TLDR 2026-05-14
App Store agents 📱, Alexa AI shopping 🛍️, Notion Dev Platform 👨💻
Email. Slack. PRDs. Prompts. Doc edits. (Sponsor)
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Apple is working to incorporate AI agents on the App Store (2 minute read)
Apple is exploring ways to incorporate AI agents into the App Store while still adhering to its privacy and security standards. AI agents can take complex actions on behalf of users, which can be an issue for Apple's strict regulations, which are designed to prevent apps from spreading malware, avoiding App Store fees, and committing other misbehavior. Providing better support for agents will help Apple protect a revenue stream while providing key privacy and security guarantees to users.
Amazon ditches Rufus chatbot, launches Alexa shopping agent in AI strategy pivot (6 minute read)
Amazon is making Alexa the centerpiece of its AI shopping strategy. Alexa for Shopping is an e-commerce bot that can answer queries and take actions on behalf of users. It uses shopping history and other data to provide a personalized AI shopping experience. The feature is available without a Prime membership. Amazon is discontinuing its standalone Rufus chatbot.
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Science & Futuristic Technology
A Start-Up Aiming to Make Geothermal Energy Mainstream Goes Public (9 minute read)
Fervo Energy is building a commercial geothermal plant in Utah and is planning others across the West. Tech companies are hunting across the country for energy to fuel the AI boom, powering tens of billions of dollars into solar energy, batteries, natural gas power plants, and new kinds of nuclear power plants. Geothermal energy can produce electricity without any planet-warming emissions while operating 24 hours a day. Fervo raised $1.89 billion in an initial public offering this week, a real signal of confidence in the industry.
Could this be the moment that drug manufacturing takes off in orbit? (4 minute read)
Vada Space Industries, a private space company, has announced a significant new collaboration with the United Therapeutics Corporation to explore the use of microgravity to develop improved treatments for rare lung disease. The companies plan to use microgravity's influence on the structure and crystallization properties of therapeutic compounds to improve their stability and delivery. This is the first time a large, publicly traded company is using capital from its own balance sheet to build and produce a product in microgravity. Up to now, NASA has subsidized much of the research into the impact of microgravity on drug development.
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Programming, Design & Data Science
MCP is a protocol. Your AI coworker needs a context layer (Sponsor)
Most teams assumed off-the-shelf MCP would replace the need for a context layer. It hasn't. MCP defines how tools talk — not what they know. Glean's benchmark tested both head-to-head: off-the-shelf MCP used 30% more tokens, and Glean was preferred 2.5x on agentic tasks. An enterprise knowledge graph changes what your AI can do.
Read the evaluation from our recent article
AI Gateway production index (15 minute read)
Anthropic is leading in spend despite a higher unit price, while Google leads in volume. Open source models are gaining traction, but there is no loyalty to specific labs. OpenAI's spend share is growing quickly after its recent model update. Agentic workloads are carrying 59% of all token volume.
The Notion Developer Platform (1 minute read)
The Notion Developer Platform enables developers to write code to sync any data and build any agent tool. It supports all popular agents and custom agents. Developers can trigger Notion workflows from anywhere and use Notion Agents in any app. Notion has created a collection of agents from companies like Ramp, Clay, and Vercel for anyone to use.
Browsers Treat Big Sites Differently (7 minute read)
Safari and Firefox change how some sites are rendered based on the domain. Sites like TikTok, Netflix, and Instagram get special treatment. This happens because these browsers are playing catch-up when it comes to Chrome feature updates, and this means using quirks and workarounds until they reach feature parity. The resulting loop keeps Chrome dominant as users switch to Chrome for a better experience.
AI is the New Netflix (4 minute read)
Video streaming reshaped how operators planned capacity as people started caring about downstream speed. AI is now changing upload needs. AI use is generating upstream traffic that didn't exist at scale just a few years ago. Cloud sync has become the dominant upstream category. The old asymmetric broadband model of fat downstream and thin upstream was engineered for passive consumption - that model is finished.
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