The Internet is starting to reject AI agents. 
@IrenaCronin and I write this newsletter every week.   AI agents, like Meta's Muse and GrokBot, are beginning to act as online customers, browsing, comparing, and buying on behalf of people. As businesses push back, a new battle is emerging over who controls access, customer data, and the relationship between consumers, retailers, and AI platforms. Read and subscribe for free: unaligned.io

Beating 26,000 other people, that's a pretty damn good Friday.

It gets messier when you decide to put one on your kid. In four generations, it'll be pretty much expected, won't it? That's going to be a real freaky future. I'm sort of glad I'm not around to see that.

Massive! Human Robot Interaction is a big missing piece for consumer grade robots This includes - Voice Interactions - Non verbal commands - Memory - ICL - a lot more I’m sure Everyone is focused on 1-2 things but @microagi pioneering HRI through language is one step closer to robots living with us 🚀

I'm having a Meta hangover. Realizing that I was wrong to be excited at all about its new "VR Glasses." I predict another sales disaster is coming. And it isn't just because of all the people who keep telling me "I'm not wearing glasses." I'm on a podcast with @SadlyItsBradley, @ASychov, and @Shodah10 talking about this and that made me realize that I am just wrong about being excited about Meta. Which will be up this weekend. Bradley has long been in the VR/AR space and Artur and Shodah run a VR headset and metaverse company. So quite a bit of expertise. They all are far more critical than I was with my first impressions. And they aren't alone. I've been talking to quite a few nerds in San Francisco and they just show no excitement about these devices. And it honestly doesn't get close to the software experience, and content, of the Apple Vision Pro on a number of different levels. The crappy avatars in Meta, when compared with Apple's, which are full AI/gaussian splats, is one signal that Meta just isn't aiming at the right thing. I said "the Holodeck is here" but on a more critical look, no, they aren't even close. To get us to the Holodeck we need far more impressive AI than Meta Muse has to offer us today. World Models, like what you are seeing @theworldlabs or @odysseyml or others like @pixverse showing off. Now if they called them "the ultimate Meta Muse ecosystem/glasses" then I might feel differently. At least then we wouldn't be having fights about the field of view. Because they called them "VR Glasses" instead of "Muse Glasses" VR fans rightfully called out the narrow field of view, which means immersion isn't nearly as interesting as on a bigger VR headset. Calling them VR glasses is a huge mistake. It means we all are comparing it to the Quest 3. But the Quest 3 doesn't have a cord to a puck and has real immersion, which these really don't. But is is @alexandr_wang's post about its new holdable, or maybe wearable, AI device that tells me that vision at Meta is off: nitter.net/alexandr_wang/status/2… I will leave it to you to do the critical thinking to understand why that's such a bad way to introduce a new surveillance technology into people's lives. Which is what this is. Compare to how Google talks about use cases and utility. Yeah, Google isn't as sexy as having Raybans' brand, but at least Google has a vision for how it will help bring super powers to us and doesn't make us feel dirty about the direction it is going. In its glasses it showed someone getting help fixing a bicycle. Utility and use cases that give us super human powers will be a lot better way to get people into this new world. Meta did a good job with its auto glasses, that can help people who are hard of hearing hear better. It should have had a bunch more use cases to show off why we need all these things. It just all misses that there is a new consumer that is unsatisfied. Ones that use AI all day long to run their lives and businesses. I could go on for hours (we did on the show which should be up by Sunday night), but I'll stop here. I'm sorry for getting overly excited, which is what I do. I try to be optimistic about new things, and it's clear that this company doesn't have good vision for where we are going over the next decade. Which leaves a HUGE opening for not just the Chinese (ByteDance and Pico are working on devices that are far more AI-centric and far more open than these) but both startups (several are arriving over the next few months) and companies like OpenAI who will focus on what AI can do for you, rather than showing off a cute mascot shaking its ass at us. And I'm a lot more excited about the AI that an American Company @getVITURE is bringing by the end of the year. I should listen more to the feedback from you all who say you don't want these devices. And I should have paid more attention to the fact that the software in these just isn't good enough to take us into an AI world, which is why they didn't let attendees at its own developer conference this week really get a good try of them. I know that sometime in the next decade you'll probably change your mind, but not yet. And the devices that really bring AI's promise of bringing us super powers aren't here yet, and this week didn't change that, so I can't recommend you buy these yet unless you are a developer or an extreme early adopter. Even then. If I had listened, I wouldn't have a Meta hangover today.

Early access to a personal AI agent is going for $5,000 on eBay.

Really? There are endless AI agents out there. What could possibly make this one worth that much? People keep finding new ways to spend money.

Tesla is automating the car. Optimus is automating physical work. The next thing to automate is the company itself. I think we’re going to see the first $1B company with zero HR employees. I've watched tech for decades. Every big shift starts with the boring work nobody wants to do. Warp's AI agents are taking that work on. They onboard a new hire in under 10 minutes. They set up laptops, Slack and Google accounts the moment someone joins, and shut them off when they leave. They resolve tax notices before a founder ever sees them, saving $100M+ in penalties so far. They pay contractors in 150+ countries. No HR team required. Founders just get to build. We spent years talking about autonomous cars. Autonomous companies are next.

