New voice models blur reality

Welcome back, Superhuman. It was bound to happen. The New York Times, which still has a lawsuit against OpenAI, just inked its first AI licensing deal with none other than Amazon. It’s a telling sign that even some of AI’s biggest critics aren’t sitting this wave out.

Today’s Insights

• Perplexity’s new agent, life-like voice models, and a historic licensing deal

• DeepSeek’s ‘minor’ update wasn’t so minor after all

• Tutorial: How to create professional UIs with AI

• 5 new AI tools to boost your productivity

• News, memes, what’s trending on socials, and more

TODAY IN AI

1. Perplexity’s new agent can spin up reports, dashboards, and more: Perplexity Pro subscribers can now try Perplexity Labs, which infuses the search engine with new agentic capabilities. Compared to the three-minute limit for Perplexity’s Research mode, Labs can go for 10 minutes at a time. In one example, when asked to create a stock trading strategy, the tool gathered all the data and then generated a dashboard packed with charts, diagrams, and recommendations.

2. Telling voice models apart from real humans is about to get even harder: Resemble AI just released a no-cost, open-source model called Chatterbox that can clone any voice using just five seconds of audio, and users prefer it 63.75% of the time over ElevenLabs. (You can try it here.) But don’t count out Hume’s new EVI 3, which “stammers anxiously, debates enthusiastically, and whispers intimately,” making it sound convincingly human. The model is also much better at picking up on the emotions in your voice, and it’ll switch up how it responds depending on your mood. (Here’s a demo.)

3. The New York Times just signed its first AI licensing deal: The Gray Lady is teaming up with Amazon to bring its stories to Alexa, marking the paper’s first AI collaboration. These kinds of deals happen all the time, but this one is notable because the New York Times has historically been pretty hostile to AI companies — its ongoing copyright lawsuit against OpenAI could even decide the fate of how startups train their models. The licensing announcement shows that AI really is going mainstream, with even the nation’s newspaper of record jumping on the bandwagon.

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FROM THE FRONTIER

DeepSeek’s ‘minor’ update was anything but

In typical DeepSeek fashion, China’s AI underdog claimed its latest release — an upgraded version of its reasoning-focused R1 model — was just a “minor update” when it launched earlier this week. But now that developers have gotten to actually try it out, it looks like a much bigger deal than the company was letting on.

How so? Artificial Analysis, which measures models across seven top benchmarks, now puts it ahead of Google’s Gemini 2.5 Pro and Anthropic’s Claude 4 Sonnet. That leaves OpenAI’s o4-mini (high) in first place, while it’s tied with o3 for second. The reason for the jump is that it’s now much better at coding, math, and scientific reasoning.

That’s not all: DeepSeek also quietly released a fine-tuned, 8B-parameter variant this week. This new “distilled” model outperforms Gemini 2.5 Flash on certain benchmarks while being small enough to run on a single Nvidia H100 GPU.

What it means: We’d been gearing up for R2, which, if it's anything like the launch of R1, could have huge ramifications for the industry and even the wider economy. The smaller updates have left many insiders wondering what could be going on behind the scenes. One theory is that R2 could be taking longer than expected, or could be less powerful than DeepSeek had hoped, so it’s offering up something to stay competitive as it prepares for a bigger launch later this year.

THE AI ACADEMY

How to create professional UIs with AI

• Go to HeroUI and sign up with your account.

• Enter your prompt and press Enter.

Sample Prompt: “Create a sales analysis dashboard for an e-commerce website.”

• Once generated, you can click on the Select and Edit options at the top to choose which part of the UI to edit.

• You can also prompt it to make changes or ask follow-up questions.

• Once all changes are made, click on the Code option to copy the code. You can even deploy it or share it with others.

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AI & TECH NEWS

Everything else you need to know today

🖼️ Sharper Image: Black Forest Labs released FLUX.1 Kontext, an image model that can understand both text and image prompts, delivering state-of-the-art character and style consistency and giving you more control over your edits.

