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Starbucks just quietly killed an AI tool that it deployed across all 11,000+ North American stores nine months ago. The tool was supposed to automatically count inventory. The problem? It couldn't tell oat milk from whole milk. Turns out that milk is the one thing that can humble AI, not some regulation, a rival model, or a Senate hearing. | | CEO Brian Niccol had championed the tool as part of his big turnaround plan to fix the product shortages hurting sales. Now it's been retired. "Starting today, Automated Counting will be retired," read an internal newsletter. Milk will be counted "the same way you count other inventory categories." With human eyes and a clipboard. Classic. | Here’s what happened in AI today: | 😸 Cursor hit $3B in annual revenue, and SpaceX is about to buy it for $60B 📰 Manus is raising $1B to buy itself back from Meta after China forced the unwind 📰 Spotify and Universal Music struck a deal to let fans make AI covers and remixes 🍪 OpenHuman, the open-source AI agent with 1B tokens of local memory
| Hey: Want to reach 700,000+ AI-hungry readers? Advertise with us! | P.S: Love robots? We’re starting a new robotics newsletter! Sign up early here. | | 😸 Cursor Is Quietly Becoming One of the Fastest-Growing Software Companies Ever | Cursor, the AI-powered coding editor that helps programmers write, debug, and ship code faster, just reported $3B in annualized revenue (the run-rate it'd hit if its current pace held for a full year). In February that number was $2B. It added $1 billion in two months. It's projecting $6B+ by end of 2026. | For context: it took Salesforce over a decade to reach $3B. Cursor did it in roughly two years. | Here's what happened: | More than 3,000 customers now pay at least $100,000 each per year. Cursor shipped Composer 2.5 this week, its latest model, partially trained on a SpaceX data center. SpaceX's IPO is expected June 12; a Cursor acquisition could close roughly 30 days after.
| The SpaceX deal didn't come out of nowhere. This spring, xAI began renting computing power from its Colossus supercomputer to Cursor for model training. Two of Cursor's most senior engineering leaders left to join xAI, reporting directly to Musk. | Then in April, SpaceX announced it had secured the right to acquire Cursor for $60B outright, or pay a $10B fee and walk away. Cursor's valuation trajectory tells the whole story: $2.5B eighteen months ago, $9B last May, $29.3B by November, and now $60B as a final price tag. I’m sure the team will gladly take $60B or $10B in cash! | Why this matters: Greg Brockman said it best: the model alone is no longer the product. TBH, the massive success of ChatGPT when it first launched kinda made that obvious. And now, as Chat-based apps have somewhat saturated, the apps around the models are more important than ever. | Cursor is proof there’s still real money in the layer above the models, i.e. the tools that make people's jobs faster. But it’s also proof that there’s still value in training your own models. Basically: you need both (app and model) to work. Developers don't really care what model is under the hood, so long as that model is really good and really cheap. The pareto curve of frontier capable quality and affordable to run is key. | Our take: Caveat to the above: Cursor still sells access to Claude and GPT models even as Anthropic and OpenAI are now competing directly with it for developers. The SpaceX deal is partly an escape hatch: proprietary compute, a consistent path off its own competitors' APIs, and a $60B payday. | In a way, this is a kind of team-up of necessity: xAI needs a popular coding platform, as the dev market is now the crown jewel for the AI industry to capture. And Cursor needs a hyper-scale benefactor to keep up with the intense competition on product and model development. If you can’t beat ‘em, join up Avengers Assemble style and try again! | |
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If you still manually save reports as PDFs and email them one by one, Leila Gharani has a better way and it doesn't require a developer, a VBA macro, or Power Automate. | The trick is using Office Scripts (Excel's built-in automation tool that works in both desktop Excel and Excel online) paired with AI to write the code for you. The result: one click sends personalized PDF reports to every manager on your list, with only their data, automatically. | Here's how to set it up: | Build your index table. Create a sheet with three columns: manager name, email address, and which sheet(s) belong to them. This is the list your script will loop through. Ask AI to write the script. Go to the Automate tab in Excel, open a New Script, then paste this into ChatGPT or Claude:
| Write an Office Script for Excel that does the following:
- Reads a table called "SendList" with columns: Name, Email, Sheets
- For each row, hides all sheets except the ones listed in the Sheets column
- Converts the workbook to a PDF
- Sends the PDF to the email address in that row with the subject "Your Report" and body "Hi [Name], please find attached your report."
