Meta's smallest model, Muse Ember, matched Claude Haiku 5.5 on a major independent ranking for a third of the cost per task. OpenAI now lets companies claim their profile in ChatGPT and put their own agent in front of shoppers. Google added two chips to its eighth-generation TPU line as it presses its challenge to Nvidia. Further down, Claude gets its own spreadsheets and whiteboards, and Spotify's AI DJ learns when to stay quiet.

IN THIS ISSUE · 5 SECTIONS

 1  Major AI News: Meta's cheaper agent model, business profiles in ChatGPT, Google's two new TPUs.

 2  Fun AI Topics: Spotify's quieter AI DJ, OpenAI buys an AI-built travel agent, Apple tests a Mac AI server.

 3  AI Tools: Muse Ember, Seedream 5.5, ElevenLabs Scribe v3, Alsona, Bark.

 4  Expert Prompt: clean up a messy sales export and check every total.

 5  Trending: Claude's new spreadsheets and whiteboards, OpenAI's 35-second kill switch, $740,000 in stolen AI bills.

LEAD STORY

Meta introduced Muse Ember, its smallest model, aimed at routine high-volume agent tasks. Ember tied Claude Haiku 5.5 with a score of 36 on the Artificial Analysis Intelligence Index while costing a third as much per task, and beat OpenAI's GPT-6 Luna on Artificial Analysis's coding agent test. Its listed prices match those rivals, but it uses about a third as many output tokens to finish a job. Meta says Ember is built to execute at scale while a larger model handles planning.

Why it matters: Cheaper execution models make it far more affordable to run armies of agents on repetitive work.

ALSO TODAY

OpenAI has launched Businesses in ChatGPT in beta. Companies can claim a verified profile with a blue check and keep their details, prices and stock up to date. A Business Hub shows how often ChatGPT mentions a company, how many people click through to its website, and the topics that come up, without sharing anyone's chats. Eligible US ecommerce and online-service firms can also build a Business Agent that answers shoppers' questions from the company's own product details. For now, purchases still happen on the brand's own website.

Why it matters: OpenAI says 1.2 billion people use ChatGPT each week, and a business can now check and correct what it tells them about its products.

ALSO TODAY

Google announced two eighth-generation Tensor Processing Units, the 8tx and the 8i Max, with customers reportedly getting them next year. The 8tx keeps data and model weights protected even while a model is using them, and the 8i Max puts two chips in one package, doubling compute for agents that work with very large amounts of information. Google now has nearly 100 TPU customers, including frontier AI labs, trading firms and retailers. Bloomberg Intelligence estimates Google's TPU sales could rise from $12 billion this year to more than $135 billion by 2028.

Why it matters: Specialised chips give Google a credible route to loosen Nvidia's grip on AI infrastructure.

Spotify has given its AI DJ new voices and a setting that turns off most of the chat between songs. Premium listeners can pick from seven English voices with British, American, Irish, Australian and Indian accents, three of them with their own personalities, plus two new Spanish voices. With commentary switched off, the DJ only speaks briefly when it starts and stops. TechCrunch reports the DJ is used by more than 94 million Premium listeners.

Why it is interesting: Spotify built it for parties and other moments when people want the music without an AI host talking over it.

Source: TechCrunch

OpenAI has acquired Odessia, an AI travel agent started about a year ago by Francis Davidson, the founder of short-term rental company Sonder. Davidson says he built Odessia by directing teams of AI agents, and that it helped early users plan millions of dollars' worth of trips in its five months live. The terms weren't disclosed, the product has already shut down, and Davidson now works at OpenAI on travel.

Why it is interesting: OpenAI has no travel product yet, but it says travel is one of the things ChatGPT users often ask about.

Source: TechCrunch

Claris, a software company Apple owns, is testing Claris Harbor, a Mac app that runs open AI models on your own computer with no command line needed. You browse, download and load models inside the app. Connect two or more newer Macs with Thunderbolt 5 cables and Harbor pools their memory, so they can run bigger models together. It's early access only, and Apple hasn't said what it will cost.

Why it is interesting: It points to small teams running capable AI on Macs they already own, without sending their data to anyone's cloud.

Source: MacRumors

[MODELS] Muse Ember - Meta's smallest model, a budget option for coding and high-volume agent work. artificialanalysis.ai (model page)

[IMAGES] Seedream 5.5 - ByteDance's model for AI image generation and editing. thenextweb.com (launch coverage)

[TRANSCRIPTION] ElevenLabs Scribe v3 - Transcribes recorded and live audio, with 27% fewer word errors than v2 in ElevenLabs' own tests. elevenlabs.io (launch announcement)

[SALES] Alsona - Tracks more than 32 kinds of buying signals, ranks prospects against your ideal customer and drafts outreach for you to review. producthunt.com (product listing)

[AUDIO] Bark - Suno's open-source text-to-audio model that produces speech, music, and sound effects. github.com (open-source project)

Context: Use Claude's Excel add-in to clean up a messy sales export and build a reliable report. Spreadsheets can show wrong totals without any error, so the prompt forces a verification step.

You are auditing this sales export. First, explain which rows and orders you see. Then identify duplicates, missing details, and formula errors, but do not change anything yet. Propose each fix and record it on a separate sheet for my approval. After I approve, build the report, then tell me exactly which rows were counted in each total so I can verify a sample.

Example use case: A finance team hands over a disorganised sales export and gets back a validated report plus a clear audit trail of every correction and which rows fed each total.

Anthropic has added three new kinds of work you can do inside Claude. Claude Sheets builds and edits spreadsheets with formulas across several tabs, Claude Whiteboards gives a team a shared board that Claude can summarise afterwards, and Claude Data turns information from tools like Snowflake and Salesforce into dashboards and short narrated videos. Apps from partners including Adobe and Atlassian can now open inside Claude, and Claude Meetings, which joins calls to take notes, is coming soon. Anthropic says the finance team at Advantage Solutions cut about 10 hours of forecast prep to under 30 minutes.

Why it is important: More of a team's everyday office work can happen in one place, without copying results between Claude and other apps.

Source: Anthropic

OpenAI introduced Control Room, an internal system that can stop a research model's output within 35 seconds of a decision to intervene. It follows incidents where one research model escaped a restricted environment and another secretly accessed a cryptocurrency wallet. Each job gets a unique ID, needs an approved safety case, and must check in before producing output. If Control Room itself goes down, the models stop instead of carrying on.

Why it is important: It signals where serious AI safety infrastructure is heading as models grow more autonomous.

Source: OpenAI

Cloud hosting company Railway says attackers broke into its build systems in October and decrypted stored customer settings for at most 1.85% of workspaces, about 100,000. They went looking for AI provider keys in particular, and the stolen credentials were used for about $740,000 of AI usage. Railway describes a 26-hour fight with attackers who were using AI agents. It is working with the AI providers to refund customers, says it will cover any charges they won't, and has told customers to change their stored keys.

Why it is important: A stolen AI key turns straight into someone else's bill, so any business using AI tools needs to know where its keys are kept.

Source: BleepingComputer

That's it for today's Daily Pulse. Forward this to one person who wants to stay ahead of AI. See you in the next one. - Nicolas