So Much AI Progress

Hello, and happy Sunday! It was arguably the biggest week yet in AI: Google and Microsoft laid out their visions for an agentic and human-focused future, respectively, while Anthropic released the next version of its flagship model. Scroll down to see our on-the-ground reports by Dan Shipper and Alex Duffy. (In the meantime, we had an announcement of our own at Every.) We’ll be off on Monday for the U.S. Memorial Day holiday—see you on Tuesday.—Kate Lee

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Knowledge base

"Vibe Check: Claude 4 Opus" by Dan Shipper/Chain of Thought: Dan put Anthropic's new Claude 4 Opus through its paces by feeding it 50,000 words of his unfinished book (among other tests) and discovered it's eerily good at telling you what you're trying to say better than you can. Read this to understand why the AI competition is now more about product than pure smarts.

"Microsoft’s AI Vision: An Open Internet Made for Agents" by Dan Shipper/Chain of Thought: While everyone's busy hyping the latest AI startup, Microsoft is quietly building the plumbing for our AI future. Dan went to Microsoft’s Build conference where CEO Satya Nadella and CTO Kevin Scott unveiled their vision for an "agentic web"—an open internet where AI agents talk to each other the way browsers talk to servers. Read this if you want to understand how Microsoft plans to wire the infrastructure that will make AI agents useful in your daily life, and check out Dan’s interview with Kevin in full. 🎧 🖥 Watch on X or YouTube, or listen on Spotify or Apple Podcasts.

"Google's AI Vision: Make Tech Human Again" by Alex Duffy/Context Window: Google's tsunami of AI announcements at its I/O conference—from mind-blowing video generation to language-translating glasses—suggests that the company is flexing its unique ecosystem advantages (search, video, mobile) while pursuing AGI. Read this if you want a glimpse of our AI future that feels hopeful rather than dystopian.

"When o3 Plans Your Career Better Than You Do" by Katie Parrott/Working Overtime: Where do you see yourself in five years? Katie let OpenAI's o3 model take a crack at answering that dreaded question—and it dreamed bigger for her than she did for herself. Read this for a glimpse of how AI is evolving from reactive assistant to agenda-setting co-pilot—and a career coach.

"So, We Raised Some Money" by Dan Shipper: Every raised $2 million in a “sip seed round” co-led by Reid Hoffman and Starting Line VC. Read this if you want to see how we're building a different kind of media company at the frontier of AI, with tools like Cora, Sparkle, and Spiral that help you live and work better.

From Every Studio

Cora: New onboarding just dropped

The team at Cora, our inbox management tool, has been hard at work, building a new onboarding story that brings you through how it works, and depicting a beautiful scene while doing so.

If you’re already a Cora user and want to give this new story a spin, find us in lush valleys of email bliss. If you’re not currently a user and want to see what it’s all about, sign up for an Every subscription and get access to Cora, along with Spiral and Sparkle.

Mini-vibe check: OpenAI’s Codex

Every entrepreneur in residence Naveen Naidu has been feverishly working, and while we can’t yet say on what (more to come), he’s been using OpenAI’s Codex and loving it. He’s merged 25 pull requests with it, calling it his most productive coding week ever, with the help of what feels like "5–10 interns on demand." And in just seven minutes, he implemented a new feature without any changes needed. Just paste in the feature, pass it off to Codex, and boom—production-ready pull request. Wild times. Sparkle general manager Yash Poojary is finding similar delight with the agent, saying that Codex is “freaking good at one-shotting,” where the agent takes a prompt and implements it all in one go. With all the new agent releases this week, we’ll have more thoughts on how to use them soon.

Get a walk-through of Sparkle

Take a spin through Sparkle v2 and its new features, and get some tips on how to make the most of your Sparkle workflow. If you’re not already on Sparkle, what are you waiting for? Get your desktop spring cleaning done.—Vivian Meng

Alignment

Truth demands sweat. The Chicago Sun-Times took the easy way out—and paid the price. Its AI-generated summer reading guide urged readers to pick up Nightshade Market, a novel that doesn't exist, by celebrated author Min Jin Lee, who never wrote it. Dozens more lies followed, from phantom experts to invented quotes, all of which slid into print. When the mistakes surfaced, condemnation arrived from readers, editors, and every rival outlet that still guards its editorial process. The guide shows what happens when thinning newsrooms lean on chatbots that talk fast and check nothing.

I expect this cycle will only quicken. Search engines now answer questions inside the results page, so clicks never reach the source and advertising money vanishes. Publishers, starved of cash, reach for cheaper words. Large models scrape that filler and churn out more of it. Machines draft for machines while readers inherit the slop. The problem is that each shortcut trains the next one. But you cannot outsource the truth. It refuses automation. It demands at least one pair of eyes that wonders, “Who said this,” “when,” and “why.” I remember Ronald Reagan once saying, “Trust but verify.” In a feed flooded with AI slop, we reverse the order: Verify first. Trust only after the facts are solid.—Ashwin Sharma

That’s all for this week! Be sure to follow Every on X at @every and on LinkedIn.

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