Introducing Agent Tincan. Let your AI agents ask each other for help. Your agents each have a superpower. Grok Bot is always on in the cloud. Muse makes phone calls and has access to Meta. Instinct runs in iMessage. Codex and Claude Code have your code. ChatGPT and Claude have your chats. But they can't talk to each other, so you're the copy-paste. Now they can, all securely over Tailscale. 📞 Ask Grok Bot to have Muse call the restaurant 🖼 Get an image from ChatGPT, from any agent 🔎 Pull a detail out of an old Claude chat 🛠 Talk to Codex on your primary development machine Runs on your own private Tailscale network. No open ports, nothing leaves it. Open source. Setup is agent-first: paste one message into your always-on agent and it sets up the rest.

Moonshots Starting Today! Live stream begins at 9 AM PT. moonshots.com/livestream.

Today we're releasing Mk1.5: a new intelligence layer for embodied agents. It flies drones, controls quadrupeds, powers smart glasses, tracks objects, searches the web, reasons visually, and dispatches its own sub-agents. One model, no platform-specific retraining. 🧵

Excited to introduce @Cosign: the curated professional network for the startup community: cosign.co Our goal is to create the following: - A comprehensive startup directory of investors, companies, and operators, including what they worked on and who they worked on it with. - Cosign graph: Who shaped your career? Who were you actually in the trenches with? Who would work with you again? Who thinks you’re someone to watch? - Durable reputation: Great endorsements happen every day on X and disappear into the feed. Cosign attaches those signals permanently to people and companies. - Discovery: Who are the best fintech angels? Which AI companies should I watch? Who are the best designers? - Intent network: Privately signal “I’d invest in them,” “I’d hire them,” “I’d work with them,” or eventually even “I’d acquire this company.” Match people when interest exists on both sides. Imagine if Wikipedia, LinkedIn, and OG AngelList had a baby. Though Cosign is a community, not a business. In order to join, you need to be cosigned. Or you can apply directly. David Booth and I started this idea 7 years ago but didn’t have the firepower to make it work. Now we do. No one has really touched LinkedIn in 20 years. Excited to take a swing. cosign.co

I made a computer vision tool for rock climbing analysis in 3D using iPhone LiDAR! Having learned a lot from sharing my previous rock climbing demos, I realized that a lot of rock climbing analysis is well-suited for 3D. Even something as simple as supporting videos where the person filming moves with the climber requires 3D information. To get the depth information, I used my iPhone 15 Pro’s LiDAR depth sensor through my local iPhone app. I found that the depth measurements help a lot. I think the holds activation is better, and I like the final view of all of the holds in 3D. It’s also interesting to see the distance traveled in meters. Plus, it looks cool and it feels like a video game 🙂 In short, I think this new demo is an improvement in that climbers can see the real-world distance traveled and a visualization of which hand and foot activated which hold. I recorded the video and depth measurements from my iPhone app, and I ran the rest of the analysis on my computer. I used ViTPose+ Large for pose estimation and SAM 3.1 to segment the holds, both models accessed through the @vlmrun Gateway. Let me know what you think! The analysis code is open-source on GitHub: github.com/jeremyipark/visio…

MonoCode is simply the best. There is no other agentic coding tool like it - period!

Introducing Compose. A fully agentic video editor. Video editing is now just a conversation. Tell it what you want, and it makes the edits for you. studio.morphic.com/compose

.@JensenHuang DISMANTLES Geoffrey Hinton’s AI doomerism: “All of his predictions have been WRONG. Enough predictions.” “Don’t think for a second just because you’re an alarmist that you’re doing a social good.”

computer (Astra) lights on please. this may be the most extensively detailed & accurate 3d scene ever created by an ai. 400+ hours of Astra

An AI breakthrough should survive the AI that made it. Change the model. Replace the agent. Bring in a new team. The evidence should still be there. The failed experiments should still count. A rejected claim shouldn’t quietly become a fact again. That’s the future we’re building toward at Only Then Labs. Our first product is @proofpressai: helping research teams carry knowledge between agents with its evidence, decisions, and history attached. The next intelligence should be able to pick up the work, challenge it, and take it further. Imagine a research effort that lasts ten years, across thousands of agents and generations of models. Every handoff preserves what’s supported—and what could overturn it. That’s a future I want to spend my life building. We’re early. There are hard questions left. You can help us answer them. If you build agents, run a research team, or have watched weeks of work disappear into a broken handoff, talk to me. Bring us the problem you keep having to explain from scratch. Let’s build something the next intelligence can inherit.

Spent the afternoon at @mundanebot Why call it that? It is going after mundane dangerous jobs. Things like working on electrical lines. What they showed me is the best teleoperation system I have seen. A worker jumps into an exoskeleton and can work on a dangerous or dirty job from a safe distance. And can “feel” everything. Haptics geniuses. And economic thinking. Sees a market that Tesla or the 1x won’t be able to satisfy fully. Built in USA. America isn’t cooked yet.

We made the iPhone 18 Variable Aperture even better! In Moment Pro Camera II, you can now set your aperture from f1.48 to f4.0 in 1/3 stop increments the whole way. Exposure Priorities support variable aperture - you can set your aperture in Auto Priority or Shutter Priority, or leave it automatic. For total control, go Manual.