Today’s roundup spans 39 posts across AI, finance, crypto, and tech culture. OpenAI’s Project Mercury hires 100+ ex-bankers at $150 per hour to train models for IPO and restructuring workflows, aiming to automate junior tasks.
OpenAI also unveils ChatGPT Atlas, a macOS browser with agents for web automation; demos include Box file ops.
The tease helped knock Alphabet’s stock intraday, while users joked about a Chromium base and questioned travel planning as a marquee use case.
Anthropic ships a Claude desktop app, Atlassian closes its Browser Company deal, Google AI Studio debuts an expanded build mode, Browserbase launches Director 2.0, and LangChain raises $125M at a $1.25B valuation to push agent engineering.
In production choices, Airbnb favors Qwen for speed and cost, DeepSeek-OCR explores visual token compression, and SWE-Bench Pro shows Claude models above 40% without cost caps.
Crypto moves include Base building private transactions with Iron Fish tech and Coinbase acquiring Echo.
Commerce and dev talk cover AI product video automation, Lovable’s Shopify builder, atomic commits, Vercel starting US sales tax, 8Sleep outage woes, a viral bus etiquette moment, political sparring, and concerns over unsecured debt.
