TLDR 2025-05-07

The agentic AI space still feels chaotic, overhyped, and hard to navigate. But for businesses that get it right, AI agents are reshaping customer experience.

Join Thatcher Foster, VP of Client Solutions at Bilt Rewards, and Max Lowenthal, Agent Product Manager at Decagon, for a candid conversation on Bilt's experience evaluating AI agents for customer support.

They'll look at what separates best-in-class agentic AI solutions from legacy chatbot software, a five step checklist for evaluating AI agents, deploying AI in a way that fits your workflows, and how to measure ROI.

Wednesday, May 21 - register here

Google is developing its own Samsung DeX-like desktop mode for Android. Samsung DeX is a software feature that emulates a desktop UI that presents a desktop-like interface, allowing users to launch multiple apps in floating windows and control everything with a keyboard and mouse. The feature is still unfinished and almost certainly won't launch by the release of Android 16. This article presents a preview of the new desktop mode.

Amazon's Kindle app for iPhones and iPads wouldn't actually let anyone buy books in the app, until yesterday. The iOS app still doesn't allow books to be purchased directly in the app, but users can search Amazon's virtual bookstore inside the app and tap a new button that automatically pops them over to Amazon's website. Apple plans to appeal the ruling to allow third-party developers to use alternate payment processors in their apps - if successful, it could create new potential PR headaches for Apple as the company would then be taking away something from developers and users rather than preserving the status quo.

The Federal Aviation Administration has agreed to allow SpaceX to substantially increase the number of annual launches from its Starbase launch site in South Texas. SpaceX will now be able to conduct up to 25 Starship launches and landings during a calendar year. It will be required to undertake dozens of actions to mitigate environmental impacts. The company has yet to announce a firm date for its ninth Starship flight test.

Stratolaunch's Talon-A2 reusable hypersonic rocket plane has already carried multiple experiments and delivered payloads. The company is aiming for monthly flights by the end of the year and eventually wants to ramp up to weekly flights. The Pentagon has spent about $12 billion on hypersonic weapons development and testing since 2018 - none of the weapons are operational yet. China's first hypersonic weapon became operational in 2019, and Russia's government claimed it deployed a hypersonic weapon in the same year. The Pentagon's hunger for hypersonic weapons will likely fund Stratolaunch for some time to come.

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Google has released early access to a version of Gemini 2.5 Pro with significantly improved coding capabilities. The model is reportedly better at coding tasks such as building interactive web apps, code transformation, code editing, and creating agentic workflows. It was scheduled to debut at Google I/O, but Google released it early in response to positive feedback. The updated Gemini 2.5 Pro is placed at the top of the WebDev Arena Leaderboard and scored 84.8% on the VideoMME benchmark.

Hyper is a simple markup language for building user interfaces that enables developers to generate complex UIs with clean syntax. It is a headless view layer focused on rendering. Hyper allows developers to ditch the hundreds of frameworks, tools, languages, idioms, libraries, and practices that attempt to solve problems within the idiomatic React stack. This post compares React to Hyper.

UK retailers Harrods, Marks & Spencer, and Co-op have all reported cyber intrusions in the past two weeks. A group that calls itself Star Fraud (but more widely known as Scattered Spider) is suspected to be the culprit of the hacks. The attacks bear all the hallmarks of the group's attacks. Other retailers have been warned to harden their defences as the group usually works its way through a sector.

Uber has announced that it will increase its in-office requirements and change benefits. Employees will be required to come into the office three days a week starting in June. The eligibility for Uber's month-long paid sabbatical benefit has been raised from five years at the company to eight years. Some employees who had previously been approved for remote work will be required to start coming in.

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Microsoft has introduced a Surface Pro convertible tablet and a Surface Laptop, both of which can run artificial intelligence models without using the internet.

A class action suit filed on behalf of developers claims that Apple's actions cost them revenue during the period it was found to have violated a court order to let developers sell subscriptions directly to customers.

Outpost is a self-hosted infrastructure that enables event producers to add outbound webhooks and Event Destinations to their platform.

Function calling allows large language models to interact with external systems.

The App Store Freedom Act aims to promote competition and protect consumers and developers in the mobile app marketplace.