AI Tools

🎧 Prefer to listen? Your browser does not support the audio element. Google just announced that the Gemini app passed 1 billion monthly active users — the 14th Google product to cross that line (TechCrunch has the numbers). It now keeps pace with ChatGPT, which hit the same milestone in June. I wrote last month about what Gemini’s free image generation meant for creators, but this milestone is a different lesson — and it’s the one I’d tattoo on the inside of every solo builder’s eyelids: Google didn’t win this by having the best model. It won by putting the model everywhere people already were. That distinction rearranged how I think about my own growth problem, so let me hand you the same reframe. ...

🎧 Prefer to listen? Your browser does not support the audio element. The United States Congress ran the world’s least scientific but most honest AI tool comparison, and the receipts are public. Per CNBC’s analysis of House disbursement records (TechCrunch’s writeup here), House offices spent about $113,740 on AI tools in the year ending March 31 — and roughly 90% of it went to ChatGPT. Anthropic’s Claude came in a distant second at about 7%. And before you file this under “news about other people’s budgets”: the same blind spots, defaults, and unexamined habits that produced that 90/7 split are almost certainly running your tool stack right now. That’s the part worth your time. ...

🎧 Prefer to listen? Your browser does not support the audio element. An AI image lab just bought an astrology app, and I think it’s one of the more quietly useful signals of the year. The Verge reported that Midjourney acquired Co-Star, the app whose daily horoscopes people actually read. Founder Banu Guler stays in charge of Co-Star while also becoming Midjourney’s chief design officer, and her team’s job is to build Midjourney’s first real apps, including one dedicated to image generation, as the company outgrows its Discord-and-browser home. Terms weren’t disclosed; the deal reportedly closed in spring. ...

🎧 Prefer to listen? Your browser does not support the audio element. On Sunday night, people using Meta’s Muse AI assistant to shop on Amazon started hitting a wall — a literal terms-of-service error. Amazon’s message said that continued access by an “unauthorized AI agent” violates its Conditions of Use. Muse can browse, summarize, and plan all it wants. The moment it tries to check out on Amazon.com, the door slams shut. ...

🎧 Prefer to listen? Your browser does not support the audio element. Two months ago I wrote about DoorDash launching a command-line ordering tool and called it the most important signal solo builders had gotten in months. Back then it was a waitlist beta with a demo video. This week I went back through the actual repository, the release notes, and a growing pile of issue-tracker friction reports — because the gap between “demo” and “daily tool” is where most of these things quietly die. This one is doing better than I expected, with caveats that matter if you’re tempted to hand it your credit card. ...

🎧 Prefer to listen? Your browser does not support the audio element. I’ve watched Salesforce announcements for years, and most blur together. This one didn’t. At Dreamforce 2026, Salesforce didn’t launch another app; it started dismantling its own interface, on purpose. The short version: Salesforce’s new Slackbot AI agent runs on Slackforce, but the Slackbot is the least interesting part. The bigger move is AIforce, an umbrella over Claudeforce, Slackforce, and Agentforce Coworker, which crossed 100,000 activated users in its first 35 days and just rolled out to all 27,000 Adecco employees. All three products do the same thing in different places: they take Salesforce’s data, workflows, and business rules and deliver them inside platforms you already use. Claude. Slack. Microsoft Teams is next, and OpenAI after that. I covered the earlier agent comparison between these workplace suites in my Agentforce vs Copilot vs Google breakdown — this update changes that picture even if you’ve never touched Salesforce. ...

🎧 Prefer to listen? Your browser does not support the audio element. When the people selling you AI start begging regulators to slow them down, you should be suspicious. When those same companies get sued for agreeing with each other about it, the story gets interesting. Last week, four paying AI subscribers filed a proposed class action claiming the September “pace the frontier” consensus — the one Sam Altman personally endorsed — was an illegal agreement under the Sherman Act. I read the filings so you don’t have to, and the messy part isn’t the lawsuit. It’s what it exposes about who actually decides how fast your tools improve. ...

🎧 Prefer to listen? Your browser does not support the audio element. The people who build frontier AI spent September telling anyone who’d listen that maybe, possibly, we should slow down. Dario Amodei published a plan to “pace the frontier.” Sam Altman echoed it. Even Elon Musk nodded along. Meanwhile, two companies with rockets and warehouses decided the debate was someone else’s problem — and kept pouring concrete and welding satellites. If you build anything with AI tools, this gap between what the labs say and what the industry does is the most useful signal you’ll get all year. ...

🎧 Prefer to listen? Your browser does not support the audio element. Google gave the entire planet the ability to fabricate photorealistic “satellite footage” of real places, watched people plant a nuclear facility in Iran and a crater in a Gaza hospital within hours, and pulled the feature the next day. If you missed the story, I covered the product-management side of it in what Google’s Earth AI failure teaches solo builders. That post is about why Google’s launch failed. This one is about what the failure changed for you — because the tool is gone, but the capability isn’t. ...

🎧 Prefer to listen? Your browser does not support the audio element. Google shipped an AI image tool inside Google Earth, watched the internet break it within 24 hours, and pulled it. The feature, powered by Google’s Nano Banana 2 model, let users type a prompt at any set of coordinates and generate photorealistic images built on real satellite and 3D mapping data. Within a day of public use, people had fabricated disaster scenes over real cities and fictional nuclear facilities, and Google suspended the feature entirely. ...