- Unhides all sheets after sending
- Skips any row where the email or sheet name is missing or invalid
Use TypeScript. Include error handling for missing sheets.
| Paste the output into Office Scripts and run it. Add it as a button on your index sheet for one-click sending.
| The AI does the hard part. You just describe what you want, paste the code, and click run. Leila's full walkthrough (including a downloadable file with the code) is worth a watch if you want to see it built step by step. | Total AI beginner? Start here (goes with this video). | Have a specific skill you want to learn? Request it here. | | |
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| 📰 Around the Horn | | Manus weighed raising $1B to buy itself back from Meta after China's regulators ordered the unwind of Meta's $2B+ acquisition, a move that's now being watched as the clearest example yet of Beijing extending cross-border enforcement to companies with Chinese-origin tech, no matter where they're incorporated. Spotify and Universal Music Group struck a landmark licensing deal enabling Spotify to launch a paid Premium add-on that lets fans create AI-powered covers and remixes of songs from participating artists, with artists and songwriters sharing in the revenue. Adobe, Canva, and CapCut all announced integrations with Gemini this week, with Canva live now and the others coming soon, letting users generate and edit images and videos without ever leaving the Gemini app. OpenAI announced plans to offer GPT-5.5 Cyber, a model built specifically for cyber defense, to Japan's government and private sector, covering 15 critical infrastructure sectors under a vetting program called "Trusted Access." Google launched Gemini for Science, a suite of experimental research tools on Google Labs covering hypothesis generation, computational discovery, and literature synthesis, with papers validating two of the tools published today in Nature.
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| Dell Pro Max with GB10 gives your builder a serious desktop for experiments, demos, and workflows, powered by NVIDIA Grace Blackwell architecture, NVIDIA DGX OS 7, and 128GB memory. | See Dell Pro Max with GB10. | |
🌟 Sunday Special: Top of the Week | Big week. Beyond the five stories that made our list, there was no shortage of other news worth knowing: OpenAI confidentially filed for its IPO, targeting a September debut at an $852B valuation with Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley leading; the White House briefed AI labs on a planned executive order that would give government agencies up to 90 days to review advanced models before public release; Andrej Karpathy (the researcher who coined "vibe coding" and one of the most respected names in the field) joined Anthropic to head back to frontier R&D; SpaceX's public S-1 filing revealed Anthropic is paying SpaceX $1.25B per month through 2029 for data center access; and Pope Leo XIV announced his first encyclical, focused on preserving the human person in the age of AI, dropping May 25. | Top 5 Stories | Meta used its own employees' keystrokes to train AI, then laid off 8,000 of them, with a leaked Zuckerberg all-hands audio revealing that elite engineers make better training subjects than outside contractors; two days later, the layoff notices arrived. Elon Musk lost his lawsuit against OpenAI and Sam Altman after a jury found his claims were filed past the three-year statute of limitations, clearing a major legal cloud over OpenAI's restructuring and accelerating its path to IPO. Google put Gemini agents into Search, Workspace, Gmail, Android, coding, and app-building at I/O 2026 with one clear strategy: stop being a chatbot and become the operating layer underneath every tool people already use. AI layoffs are tanking stocks, not saving them, with CNBC data showing 56% of companies that announced AI-linked cuts saw their stock drop an average of 25%, while Gartner found the highest ROI came from using AI to amplify workers, not replace them. AI hackers found a new lane, with Google confirming criminal AI use to weaponize a zero-day exploit, Pwn2Own Berlin paying hackers $1.3M for vulnerabilities in Codex, Cursor, Claude Code, and LM Studio, and UK's AISI finding frontier models can now autonomously complete 32-step corporate network attacks.
| Top 5 Tools | Cursor Composer 2.5 improves long-running coding-agent behavior, instruction following, and cost efficiency; the same tool now generating $3B a year just got better. Gemini Spark is Google's new 24/7 personal agent that handles proactive tasks across Workspace apps under your direction, rolling out to U.S. AI Ultra users first. Google AI Studio now generates full native Android apps from a text prompt, no coding required. ChatGPT Personal Finance lets Pro users in the U.S. connect bank accounts and ask questions about spending, subscriptions, portfolio performance, and goals. OpenHuman is the open-source desktop AI agent that hit #1 on Product Hunt daily, weekly, and monthly this week; stores up to 1 billion tokens of your personal memory locally and gets smarter the longer you use it.
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