Good morning. It's Friday, October 16, and we're covering how ambient AI could make apps less relevant, why chatbot companions are reshaping human relationships, and what Anthropic’s $16.8 billion revenue reveals.

Plus: yesterday’s poll results on AI’s most exciting future, and a new Friday Fact about a Guinness World Record.

Anthropic told prospective investors that third-quarter revenue rose about 45% to $16.8 billion and that the company was cash-flow positive. Growth was far slower than the prior quarter, adding pressure to the valuation it can support in a possible November public offering.

Meta released Muse Spark Open, an 816-billion-parameter model designed to run locally on Apple’s M5 Ultra Mac Studio. The release gives developers a powerful U.S.-built model they can inspect and operate on their own hardware instead of sending every request to the cloud.

TSMC plans to build another 3-nanometer factory in Tainan, Taiwan, with production expected in the first half of 2028. The company says heavy AI-chip orders justify more capacity and reported third-quarter revenue of $46.72 billion, up 41.2% from a year earlier. (Paywall)

In 2013, IBM researchers made a simple animation of a boy playing with a ball. It looks like early computer graphics, but how they made it earned the film a Guinness World Record. Get the full story below.

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Here’s your first look behind the scenes. The full interview drops next week, but members can get a sneak peek today. In an exclusive post-interview video, Matt shares how the conversation went and his reflections on the experience. Watch Matt’s members-only recap →

Amazon devices chief Panos Panay says the next generation of personal computing will rely more on ambient devices that use sensors and AI in the background. Instead of opening an app and issuing a command, people would expect a connected “intelligence layer” to understand what they need and handle more tasks automatically.

Amazon’s new Bee wearables are an early test of that idea: they listen, summarize conversations and turn them into reminders or actions while deleting raw audio after processing. The useful-versus-invasive tradeoff will decide whether ambient AI becomes normal. → Read the full article here.

Ezra Klein speaks with MIT sociologist Sherry Turkle, who has studied people’s relationships with machines since the 1970s. They examine a world where roughly half of U.S. adults use chatbots, nearly one in five has talked with an AI romantic companion, and kids struggle to distinguish chatbots from humans.

Turkle’s concern is not that the machine is secretly conscious; it is that people can accept simulated empathy from a system that has no needs, history or responsibility to them. → Read the full article here. (Paywall)

What if you could edit a video just by saying what you want changed? Brian, a producer at Forward Future, is already doing it. In this practical guide, he walks through the tools, prompts, and feedback process he uses to turn raw footage into finished videos. It still takes patience and a human eye, but you don’t need years of editing experience to get started.

Frontier Pass members get the full guide for free →

Amazon Launches Two Bee AI Devices: Amazon introduced the $74.99 Bee Frontier wearable and the $99.99 Bee Eclipse phone attachment.

Bank of America Assigns 4,000 to Fix AI-Found Flaws: Teams are repairing software vulnerabilities found by Anthropic’s Mythos and other AI models.

Google Launches Universal Cart in the U.S.: Search and Gemini now combine products across retailers with price, stock and promo tracking.

Stallone Sees AI Transforming Hollywood: Stallone says AI could show younger versions of actors, despite industry fears of job losses.

Google Clears a Major Quantum-Computing Bottleneck: Google Quantum AI demonstrated “magic state cultivation” on its Willow processor.

For A Boy and His Atom, IBM researchers used a scanning tunneling microscope to arrange carbon monoxide molecules frame by frame into a stop-motion animation. Each molecule contains just two atoms, and IBM magnified the action 100 million times to make it visible.

The film shows a boy dancing, tossing a ball, and bouncing on a trampoline—all at the molecular scale. Guinness recognized it as the world’s smallest stop-motion film. The technique grew out of research into atomic-level data storage, but the team gave it a playful twist: turning the building blocks of matter into cartoon characters.

Here's how you voted: Longer, healthier lives topped the poll at 37%, followed by universal abundance at 32%. Space exploration drew 17%.

Thanks for reading. See you next time!

— Matthew Berman, Nick Wentz & the Forward Future Team