Disney star debuts AI avatars of the dead

PLUS: Use Claude to organize your business finances

Good morning, AI enthusiasts. If you thought users forming attachments to AI models was concerning, the future is only going to get weirder.

A new app called 2wai just launched the ability to create interactive AI avatars of deceased relatives — and the immediate backlash calling it "objectively evil" suggests we may have found one of AI's ethical breaking points.

ICYMI: We debuted a new section each Monday showcasing how The Rundown team is using AI in their own lives, both in and outside of work. Check out the latest workflows below!

In today’s AI rundown:

  • Disney star's AI avatar app to chat with the dead

  • The Rundown Roundtable: Our AI use cases

  • Use Claude to organize your business finances

  • Satya Nadella details Microsoft’s ‘positive-sum’ AI future

  • 4 new AI tools, community workflows, and more

LATEST DEVELOPMENTS

2WAI

Image source: 2wai

The Rundown: Disney Channel actor Calum Worthy just launched 2wai, an AI platform that creates interactive avatars of deceased relatives, which can speak and interact across life events — drawing comparisons to the techno-dystopian show ‘Black Mirror.’

The details:

  • The app generates "HoloAvatars" from just minutes of recorded footage, allowing users to talk with digital versions of departed family members.

  • A viral promo video showed an AI grandmother interacting with her grandson from infancy through adulthood, receiving thousands of critical responses on X.

  • The beta version is currently free on Apple's App Store, with plans to transition to a tiered subscription model and expand to Android devices soon.

  • Critics called the idea "demonic" and "objectively evil," arguing it exploits grief and prevents healthy mourning by simulating the deceased without consent.

Why it matters: If you thought users getting emotionally attached to AI models like 4o was strange, things are only going to get weirder. Ethical questions surrounding consent/identity of the deceased and commodifying grief aside, selling a hollow avatar as “preserving a loved one” feels like an AI psychosis event waiting to happen.

TOGETHER WITH MOZILLA DATA COLLECTIVE

The Rundown: Mozilla Data Collective is a new platform for real-world data sharing, home to multilingual, multimodal datasets in 300+ languages, built and curated directly by contributors. They publish unique, permissively licensed datasets for ASR, TTS, Translation, and SLM, accessible via the datacollective Python package.

New releases this week include:

  • Text-to-speech: Bulgarian corpus for TTS

  • Code-switching: Dialogues annotated for codeswitching in Nahuatl

  • Youth speech: Corpus of Indonesian youth-speech audio

THE RUNDOWN ROUNDTABLE

Image source: Ideogram / The Rundown

The Rundown: The Rundown Roundtable is a new weekly feature where we poll members of The Rundown staff on how they are using AI both in work and daily lives.

Joey, Head of Partnerships: I’ve been using Sora as my secret superpower with the kiddos. At a recent family dinner with a pack of 4–7-year-olds, I pulled out Sora and started spinning their wildest ideas into fun mini clips. The kids were entertained, the parents were relieved, and I officially earned the title of “fun aunt.” Win-win!

Shubham, Editor: My Deco mesh network (main unit upstairs, secondary downstairs) struggled to cover the back of the house on the ground floor. Gemini helped walk me through Deco app settings, gave the default router login password (it guessed it correctly), and suggested manual channel tweaks to improve coverage.

When that didn’t work, I shared my ground-floor layout via Gemini live, walking with it. It helped me find the ideal spot for the second unit, where it connected perfectly with the first one and boosted speed. It saved me the expense of a third unit.

Zach, AI Writer: This summer, I used ChatGPT to help me plan, build, plant, and manage our garden. I uploaded pictures of the space, and ChatGPT helped me decide where certain plants should go for optimal sunlight/preferences, companion options that grow together well, helped build out watering schedules, and other helpful tips.

I was able to continually provide pictures and updates as everything grew, asking it questions as my on-demand gardening assistant. A very successful first year, and I’m already excited for next season to expand things even more!

