u/DigiHold

Square launched this on July 1 and it kind of flew under the radar with the holiday weekend. If a restaurant uses Square for their payments, customers can now find them, browse the full menu, and place an order directly inside ChatGPT or Claude.

There's no delivery app in the middle. You ask ChatGPT something like "Thai food near me", and if a local spot runs on Square, it shows up right in the conversation. You pick what you want, pay through Cash App, and the order lands on the restaurant's kitchen screen like any normal online order.

What matters for restaurant owners is that Square isn't charging them anything extra for this. No new commission and no per-order fee on orders that come through AI. Everything flows into their existing setup, same as if you'd ordered from their website. If you've ever talked to a restaurant owner about what delivery apps take from each order, you know why that's worth paying attention to.

Only US food spots on Square Online Ordering qualify for now, so your local place might not be there yet. They're also building an Alexa+ version, so eventually you could tell your Echo to order lunch and it goes straight to the kitchen.

Anyone tried ordering through ChatGPT yet? Curious if the restaurant selection is decent or still pretty thin.

Unfortunately it is not that simple 🤷‍♂️

Anthropic's most powerful model, Fable 5, is back online today. The US government forced it offline about 3 weeks ago, and now the ban's been lifted.

Quick recap, some researchers at Amazon found a way to trick Fable 5 into writing code that could break into software. The government told Anthropic to lock it down, and since they couldn't check where each user was sitting fast enough, they pulled it for everyone on the planet.

It's back today, but they added a stricter safety filter that's a bit too cautious. If you use Fable 5 for regular coding or debugging, it'll sometimes decide your request looks risky and send it to a different Anthropic model, Opus 4.8, instead. So part of your everyday coding won't even run on the model you actually picked.

There's also a second model here, Mythos 5, the same underlying AI with fewer safety limits. That one isn't coming back for everyone, only a short list of approved US companies get it after a government review.

When Anthropic tested other models, OpenAI's GPT-5.5 and even their own Opus 4.8 could find the same security holes. So whatever got Fable 5 pulled wasn't really unique to it.

If you build on top of these tools like I do, watching one vanish overnight and return with new limits you didn't ask for is a strange feeling. You don't own it, and it can change under you with no warning.

Anyone else had a tool you rely on get pulled or changed out from under you?

Anthropic just accused Alibaba's AI lab of the biggest copycat operation they've ever caught.

Between April and early June, someone allegedly created about 25,000 fake accounts on Claude and ran 28.8 million conversations with it. All those answers then got fed into Alibaba's own AI, called Qwen, teaching it to respond like Claude without doing the original research.

Anthropic had already called out similar stuff from other Chinese AI labs earlier this year, but nothing close to this size. Alibaba hasn't said a word about it publicly.

But this affects more than just Anthropic. Every one of those fake accounts used Claude the exact same way a real paying customer would, just thousands of times over in a coordinated system.

I personally love Claude, I use it every day for my work, but I kind of like this situation for one specific reason.
If Chinese labs become better at creating AI models, even if they stole data from popular US companies, it means that Claude, ChatGPT, Gemini, etc, will need to step up, maybe with better pricing or limitations, because how to keep users if you can have way cheaper with better limitations that do exactly the same things?
US labs will try to put upfront privacy "Chinese labs use and sell your data", probably true, but US companies too, so that's not an argument that will make users pay hundred each month to stay with them.

OpenAI's next ChatGPT model, GPT-5.6, was supposed to launch like any other update. Instead the White House asked OpenAI to hold it back and only let a small group of approved partners use it first, with the government signing off on who gets access one customer at a time.

The reason they gave is security, this new model is apparently as capable as Claude Mythos model, so the government wants to test it for safety before regular people can get their hands on it.

So a few weeks back, Claude Fable 5, had two of its newest AIs held up the exact same way. Now it's OpenAI's turn, so we're slowly landing in a world where the government decides when a new AI is allowed to reach the public, not the company that built it.

Testing powerful tools before they go live sounds reasonable, but needing permission before normal people can use the new model feels very weird to me.

Google lost two of its most important AI researchers in the same week, and both went straight to competitors.

Noam Shazeer co-wrote "Attention Is All You Need", the 2017 research paper that basically invented the technology behind ChatGPT, Claude, and every AI chatbot you've used. He left Google back in 2021 because he thought they moved too slow, started his own company called Character.AI, and Google paid $2.7 billion to bring him back in 2024. He stayed less than two years and just left for OpenAI.

