Alterego debuts “near-telepathic” AI wearable

PLUS: Claude gains new file creation capabilities

Good morning, AI enthusiasts. Imagine texting, coding, or having full conversations without moving your lips or making a sound — an MIT spinout just made it possible with a ‘near-telepathic’ AI wearable that reads your intention to speak.

With tiny cameras tracking muscle movements to decode silent speech “at the speed of thought,” Alterego’s viral demo might be a look into a future form of how we interact with both AI and the world around us.

In today’s AI rundown:

  • Alterego’s “near-telepathic” AI wearable

  • Microsoft eyes Anthropic’s Claude for Office 365

  • Create miniature product photos with Nano Banana

  • Claude gains new file creation capabilities

  • 4 new AI tools, community workflows, and more

LATEST DEVELOPMENTS

AI WEARABLES

Image source: Alterego

The Rundown: Boston startup and MIT Media Lab spinoff Alterego just introduced a “near-telepathic” wearable that uses AI to detect subtle movements and interpret a user’s silent communication “at the speed of thought” without speaking out loud.

The details:

  • The headset uses tiny cameras to detect small muscle movements in a user’s jaw and throat when thinking about speaking, turning signals into commands.

  • The demo shows founder Arnav Kapur completing tasks like coding, texting, visual queries, and direct speaking with other wearers using “Silent Sense.”

  • The team claims Alterego works in noisy areas, and can handle multilingual speech, visual cues, and both mouthed and motionless “intent to speak.”

  • The project originated in the MIT Media Lab in 2018, but spun out as a for-profit startup in 2025 — though no timelines for availability were provided.

Why it matters: The quote that comes to mind is Arthur C. Clarke’s “any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” The capabilities demoed are what we’d expect from invasive BCI devices, not a wearable. This tech is a potential future form for how we interact with both AI and the world around us.

TOGETHER WITH HUBSPOT

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With this guide, you can:

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MICROSOFT AND ANTHROPIC

Image source: Gemini / The Rundown

The Rundown: Microsoft is set to reach a deal to integrate Anthropic's AI models into Office 365 alongside OpenAI's tech, according to The Information, marking the software giant's first major AI diversification away from its OpenAI partnership.

The details:

  • Microsoft reportedly found Claude Sonnet 4 models to be more capable at creating spreadsheets and PowerPoint presentations than OpenAI’s GPT-5.

  • The rumored deal comes as Anthropic rolls out new file creation capabilities for Claude, including PDFs, PowerPoints, and spreadsheets (more on this below).

  • The company is likely to access Anthropic's models through Amazon Web Services, paying its cloud rival for usage despite having free access to OpenAI.

Why it matters: While Microsoft has publicly shot down any negativity surrounding its high-profile AI partnership, its actions speak louder — and moves like releasing in-house models and a potential Anthropic partnership show the tech giant’s approach is becoming more pragmatic and proactive than loyal to a potentially hostile partner.

AI TRAINING

The Rundown: In this tutorial, you will learn how to use Nano Banana to generate luxury miniature product photos held between fingers, creating scroll-stopping visuals perfect for e-commerce and social media ads.

Step-by-step:

  1. Go to the Gemini app, locate the tools menu, and toggle on "Create Image" (Nano Banana is also available through Freepik or Adobe Firefly)

  2. Use this prompt template: "A high-resolution advertising photo of a [PRODUCT] held between thumb and index finger. Clean white background, soft shadows, studio lighting. Product is hyper-detailed, accurate, and small. Shallow depth of field. Emulates commercial minimalist luxury photography"

  3. Test with luxury items first — Hermès Birkin bags, Cartier watches, or mix it up with Jeep Rubicons and architectural landmarks like the CN Tower

  4. Download and use directly in your store or ads — keep the fingers for scale reference or erase them for floating product shots

  5. Upload to your e-commerce store, social campaigns, or product mockups

Pro Tip: Add a small disclaimer on your product page about the scale and actual sizing.

PRESENTED BY TELY AI

The Rundown: You’re in a niche industry. Customers search on Google, ChatGPT, and Perplexity — but your company doesn’t show up, because there’s no content answering their questions. Tely AI fixes that by analyzing your industry and site to find what people search for and creates expert-level articles on autopilot. No need for a marketing team.

With Tely AI, you can:

  • Start with 60 high-quality articles a month

  • Get indexed on Google in as little as 2 weeks

  • Be featured in ChatGPT and Perplexity answers

  • Enjoy full automation for topics, writing, and publishing

ANTHROPIC

Image source: Anthropic

The Rundown: Anthropic rolled out new productivity features to Claude, including the ability to create and edit Excel sheets, Word documents, PowerPoint slides, and PDFs directly in chat, challenging OpenAI’s dominance in the workplace AI space.

The details:

  • Claude gains a private computing environment where it can write and run code to create files, turning data into reports with charts, analysis, and formulas.

  • Users can also convert between formats, turning PDF reports into slide decks or meeting notes into formatted documents.

  • The feature is rolling out to Max, Team, and Enterprise subscribers, with Pro users gaining access in the coming weeks.

  • Anthropic recommended starting with “straightforward” tasks, also warning of potential data risks with giving Claude access to the internet.

Why it matters: The AI work productivity wars are coming directly into our files, which is an absolutely massive unlock for the tools many workers use the most. Just like we’ve seen with AI coding tools, using Excel and spreadsheets is increasingly going to become a simple natural language conversation over understanding complex formulas.

QUICK HITS

  • 📈 Unframe - Scale AI efficiently and securely with enterprise solutions tailored to your unique business*

  • 📓 NotebookLM - New tools like flashcards, quizzes, and redesigned reports

  • 🎨 Ideogram Styles - Create consistent aesthetics and stylized typography

  • 🎆 HunyuanImage 2.1 - Tencent’s new open-source text-to-image model

*Sponsored Listing

Apple was quiet on AI updates at its hardware event, with the only interesting update being Apple Intelligence-powered live translation and health monitoring features.

ByteDance Seed introduced Seedream 4.0, a new image generation and editing model that competes with Nano Banana with 4K outputs and multimodal capabilities.

Baidu launched ERNIE X1.1, a new reasoning model that nears GPT-5 and Gemini 2.5 Pro in benchmarks with significant hallucination reduction.

Anthropic released an official report confirming issues in response quality over the last month, reiterating that the company “never intentionally degrades model quality.”

Drugmaking giant Eli Lilly announced the release of TuneLab, an AI drug discovery platform trained on over $1B worth of its proprietary research data.

Tencent open-sourced HunyuanImage 2.1, a new image generation model with high-quality realism, prompt following, and text rendering.

Meta is entering a $140M multi-year partnership with Black Forest Labs to use its AI image tech, coming on the heels of the company’s recent deal with Midjourney.

Google added new capabilities to its Veo 3 and Veo 3 Fast models, including vertical video outputs, 1080p HD resolution, and a 50% decrease in price.

COMMUNITY

Every newsletter, we showcase how a reader is using AI to work smarter, save time, or make life easier.

Today’s workflow comes from reader Chiara M. in Belgium:

"I help my students learn languages, and to improve their listening, I use original content on YouTube. I take the original bit, get the transcription, and then I get an AI version with ElevenLabs where the speed is comparable, but words are clearly pronounced... I also submit the notes of my classes into Notebook LM and get an audio version for my students to revise either in their native language if they're beginners or in the target language if they're more advanced."

How do you use AI? Tell us here.

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Rowan, Joey, Zach, Shubham, and Jennifer — the humans behind The Rundown

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