AI TRAINING

The Rundown: In this tutorial, you will learn how to organize scattered business finance documents into a neat, visually appealing dashboard using Claude, turning messy spreadsheets into polished financial snapshots without hiring an accountant.

Step-by-step:

  1. Go to Claude, sign in (paid plan recommended for more iterations and tools), select Sonnet 4.5, and enable extended thinking and web search in settings

  2. Upload your financial documents (revenue statements, invoices, expenses, inventory) and prompt Claude with what you want: your goal, file types, organization structure, and desired aesthetic

  3. Review the generated dashboard showing metrics like total revenue, expenses, net profit, plus pie charts and bar graphs; request changes in natural language

  4. Add enrichments like "Add a column showing how many days since each invoice to see which pending payments are getting old," then click publish and share the artifact link with stakeholders

Pro Tip: This is a strong use case for small teams. It helps you and your stakeholders see what's working, what's bleeding money, and what needs to be tuned or cut.

PRESENTED BY BLAND

The Rundown: In San Francisco, there’s an AI company that’s making voice agents that sound human, run 24/7, and never make you wait on hold.

Call Bland and you can:

  • Experience human-sounding AI

  • Role-play with your ideal use case

  • Have a phone call that you actually enjoy

Want to try for yourself? Book a demo today! 

MICROSOFT

Image source: Reve / The Rundown

The Rundown: Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella published a post on the company’s ‘positive-sum’ mentality to building in the AI wave, coming alongside a candid appearance on the Dwarkesh Podcast discussing AGI and the future of the industry.

The details:

  • Nadella pointed to the new AI superfactory as a ‘positive sum’ collaboration, emphasizing partnerships that “catalyze and compound progress.”

  • The CEO said the AI era’s success will be defined when the “overall economy and society themselves reach new heights,” not company valuations.

  • He also revealed a shift from "per user" to "per agent" pricing, treating AI systems as infrastructure customers rather than just tools for humans to use.

  • Nadella also said Microsoft now has access to “all of it” in regard to OpenAI IP (except physical consumer hardware) for seven years under the new deal.

Why it matters: Nadella’s arguing that AI's success shouldn't be measured by which company hits top valuations, but by whether it transforms the world. It’s a noble effort amid surging AI spending, but with society’s growing tension on whether AI will concentrate power or distribute it, skeptics will need more data before feeling the AGI.

QUICK HITS

  • 🔐 Incogni - Erase sensitive data like addresses and phone numbers from the web. Get 55% off with code RUNDOWN*

  • 📚 Google NotebookLM - New integrations for Deep Research, Sheets, Images, and PDFs

  • 🖥️ Holo 2 - Lightweight models for powering computer use agents

  • 🤖 GPT-5.1 - OpenAI’s upgraded model with personality customization

*Sponsored Listing

OpenAI launched a pilot of group chats for users in Japan, New Zealand, South Korea, and Taiwan, allowing up to 20 people to collaborate in shared conversations.

Google introduced AI shopping upgrades for the holidays, including an agent that calls stores to check inventory, agentic checkout, product browsing in Gemini, and more.

Apple CEO Tim Cook is reportedly planning to step down as early as next year, with hardware engineering chief John Ternus viewed as the favorite to replace him.

ByteDance Seed released Depth Anything 3, an AI model that predicts spatially consistent geometry from images to create accurate 3D depth maps.

Sakana AI became Japan’s most valuable private company after a new funding round that valued the startup at $2.6B.

Google announced a $40B investment in Texas through 2027 to build data centers and AI infrastructure, including a $30M Energy Impact Fund and training programs.

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 Jackie S. in Jersey City, NJ:

"I recently paused my career in tech to be a full-time mom. I became the household's CFO overnight. I’m not a developer, but Google AI Studio made it surprisingly easy to build my own budgeting app with a chat-based “Budget Agent.” Now I just tell it to log expenses, update monthly budgets per category, or give me insights and recommendations for next month. The app also gives me a clean dashboard with dynamic charts that show spend by category and tracks how we’re pacing against each month's budget."

How do you use AI? Tell us here.

That's it for today!

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

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