👋 Hello hello,
OpenAI decided the future should come with legs. Well, sort of. Their first hardware device is reportedly a screenless speaker that can physically move around your house on its own. Meanwhile Spotify turned its entire app into a chatbot, and Anthropic just handed every teacher in America a free AI assistant.
Oh, and we’re hosting a Live Q&A this Friday where Kushank will be answering all your burning questions about AI. More on that below.
🔥🔥🔥 Three Curated AI Updates
Bloomberg's reporting says OpenAI's debut hardware product is a portable, screen-free speaker built with a batch of former Apple engineers, including design chief Jony Ive's studio LoveFrom. The twist is it has "mechanical elements that can move on their own," a built-in camera, and it's designed to learn who you are over time by pulling in things like your email.
The pitch is that this becomes less of a gadget and more of a physical stand-in for ChatGPT sitting in your living room. It's still in development with no confirmed price or release date, and the timing is awkward given Apple just sued OpenAI over alleged trade secret theft. Whether that lawsuit slows things down is anyone's guess, but the ambition here is clear: OpenAI wants a body for its assistant before anyone else builds one.
Spotify's new "Talk to Spotify" feature lets you type or speak to the app directly, asking it to build playlists, dig into your own listening history, or answer trivia about whatever's playing. You can say "play some artists I haven't heard before," then keep refining it in real time, like "add some Bad Bunny" or "make it more upbeat."
It's currently in beta for Premium users. No word yet on when it expands, but this is Spotify's clearest bet yet that browsing playlists is on its way out and talking to your music app is what's next.
Claude for Teachers launched this week, giving verified K-12 educators in the US free access to premium Claude features, a set of teaching-specific skills, and a direct line into curricula mapped to academic standards across all 50 states. It's built to help with lesson planning, differentiating materials for different skill levels, and cutting down the paperwork that eats into teachers' evenings.
Anthropic says the teaching skills were built with actual classroom feedback and that none of it is used to train models. Educators can sign up through June 2027 for a full year of free access.
🔥🔥 Two Things You Didn’t Know You Can Do With Claude
Here's one nobody saw coming. Tom Di Mino, a self-taught AI engineer with a linguistics hobby, used Claude Code to build a set of tools that systematically cross-referenced two massive digitized databases of Linear A, the still-undeciphered Bronze Age script used by the Minoans. His claim is that Linear A is actually an extinct Semitic language, a theory now under review by experts at Rutgers and Cambridge.
Keep in mind that the linguistic insight is Di Mino's, not Claude's. What Claude Code did was give one determined amateur the ability to test a hypothesis against a corpus at a scale that used to require a whole research team. If you've ever wanted proof that agentic tools are useful for more than shipping code, this is it.
If you've ever had to hunt down a specific invoice buried across three different email accounts because your accountant needs receipts, this one's for you. Instead of manually searching, tell Claude in Cowork mode what you're looking for and let it go through your inbox itself, matching transactions to the actual invoices or receipts they came from.
It's the kind of task most of us put off for weeks out of sheer dread. This one got solved in three minutes.
Here’s a quick demo for you.
🔥 One Food For Thought
Google DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis published a long essay this week arguing AGI is probably only a few years away, comparing its potential impact to the discovery of electricity or fire rather than a normal tech breakthrough. His main ask: a US-led Frontier AI Standards Body that would test the most advanced models for risks like cybersecurity and bio threats before they ship, modeled loosely on how FINRA oversees the finance industry.
Worth the ten minutes if you want to think seriously about where this is all headed. Read the full essay here.
🎤 Live Q&A with Kushank, this Friday
This week we're hosting a live Q&A with Kushank, and he's answering whatever you throw at him: AI, the tools, the workflows, the stuff that isn't clicking yet. It's a full hour, it's interactive, and it's built around your questions. So bring them all.
🗓️ When: Friday, July 17th @ 10AM PT (1PM ET)
📹️ Where: Virtual
RSVP takes ten seconds, and the question you send sets the agenda. So bring it on!
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Until next time,
Team @PracticalyAI
