Meta Superintelligence Labs 🤖, Apple Vision Air 🥽, OpenAI's week off 🏖

TLDR 2025-07-01

Jul 01, 2025

Mark Zuckerberg announces creation of Meta Superintelligence Labs. Read the memo (6 minute read)

Meta Superintelligence Labs will house Meta's various teams working on foundation models. It will be led by some of the company's most recent hires, including Scale AI ex-CEO Alexandr Wang and former GitHub CEO Nat Friedman. Meta plans to start research on its next generation of models to get to the frontier in the next year or so. This article has the full internal memo that Mark Zuckerberg released yesterday - it contains a list of the company's recent hires.

Apple has an incredibly ambitious roadmap for smart glasses and headsets (4 minute read)

Apple is currently working on three Vision series products and four smart glasses variants. The company reportedly views head-mounted devices as the next major trend in consumer electronics. An upgraded version of the Vision Pro headset with an M5 chip is scheduled to enter mass production in the third quarter of 2025. Apple plans to launch a substantially lighter headset in the third quarter of 2027. An upgraded Vision Pro with a new design, lighter body, and lower price point will not be released until after the second half of 2028.

🚀Science & Futuristic Technology

Amazon Is on the Cusp of Using More Robots Than Humans in Its Warehouses (7 minute read)

Amazon will soon have as many robots as humans working at its facilities. The company has deployed more than one million robots in its workplaces. 75% of Amazon's global deliveries are assisted in some way by robotics. The growing automation has helped Amazon improve productivity and deal with heavy staff turnover at its fulfillment centers.

The second launch of New Glenn will aim for Mars (4 minute read)

Blue Origin's second launch of New Glenn may carry NASA's ESCAPADE mission, which includes a pair of small spacecraft that will be sent to Mars to study its magnetosphere. The mission will launch no earlier than August 15, but some say that a launch in late October or November is more likely. The Mars mission was originally supposed to be on New Glenn's first flight in October 2024, but it was taken off the flight due to uncertainty about the launch date - the two spacecraft needed to be launched within a certain time period. With a launch this fall, the spacecraft should reach Mars in 2027.

💻Programming, Design & Data Science

The New Skill in AI is Not Prompting, It's Context Engineering (5 minute read)

Context engineering is the art of providing all the context needed for a task to be plausibly solved by a large language model. Context is everything a model sees before it generates a response - this can include prompts, data in memory, retrieved information, available tools, and definitions for structured output. The secret to building truly effective AI agents is to provide quality context.

Tail Latency Might Matter More Than You Think (3 minute read)

Tail latency, or high-percentile latency, refers to high latencies that clients see fairly infrequently. Modern architectures tend to have a lot of components, so these rare instances of latency can still have a large impact. This article looks at the different ways tail latency can affect projects. Developers should be aware of service latency and consider monitoring common customer or client use cases for their end-to-end latency experience.

🎁Miscellaneous

OpenAI Reportedly Shuts Down for a Week as Zuck Poaches Its Top Talent (4 minute read)

OpenAI is shutting down for an entire week to force its staff to rest and recharge. The shutdown is being framed internally as a much-needed break. The company appears to be in 'panic mode' as Meta recently poached several high-value employees. Its decision to pause for a wellness week feels less like a perk and more like damage control.

Apple Weighs Using Anthropic or OpenAI to Power Siri in Major Reversal (11 minute read)

Apple is considering sidelining its own in-house models and using AI technology from Anthropic or OpenAI to power a new version of Siri. It has asked both companies to train versions of their models that could run on Apple's cloud infrastructure for testing. Switching to a third-party provider for Siri would be an acknowledgment that Apple is struggling to compete in generative AI. Apple's investigation into third-party models is at an early stage and the company hasn't made a final decision on using them.

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