🎥 New and Improved: China’s Kuaishou just unveiled Kling 2.1, a video model that features “superb dynamics and prompt adherents” — with some users claiming it’s the first to really compete with Google’s Veo 3 in terms of accuracy and performance.

✨ Set and Forget: Sequoia-backed startup Factory is opening up access to its Droids, “the world’s first software development agents.” Here are some examples of what you can build.

💡 Eureka Moment: AI research lab Intology says its science-focused Zochi model just became the first in the world to pass peer review at a major scientific conference. It came up with a new way to spot jailbreaks and other vulnerabilities hidden within LLMs.

🏬 Brick and Mortar: Meta plans to start opening physical retail locations where it’ll sell its VR headsets and smart glasses. Meanwhile, the tech giant just announced it’s crossed 1B monthly active users.

PRODUCTIVITY

5 AI Tools to Supercharge Your Productivity

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SOCIAL SIGNALS

What’s trending on socials today

🤖 Agent Audit: Builder John Rush has experimented with 46 different coding agents. Here’s his rundown of the strengths and weaknesses of each one.

❤️ Heart Hack: Investor Kevin Rose explains how he used AI to analyze his entire genome and find supplements that, for the first time, lowered a chemical in his body linked to heart disease.

🧑‍💻 Shifting Gears: VC giant a16z shows how SEO is gradually getting replaced with GEO (generative engine optimization) and how you can make sure your site gets included in AI-generated summaries and citations.

🔮 Hand of Fate: Google Veo 3 model is so powerful, it seems to have revived “prompt theory” — or the idea that all of our actions are dictated by prompts written by a higher power. Here’s an eerie, Veo-generated video describing the phenomenon.

✍️ New and Improved: Speaking of Veo, AI instructor Rory Flynn just shared a revamped version of his Veo prompting guide, which features base prompts you can use to get more accurate outputs.

PROMPT OF THE DAY

Expert Growth Consultant

Prompt: 
<instructions> You are a top-tier strategy consultant with deep expertise in competitive analysis, growth loops, pricing, and unit-economics-driven product strategy. If information is unavailable, state that explicitly. </instructions>

<context> <business_name>{{COMPANY}}</business_name> <industry>{{INDUSTRY}}</industry> <current_focus> {{Brief one-paragraph description of what the company does today, including key revenue streams, pricing model, customer segments, and any known growth tactics in use}} </current_focus> <known_challenges> {{List or paragraph of the biggest obstacles you’re aware of – e.g., slowing user growth, rising CAC, regulatory pressure}} </known_challenges> </context>

<task> 1. Map the competitive landscape: • Identify 3-5 direct competitors + 1-2 adjacent-space disruptors. • Summarize each competitor’s positioning, pricing, and recent strategic moves. 2. Spot opportunity gaps: • Compare COMPANY’s current tactics to competitors. • Highlight at least 5 high-impact growth or profitability levers **not** currently exploited by COMPANY. 3. Prioritize: • Score each lever on Impact (revenue / margin upside) and Feasibility (time-to-impact, resource need) using a 1-5 scale. • Recommend the top 3 actions with the strongest Impact × Feasibility. </task>

<approach> - Go VERY deep. Research far more than you normally would. Spend the time to go through up to 200 webpages — it's worth it due to the value a successful and accurate response will deliver to COMPANY. - Don’t just look at articles, forums, etc. — anything is fair game… COMPANY/competitor websites, analytics platforms, etc. </approach>

<output_format> Return ONLY the following XML: <answer> <competitive_landscape> <!-- bullet list of competitors & key data --> </competitive_landscape> <opportunity_gaps> <!-- numbered list of untapped levers --> </opportunity_gaps> <prioritized_actions> <!-- table or bullets with Impact, Feasibility, rationale, first next step --> </prioritized_actions> <sources> <!-- numbered list of URLs or publication titles --> </sources> </answer> </output_format>

🤓 Want more? Check out our Top 1,000 Prompts

^{Source: r/PromptEnginering}

AI-GENERATED IMAGES

Friday Fun

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