Then there's John Jumper, who won the 2024 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for creating AlphaFold, an AI that predicts how proteins fold inside your body (which helps scientists develop new drugs way faster). He'd been at Google DeepMind for nine years and just left for Anthropic, the company behind Claude.

A third researcher named David Silver, one of DeepMind's earliest employees, also left recently to start his own company.

Google's stock dropped over 5% after the news came out.

Anyone else feel like Google went from leading the AI race to watching its best people walk out the door?

OpenAI added something called "dreaming" to ChatGPT earlier this month, and it sounds weird but it's one of the most useful updates they've shipped in a while.

ChatGPT now runs a background process that goes through your past conversations and builds a profile about you without you ever asking. Your job, your writing style, what projects you're working on, what kind of food you like. It pulls all of that together from different chats and keeps it updated.

If you told ChatGPT about a trip coming up in July, it'll update its own memory after July to say the trip already happened instead of still thinking it's in the future. So it's aware that time is passing even when you're not talking to it, which is honestly a little strange when you think about it.

Right now this is rolling out for paying users in the US (Plus and Pro plans), and free accounts should get it in the coming weeks. Not available in the EU or UK yet because of privacy rules.

You can see everything it remembers about you in Settings under Personalization, and delete anything you don't want stored.

Has anyone else been using this yet? Curious what kind of stuff it's picking up about you.

Until recently, ChatGPT was the only AI tool most people had ever heard of. Your coworker used it, your dentist probably tried it, and nobody else was even close.

The latest industry numbers just came out and ChatGPT is down to 46% of the AI assistant market, the first time it's ever fallen below half. Google's Gemini is the biggest reason, because it's baked into Gmail, Search, Android, and basically everything Google already runs, so people aren't "switching" to it on purpose, it's just already there when they open their phone. And Claude quietly quadrupled its users without most people even noticing it existed.

But ChatGPT isn't actually shrinking, it still has over a billion people using it every month and that number keeps climbing. The whole market just grew so fast underneath it that holding majority share became impossible, kind of like how Chrome dominated browsers until Edge and Safari slowly chipped away at it by being pre-installed on every device.

Most people don't even know which AI they're talking to anymore. Google answers your search with AI before you click anything, and Microsoft sticks Copilot into every product it ships. Nobody is choosing an AI the way they chose an iPhone, the AI is just showing up wherever people already spend their time.

Feels like we're heading toward AI being more like email, where nobody cares which provider runs it as long as it works. Anyone else bouncing between different AIs without really thinking about which one you opened?

Everyone pictures AI taking jobs as a robot rolling up to your desk and replacing you. The thing actually happening is quieter and easier to miss. AI isn't going after the experienced people first, it's erasing the very first job, the entry-level one that fresh grads used to start on.

Tech layoffs this year are already somewhere around 150,000 people, and when companies explain the cuts, AI is the reason they name more than any other. But the layoffs aren't even the main story, the bigger shift is who isn't getting hired in the first place.

There's real payroll data showing that young software developers, the ones in their early twenties just out of school, have dropped nearly 20% over the last couple of years. The people doing that exact same job who were older and more experienced actually grew in number over the same stretch. So what got replaced wasn't coders in general, it was the beginner version, while the senior version kept their seat.

It makes sense when you think about what a junior used to do on day one. The first drafts, the basic research, the formatting, all the small repetitive tasks nobody senior wanted. That's exactly the work AI is cheap and good at now, so companies skip hiring the beginner and keep the experienced person who already knows what good looks like.

If nobody hires the beginner, where do the future seniors even come from?

I'll be fair, it isn't fully settled, some economists couldn't clearly link the slowdown to AI, and a few company surveys even claim they're hiring more juniors. But young workers dropping while older workers climb, in the precise jobs AI handles best, is hard to wave away.

If you pay a flat monthly fee for some AI tool right now, there's a real chance it's about to turn into a taxi meter.

GitHub Copilot just did exactly that. It's the AI that writes computer code for programmers (owned by Microsoft), and earlier this month it stopped charging one flat price and started charging based on how much you actually use it. The light stuff, like it finishing your line of code as you type, is still free. But the heavy stuff, like asking it questions or handing it a whole task and letting it go work on its own, now burns through a credit balance. Run out of credits and you start paying extra.

