going to try this for real.

Would you let a data center live in your house if it paid you? Hit reply and let me know.

— Matt

Amazon Swaps Out Rufus in AI Shopping Experience

Via LinkedIn News

Amazon is bringing Alexa Plus to Amazon.com, integrating its LLM-powered assistant directly into the company’s shopping experience. And it’s retiring the Rufus chatbot in the process.

What’s new: Typing a query into Amazon triggers “Alexa for Shopping,” powered by Alexa Plus. Simple searches like “toilet paper” still return product lists, but conversational queries like “What’s a good skincare routine for men?” or “When did I last order AA batteries?” get AI-powered answers. Unlike Rufus, which lived in a small chat bubble, Alexa for Shopping is front and center in the search bar across the Amazon app, website, and Echo Show devices.

What it can do: The assistant can set price alerts, compare items, and automatically reorder products based on conditions you set. It can also shop on other websites via the controversial “Buy for Me” agentic feature, track a year of price history, and generate personalized shopping guides with product comparisons and AI-summarized reviews.

Why it matters: This is part of a broader trend toward agentic commerce with AI. Google and OpenAI have both launched shopping features with mixed results; in fact, OpenAI recently scrapped its instant shopping experiment. But could Amazon make it work? Owning both the shopping platform and the AI layer might give it an edge competitors can’t match.

Anthropic Launches Claude for Small Business

Anthropic is courting a new customer segment: the 36 million small businesses that make up the backbone of the US economy.

Big on small business: The company announced the launch of “Claude for Small Business,” a new suite of features available via a toggle in Claude Cowork. By enabling it, paying users get access to automated bookkeeping, business insights, and generative tools for ad campaigns. 

  • The numbers: Small businesses account for 44% of US GDP and employ nearly half the private-sector workforce, but their AI adoption has lagged. As Anthropic put it: “Tools and training are rarely tailored to the ways small businesses operate.”

  • The rollout: Anthropic is promoting the launch with a 10-city tour starting in Chicago, offering free AI training workshops for 100 local small business leaders at each stop.

The bigger picture: We’ve been tracking the enterprise AI trend for months. But this takes it further—the next battleground isn’t the Fortune 500, it’s Main Street. If Claude becomes the default AI layer for small business operations, Anthropic captures a massively underserved—but impactful—market.

Turn Postgres into an Agent-First Superpower

Do you need the kind of tool that makes you think: “Wait…why was I babysitting databases before this?” Then you need Ghost.

Ghost fundamentally changes the way you build by letting you:

  • Spin up Postgres for your AI agents in about 30 seconds

  • Give Claude Code a database it can actually drive through MCP

  • Fork databases instantly and run 10, 20, even 50 experiments in parallel

  • Start free with 1 TB, unlimited databases, and hard spending caps

Ready to get started with the 1 TB free tier? One install command, and you’re in.

All-in-one multimodal generative AI

Via Crafiq

Crafiq bundles dozens of AI models to create and refine images, convert them into 3D meshes, and generate music, SFX, and voiceovers.

How you can use it

  • Generate and upscale 2D images with inpainting

  • Convert images into textured, game-ready 3D assets

  • Produce short videos, animations, and audio

  • Run concurrent generations to iterate fast

Pricing: Free and paid plans

Agentic video editing

Via Ponder AI

Ponder AI automates video editing workflows with an agentic approach—handling cuts, effects, and assembly so you can focus on creative direction.

How you can use it

  • Automate repetitive editing tasks

  • Speed up rough cuts and assembly

  • Apply consistent styling across projects

  • Iterate on video content faster

Pricing: Paid

Jobs, announcements, and big ideas

  • Devs can finally start building apps for Meta's Ray-Ban Display glasses.

  • Perplexity's new Snowflake connector lets anyone do data science by just asking.

  • You can now hand off coding tasks to Codex straight from ChatGPT on your phone.

  • Claude Code just got an open-source toolkit for generating 3D assets.

  • Anthropic's Mythos AI sniffed out real macOS bugs Apple's own engineers had missed.

  • xAI rolled out a Grok-powered coding CLI, but only SuperGrok Heavy subscribers get in.

  • Anthropic and the Gates Foundation are putting $200M behind AI for health and education.

Want the rundown on a wild week in tech? I’ve got your (action-packed) recap here.

That’s a wrap! See you next week for more.