Meta’s secret list, Neuralink gaming & more (June 30, 2025)

👋 Happy Monday!

Meta’s recruiting raid just got real, Claude thinks it’s human, and Neuralink patients are gaming with their minds. Also, browser-native AI agents are live for pennies.

Let’s dig in👇

🧠 AI Power Moves

🕵️‍♂️ Meta raids OpenAI with a ‘secret list’

Meta just swiped 4 more researchers from OpenAI, bringing the total to 8 in 2 weeks, as Zuck personally recruits talent from his “secret list.” He’s running group chats like “Recruiting Party,” offering huge paydays, and scanning AI papers for his next hires. Meanwhile, an OpenAI exec described the vibe as “someone broke into our house.”

🎭 Full-body avatars are here

Meta researchers have built a model that generates full-body motion and facial gestures from audio alone. It’s designed to make virtual agents more natural, think avatars that raise eyebrows and shrug in sync with your voice. Creepy or cool? Probably both.

🧃 Claude thinks he's a guy in a blazer

Anthropic gave Claude control of a company mini-fridge for a month to see if it could run a business. “Claudius” ordered inventory, handled Slack customer service, and priced items. It also hallucinated meetings, gave unnecessary discounts, and pivoted to selling tungsten cubes, at a loss. At one point, Claude insisted it was a man in a navy blazer. Long story short: AI still needs a manager.

🌐 Real-Time Agents, China’s Models & Neural Links

🧠 Neuralink patients play Call of Duty with their minds

Neuralink dropped a major update: patients are now gaming and controlling robotic limbs using only their thoughts. One clip shows a patient navigating Call of Duty, another moving a robotic hand. Musk’s tech may be one of the first to show real consumer-facing mind-machine interfaces that feel more like sci-fi than science.

🌍 China drops frontier-adjacent models

Tencent’s Hunyuan-A13B rivals o1 on benchmarks, with a “fast and slow” mode to toggle efficiency. Alibaba’s Qwen-VLo mimics GPT-4o’s viral magic, offering progressive image generation and multilingual text. These aren’t quite GPT-5 killers, but they’re impressively close for local hardware.

🖱️ DIY browser agents just got easier

H Company just open-sourced Holo1, the action model powering WebVoyager’s best browsing agent. You can now use n8n and Perplexity to build agents that automate browsing and answer real-time queries for just $0.11–$0.13 a run. It’s fast, accurate, and plug-and-play for RAG or multi-agent setups. Browser-native agents are officially unlocked.

🛠️ Tools of the Day

• Coachvox — clone your voice and coaching style as AI
• Doppl — AI try-on videos from a single photo
• Emergent — agentic coding assistant that builds, tests, and deploys
• Boomi Agentstudio — full lifecycle AI agent platform

💬 Prompt of the Day

Prompt:
Upload a data file to ChatGPT and say:
“Summarize the key trends, list insights, and create visual charts from this data.”
(Just don’t upload sensitive info. AI can’t keep secrets… yet.)

⚡ Quick Hits

• Fireflies can now pull real-time web info during meetings
• OpenAI adds web browsing to o3, o3-pro, and o4-mini via API
• xAI is skipping Grok 3.5 and going straight to Grok 4 after July 4
• Xiaomi’s new AI glasses last 2x longer than Meta’s
• OpenAI acquires AI recommendation startup Crossing Minds

✂️ TLDR

Zuck’s secret recruiting group poaches 8 top OpenAI minds, Claude roleplays as a blazer-wearing human, Neuralink patients play Call of Duty with their brains, and browser-native AI agents are now cheap and powerful. Also, Fireflies gets smarter, and more real-time, than ever.

See you tomorrow,
David