Your brain is no longer private (sorry)

Jul 03, 2026

Someone wants your attention. 🐶

Enjoy it, because this week AI got unnervingly good at watching back.

For a year, the deal seemed settled: America makes the best AI, China makes the cheap knockoff.

This week a Beijing startup broke that in half. Its model climbed above Anthropic’s on the tools developers actually reach for - at a sixth of the cost.

Meanwhile, in a lab, Meta pulled full sentences straight out of someone’s brain.

Two reminders in one week that nobody’s lead is safe anymore.

Lead Story

The Chinese Model That Climbed Above Claude

GLM-5.2, from Beijing startup Z.ai, launched last month and has Silicon Valley buzzing over its coding and agent skills. On OpenRouter, where developers pick which model to actually run, it now sits above Anthropic’s - at about a sixth of the cost.

The praise is coming from loud places. David Sacks, the president’s former AI czar, called it “a tick below Opus 4.8” and level with GPT-5.5. Marc Andreessen piled on.

Circumstance helped too. With Anthropic’s Fable and Mythos restricted until Tuesday and OpenAI’s GPT-5.6 on a slow leash, developers went looking and found something that worked at a fraction of the price.

Nobody’s switching wholesale; analysts expect “partial routing,” not a full defection. But Z.ai’s founder told Elon Musk he’ll match Fable by early next year. The gap the U.S. counted on is closing. Read More →

In Focus

Meta Read Words Straight Off a Brain - No Surgery

Imagine typing a sentence and having a machine guess it - not from your keyboard, but from your brain. That’s roughly what Meta just pulled off.

Its new Brain2Qwerty v2 reads typed sentences from brain activity with no implant, hitting 61%-word accuracy - a big leap from the 8% earlier non-invasive attempts managed.

The trick is a MEG helmet that reads your brain from outside, so nobody needs surgery.

Worth a reality check: 61% still means plenty of wrong words, and the volunteers had to physically type the words. Still, accuracy kept climbing the more data Meta fed it. Which hints this might only get better from here.
How it reads your brain without touching it →

Interesting Read

How Much Real Work Can AI Actually Finish?

*Image Source: The Center for AI Safety*

The Center for AI Safety runs a Remote Labor Index - it hands models real freelance projects and has humans judge whether the output is professional quality.

The share AI can finish more than quadrupled in under eight months. Anthropic’s Fable 5 tops the board at 16.1%, well ahead of Opus 4.8 (8.3%) and GPT-5.5 (6.3%).

Here’s the part the headline number hides: even Fable 5’s “completed” jobs still wouldn’t be accepted as finished work by a real client.

Being able to do one job in six is a long way from replacing the person who does all six. Read More →

Worth a Try AI Tools

1. Nano Banana 2 Lite + Gemini Omni Flash
Google’s fastest, cheapest image model spits out a picture in about four seconds; its new companion, Omni Flash, then turns that image into a video you edit just by describing the change.

Why try it? Generate an image, then animate it, in one smooth flow.
Try it here →

2. Tamamon
A tiny pixel creature that lives on your desktop and grows the longer you keep coding. The more you ship, the bigger it gets.

Why try it? A small, silly companion that turns your coding streak into something you can watch level up. Try it here →

🤯 Something Bizarre

A sandwich chain fronted by Danny DeVito name-dropped “AI” 22 times in its IPO filing - more than plenty of actual tech startups.
See what’s cooking →

Top Tweet of the Week

App-hunter Alessandro Paluzzi (@alex193a) noticed Meta rolling out Pocket - a new app that lets you spin up little AI-made games from a single text prompt and share them.

It’s Meta’s latest nudge to get everyone “vibe-coding,” no dev skills required.