AI in Microsoft Excel, Alibaba's image editor & more (August 19, 2025)

Good morning,

AI is editing your selfies, building your spreadsheets, and even dreaming up alien-looking physics experiments. Let’s dive into today’s bite-sized drops.

🎨 Smarter AI Tools Are Here

🖼️ Alibaba’s Qwen-Image-Edit

Alibaba dropped Qwen-Image-Edit, a 20B parameter open-source editor that keeps characters and objects intact while allowing pixel-perfect and style edits. It even edits Chinese and English text directly inside images without breaking fonts or formatting. Natural language photo editing just got its ChatGPT moment.

✍️ Grammarly’s Writing Agents

Grammarly unveiled eight new AI agents that act as co-writers and graders. From predicting where a reader might get confused to grading essays, detecting plagiarism, and checking human-likeness, these tools blur the line between learning and outsourcing.

🎮 Gaming Goes AI-First

Google Cloud reports 90% of developers are using AI in game development. From procedural world generation to smarter NPCs, AI is transforming design. Still, privacy and ownership concerns loom.

📊 AI in Work & Science

📑 Microsoft Copilot in Excel

Microsoft added a =COPILOT() function directly into Excel. Users can now summarize feedback, categorize data, and pull outside info with a simple formula. It’s in beta and requires the $30/month Copilot plan.

🧪 AI Designs “Alien” Physics Experiments

Physicists at Caltech let AI redesign LIGO’s gravitational wave detector. The AI produced bizarre asymmetrical layouts, initially dismissed as nonsense, that rediscovered old Russian theories and boosted sensitivity by 15%. AI is solving problems humans dismissed decades ago.

🌍 OpenAI Expands in India

OpenAI rolled out a sub-$5 subscription plan in India to accelerate adoption. With price cuts and localized plans, the company is making a serious push into emerging markets.

🛠️ Tools of the Day

• Splash – Turn your data into insights with AI
• Gitcord – Track and analyze GitHub repos in real time
• Miniflow – Automate workflows across multiple AI models
• April – Reach Inbox Zero by speaking with your email & calendar

💡 Prompt of the Day

Meeting Notes Summarizer

You are a senior executive assistant with expertise in meeting documentation. Review notes, extract key decisions, action items with owners and deadlines, and next steps.

⚡ Quick Hits

• Nvidia dropped Nemotron Nano 2, small reasoning models (9B–12B params) at 6x speed.
• Meta preps Hypernova smart glasses for September, priced around $800.
• ByteDance launched M3-Agent, a multimodal AI with long-term memory.
• Texas AG is probing Meta & Character AI for “deceptive” chatbot marketing.
• Researchers built a social network of AI bots that devolved into a bot war.

📌 TLDR

AI isn’t just generating content, it’s editing with precision, grading your writing, and redesigning physics experiments. At the office, Copilot is taking over Excel, while OpenAI is cutting prices in India to dominate global markets. The message is clear: AI is everywhere, from spreadsheets to supernovae.

See you tomorrow,
David