Good morning, AI enthusiast.

Google is upgrading its Search engine to do more than just find information—it's now making phone calls for you. A new feature allows an AI agent to contact local businesses directly to check on things like pricing and availability.

This move transforms Search from a tool for retrieving information into a personal assistant that takes action. By embedding agent-like features directly into its core product, is Google creating a powerful moat against its AI-native rivals?

In today’s AI recap:

• Google's new agent that calls businesses for you

• Meta's massive data center and talent push

• Scale AI lays off 14% of staff

• Runway's new hybrid AI acting model

Google's AI Calls For You

The Recap: Google is rolling out an AI agent that calls local businesses on your behalf, and is supercharging its AI Mode with Gemini 2.5 Pro and a new “Deep Search” capability. The company officially announced the new features for U.S. users.

Unpacked:

• The new Search feature calls local businesses for you to check pricing and availability, saving you the time of making multiple phone calls yourself.

• For Google AI Pro and AI Ultra subscribers, a new “Deep Search” feature uses Gemini 2.5 Pro to conduct hundreds of searches and create a comprehensive, cited report on complex topics.

• Businesses can manage whether they receive these automated calls through their Business Profile settings, making strong local SEO even more critical for receiving AI-generated leads.

Bottom line: Google Search is evolving from an information retriever into a task executor, aiming to act as your personal assistant. This integration of agent-like capabilities directly challenges AI-native competitors by embedding advanced actions into the world's most popular search engine.

Meta's Manhattan-Sized AI Bet

The Recap: Mark Zuckerberg announced Meta is spending hundreds of billions on AI and building massive data centers, one nearly the size of Manhattan, in an aggressive push for personal superintelligence. The company is simultaneously poaching top talent from rivals like OpenAI and Apple to fuel its ambitions.

Unpacked:

• Meta's infrastructure plans include a data center called Hyperion, which will eventually support up to 5 gigawatts of capacity—enough power for roughly 4 million homes.

• The spending spree extends to human capital, with Meta aggressively recruiting top researchers from competitors, including poaching Apple's head of AI and multiple key researchers from OpenAI.

• This aggressive push comes after Meta's Llama 4 Behemoth model was put on hold, failing to keep pace with rivals and prompting Zuckerberg to remake the company's AI leadership team.

Bottom line: Meta is leveraging its massive advertising revenue to brute-force its way back into the top tier of AI development. These moves signal a high-stakes attempt to not only catch up with competitors but also to define the future of personal AI assistants and smart glasses.

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Clone Zapier & Canva’s SEO Strategy

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The Scale AI Shakeup

The Recap: In a surprising move just a month after Meta's $14.3 billion investment, data-labeling giant Scale AI is laying off 14% of its staff to streamline its operations.

Unpacked:

• Interim CEO Jason Droege stated the company expanded its generative AI capacity "too quickly," which created excessive bureaucracy and inefficiency.

• The restructuring follows reports that key customers like Google are pulling back over concerns that the Meta partnership compromises Scale's neutrality.

• The cuts affect 200 full-time employees and 500 contractors as the company reorganizes its GenAI division from 16 teams down to five core units.

Bottom line: This move highlights the intense competitive pressures in the AI industry, where major partnerships can unsettle customer relationships. Scale AI's shakeup is a clear signal of the challenge startups face in balancing rapid growth with their position as a trusted, independent partner in the ecosystem.

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Runway's Hybrid AI Acting

The Recap: AI video company Runway has released Act-Two, a new model that lets creators transfer their own movements and facial expressions onto any digital character using just a simple video.

Unpacked:

• The model captures full-body movement, facial expressions, and hand tracking from a standard video, eliminating the need for complex motion capture suits or green screens.

• Creators are already combining Act-Two with other AI tools, using it to animate characters generated in Midjourney and adding voice clones from ElevenLabs for a full performance.

• The technology enables a new form of hybrid human-AI performance, where the nuance of a real actor's delivery is preserved while being mapped onto a completely synthetic character.

Bottom line: Act-Two significantly lowers the barrier for independent creators to produce high-fidelity character animations that were once exclusive to big-budget studios. This tool could redefine digital performance, allowing actors to embody characters in ways that are untethered from physical reality.

The Shortlist

OpenAI is reportedly designing a rival to Google Workspace and Microsoft Office, developing agentic functions to create and edit documents and presentations in a direct challenge to the productivity software giants.

WeTransfer revised its terms of service to explicitly state it will not use customer files to train AI models, backtracking on a previous update after significant backlash from its user base of creative professionals.

xAI posted a job opening for a "Fullstack Engineer - Waifus" with a salary up to $440K, seeking developers to build out its AI "Companions" like the anime character 'Ani' for the Grok platform.

ETH Zurich and EPFL will release a new large language model developed entirely on public infrastructure, which will be fully open-source and feature fluency in over 1,000 languages.

Signing off,

David, Lucas, Mitchell — The Recap editorial team