Welcome back! The best way to help you shop for real products? Show you fake ones…at least according to Amazon. The company will now display AI-generated product images below your autocomplete suggestions when you search the app. So, if you type "blue gingham shirt," you'll see a few invented styles to click through to actual results. The logic is that shoppers don't always know the right term (can anyone really define “rattan?”), so a generated picture bridges the gap.
What do you think—helpful or just plain confusing? Hit reply and share your POV.
A Quick Note From the Road
My buddy Corey Noles and I outside of Microsoft Build
I just spent the week at Microsoft Build, and there's a lot I want to unpack with you. But first, a quick story.
My buddy Corey and I were headed to an event one morning when we very confidently walked 20 minutes downhill in completely the wrong direction. We got rescued by a Waymo, which then dropped us at the base of one of those San Francisco hills that makes you reconsider every life choice that led you there. We survived (barely).
The good news: Once we caught our breath, we got to check out some of the genuinely cool new computers Microsoft just unveiled.
The headliner was the Surface RTX Spark Dev Box, a mini-PC that Satya Nadella described as "the AI data center for your desktop." 1 petaflop of AI compute, 20 CPU cores, 128 GB of unified memory. The idea is that developers can run massive, frontier-class models locally without ever touching the cloud. It's wild.
There's a lot more I want to dig into from Build—new MAI models, Project Solara (Microsoft's Android-based OS for running AI agents), the Majorana 2 quantum chip, on-device agent tooling—and I'll be unpacking all of it ASAP.
More soon!
— Matt
Meta Enters the Enterprise AI Race
Via MSN
Meta unveiled a Business Agent this week that can take real actions for companies (e.g., booking appointments, closing sales, processing payments). The goal? Meta is going after the enterprise AI market dominated by OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google.
The reach play: Meta is leaning on a footprint it already owns while opening new surfaces to reach businesses. As of today, over 1M businesses already use earlier chatbots on WhatsApp and Messenger, and the new agent extends to Instagram (free to start, paid tiers coming).
It's also taking a cue from the competition, embedding its own engineers inside client companies—AKA the same forward-deployed model Anthropic has ridden to enterprise wins.
Anthropic's annualized revenue run rate jumped from roughly $9B at the end of 2025 to more than $30B by early April, fueled in part by enterprise tools like Claude Code.
But it’s awkward timing: A group of hackers just tricked Meta's AI support chatbot into handing over access to high-profile Instagram accounts. Product Head Naomi Gleit pinned it on a buggy "technical check" rather than the agent itself.
Why it matters: Meta built its empire on consumer attention. Its wedge is distribution rather than a better model. Whether that's enough to pull companies away from rivals already embedded in their workflows is the real test.
Suno Raises $400M…Even as the Lawsuits Pile Up
Suno, the AI music generator, closed a $400M Series D on Wednesday at a $5.4B valuation—seven months after it raised at a $2.45B valuation. Seems investors don’t really mind its legal dramas. Roll the tape ➡️
Suno trains on copyrighted songs and argues fair use, a doctrine that's notoriously fact-specific. UMG, Sony, Germany's GEMA, and more are all still suing for copyright infringement, though Warner Music settled and signed a licensing deal last November.
When Sony and UMG first sued in 2024, they cited 560 copyrighted works. Last month, they moved to amend the complaint to add more than 61,000 additional songs allegedly used without permission.
Topping the charts: The legal overhang doesn’t seem to be slowing Suno down. It sits near the top of the App Store music charts, and around its Series C, users were generating over 7 million songs a day.
The bigger picture: Suno isn't alone in raising big while fighting in court—Anthropic settled author copyright claims for $1.5B last September, the largest such payout in US history…in the very same month it closed a $13B round at a $183B valuation. The pattern says investors are treating copyright litigation as a cost of doing business, not an existential threat. The open question is whether that confidence holds if a court rejects the fair-use argument outright.
Reimagine Your Marketing Processes with Agents in the Mix
It's time to rethink what your marketing team can actually get done. Agents in the Mix is the event to reframe everything.
At Agents in the Mix, you’ll:
See real demos of AI agents handling creation, distribution, optimization, personalization, and adoption.
Learn from practitioners using agents behind the scenes right now.
Choose your own adventure without missing anything—all sessions will be recorded.
Ready to go beyond fast tracking old processes?
Your revenue team's institutional memory
Via ASPR AI
ASPR AI is an agent-based sales assistant that uses specialized AI agents to handle the busywork draining your reps' time. It pulls tribal knowledge from calls, CRM records, and documents, then centralizes it.
How you can use it:
Automate CRM updates so reps stop logging calls by hand
Run meeting prep and capture without manual note-taking
Generate documents and handle email follow-ups automatically
Deliver personalized coaching to ramp new hires faster
Pricing: Paid
SQL for your AI agents
Via Coral
Coral is an open-source, local-first data layer that lets AI agents query APIs, databases, and files as read-only tables using plain SQL.
How you can use it:
Let agents query heterogeneous live sources reliably in production
Enforce scoped, read-only permissions and governance
Keep all your data inside your own infrastructure
Plug into agents via the CLI or MCP
Pricing: Free
Jobs, announcements, and big ideas
Reve unveils Reve 2.0, a layout-based image generation model for finer compositional control.
OpenAI rolls out Dreaming to sharpen ChatGPT's long-term memory for Plus and Pro users.
NVIDIA launches Nemotron 3 Ultra, powering faster, cheaper reasoning for long-running AI agents.
Krea ships Krea 2 Turbo, generating AI images in roughly two seconds.
Runway debuts Aleph 2.0 inside a new Edit Studio built for precise video edits.
Google introduces Gemma 4 12B, an encoder-free multimodal model that runs on laptops.
xAI releases a Grok Imagine 1.5 preview, opening its image generation to API developers.
You heard me up there: There’s a lot to dig into this week, from Microsoft announcements and beyond. I’m digging in with my weekly AI news recap, right here ➡
That’s a wrap! See you next week for more.
