🗞️ THE WEEKEND RECAP
Top Stories You Might Have Missed
📈 Perplexity Hits 780M Queries in May: CEO says growth could top 1B weekly searches within a year, fueled by its new AI-powered Comet browser aiming to replace Chrome and act as a “cognitive OS” that not only answers questions but completes tasks on your behalf.
🎯 AI Can Pinpoint You From One Photo: A single beach snapshot let AI ID the exact vacation spot, showing how powerful models can now strip away digital anonymity—turning once-trivial data like photos into tools for tracking, raising urgent questions about privacy and safety.
🏗️ Amazon Builds Agentic AI for Robots: A new team at Lab126 is developing an AI framework to give robots the power to understand and act on voice commands, turning warehouse bots into multitasking assistants—part of Amazon’s broader push into “physical AI” systems.
🤖 Why Anthropic Cut Windsurf Access: “It would be odd for us to be selling Claude to OpenAI,” said co-founder Jared Kaplan, responding to questions about why Anthropic abruptly revoked access—amid reports that OpenAI, its biggest rival, is acquiring the AI coding assistant.
💸 Meta Plans $10B+ AI Chip Bet: The company is reportedly in talks to invest heavily in custom AI chips, aiming to reduce dependence on NVIDIA and control its future AI stack.
🛒 AMD Absorbs Untether AI Team: In a quiet move to boost its edge and data center AI game, AMD acquired the full Untether AI team, shelving their energy-efficient chips while expanding its in-house compiler and SoC design firepower to better compete with NVIDIA.
🏆 Google Says Gemini 2.5 Pro Beats Rivals: In a new preview, Gemini 2.5 Pro tops coding benchmarks like LMArena and WebDevArena, outperforming Grok 3 Beta, DeepSeek R1, and Claude 4 Opus—signaling Google’s sharpened push to lead in enterprise-grade AI development.
💰 Anysphere Raises $900M, Hits $500M Revenue: Touted as the fastest-growing startup ever, the AI coding tool maker behind Cursor now serves half the Fortune 500, with over a million daily users and plans to push deeper into enterprise and AI model development.
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🗣️ FORWARD FUTURE INTERVIEW
An Inside Look at Our Exclusive Interview With Sundar Pichai
We sat down with Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai for a rare, wide-ranging conversation on the future of AI—from diffusion models and self-improving agents to agent memory and ambient assistants.
Key topics include:
Why Google is exploring transformer alternatives
The rise of Alpha Evolve and recursive learning
How AI agents will change knowledge work and personal tech
What comes after the search box
If you want a glimpse into Google’s boldest AI bets (and what they mean for the rest of us), this one’s a must-read. 👉 Read the full recap + watch the interview
📜 HISTORY
AI Model “Enoch” Dates Dead Sea Scrolls with Scribe-Level Precision
A new AI model named “Enoch” is helping scholars more precisely date the Dead Sea Scrolls by analyzing the tiniest quirks in ancient handwriting. Developed by researchers at the University of Groningen, the model compares script patterns against carbon-dated samples to estimate when texts were written—often placing them 50 to 100 years earlier than traditional scholarly estimates.
Enoch’s standout finding: versions of Daniel and Ecclesiastes may have been copied not long after the originals were composed. The tool brings a new level of rigor to palaeography, a field long reliant on subjective judgments. As one historian put it, the real black box might not be the AI—but the human mind. → Read the full article here.
🛡️ SAFETY
AI Pioneer Yoshua Bengio Launches “Scientist AI” to Tackle AI Safety Risks
AI luminary Yoshua Bengio is launching a nonprofit called LawZero to build “Scientist AI”—a new model designed to be safer, more honest, and transparent than today’s mainstream systems. Unlike current models, Scientist AI can explain its reasoning and report its confidence levels, aiming to prevent the kind of deceptive or overconfident outputs that have caused real-world harm. → Read the full article here.
🔬 RESEARCH
AI Tool Decodes Protein “Clumping” Code Behind Alzheimer’s and Biotech Failures
Researchers have developed an explainable AI tool, CANYA, that deciphers the chemical “language” behind protein aggregation—a key process in Alzheimer’s and over 50 other diseases. Using a dataset of 100,000 synthetic protein fragments tested in yeast, CANYA identifies and explains which amino acid motifs cause or prevent clumping.
The AI model is 15% more accurate than existing tools and could revolutionize drug development by helping biotech firms design proteins that resist clumping, cutting costs and failures. The study also uncovered surprising new rules of aggregation, paving the way for more predictable and programmable biology in both medicine and synthetic biology. → Read the full paper here.
📽️ VIDEO
Reddit SUES Anthropic for Stealing Data
Anthropic is being sued by Reddit for allegedly scraping and training on user content without permission, violating contracts and ignoring privacy protocols. Get the full scoop in Matt’s latest video! 👇
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Matthew Berman & The Forward Future Team
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