If you barely touch it, you won't feel a thing, the people feeling it are the ones who lean on it all day. One developer online said their bill went from around $29 a month to about $750, someone else claimed theirs ran into the thousands. I'd take the exact figures with a grain of salt since these are people's own posts and nobody's audited them, but the direction is very real and a lot of folks are furious.

GitHub's explanation is actually reasonable. They basically said a quick question and a job where the AI works on its own for hours used to cost them the same, they'd been quietly eating that gap, and the old model stopped adding up. Running these AIs is genuinely expensive and somebody has to pay for it.

And I don't think GitHub is the last one to do this. The AI subscription was always priced too low to survive, because the company was absorbing the real cost just to grab users. Now that everyone's hooked, the meters are coming out. So if you're on a flat plan for anything AI, go read the fine print and check whether there's a credit limit hiding in there now.

Anyone here actually gotten a surprise AI bill yet? Curious how bad it got and which tool did it to you.

Sunday roundup, here's what actually mattered in AI this week.

The US government is still blocking Anthropic's two best AI models, and we're nine days in. Anthropic launched Fable 5 on June 9, then on June 12 the Commerce Department ordered it and a sister model pulled worldwide over a way people found to get around the safety limits. The ban even covers Anthropic's own staff who aren't US citizens, refunds closed June 20, and as of today nobody outside can use what they paid for. Time

Anthropic almost stopped letting automated tools run on a normal Claude subscription, then backed off at the last second. Back in April it cut off outside tools like OpenClaw that fire off requests nonstop, and this month it planned to push all that usage onto a separate metered bill. On June 15, the day it was supposed to start, Anthropic reversed course and said nothing changes for now. The Decoder

That whole mess is the best argument I know for bringing your own key. When you plug your own AI key into a tool instead of renting someone else's subscription, no company can move the goalposts on you or cut your access overnight. It also tends to cost most people $2 to $4 a month instead of the $20 to $50 these subscriptions run, which is the model we built LinkedGrow on. LinkedGrow

GitHub Copilot switched to charging by how much you use it, and the bills got rough. Since June 1 you pay per use instead of one flat monthly price, and one developer said his went from around $29 a month to almost $750. Same lesson as above, when you don't control the pricing, you're at the mercy of whoever does. TechCrunch

Elon Musk's SpaceX agreed to buy the coding tool Cursor for $60 billion. It's an all-stock deal, the biggest takeover of a startup like this on record, and it landed just days after SpaceX went public in the largest stock-market debut ever. A rocket company now owns one of the most popular ways people write software, make of that what you will. TechCrunch

A big report this week says AI is quietly becoming how people get their news. About 1 in 10 people around the world now read the news through AI chatbots every week, up from 7 percent last year, and a lot of them never click through to the actual article. If you run any kind of website or blog, that's your traffic slowly walking out the door. Reuters Institute

Free, download-it-yourself AI models keep showing up, and they're getting genuinely good. Just this month a couple more dropped that anyone can grab and run on their own computer without paying a subscription, including one called GLM-5.2 on June 16. If you ever felt locked into a monthly AI bill, that's the quiet escape hatch. LLM Stats

Google is putting out its first smart speaker in six years, this time with Gemini built into it. The $99 Home Speaker lands June 25 and is meant to go head to head with Amazon's Alexa and Apple's Siri, except you can actually talk to it normally instead of memorizing exact commands. Whether people still want a speaker on the counter in 2026 is the real question. Google

Did I miss something big this week? Drop it below.

So SpaceX is buying Cursor for $60 billion, and yeah, I mean the actual rocket company. Cursor's that app over a million programmers use every day to write and fix their code, and Elon just bought the whole thing with SpaceX stock, not a single dollar of cash.

Back in February SpaceX swallowed xAI, Elon's AI company, the Grok people, so it's not really just rockets anymore, it's where all his AI sits now. And the biggest thing in AI right now is software that writes other software, so he wants in on that fight with ChatGPT and Claude, who both already do it.

The only reason he can throw $60 billion at this is last week's IPO, SpaceX went public, biggest one ever, the stock jumped, and those shares are suddenly worth a fortune. So he's not really spending money here, he's spending paper that shot way up.

Honestly I can't tell if this is genius or Elon just collecting companies like Pokemon cards now. Rockets, Starlink, the AI, and now a coding tool a million devs basically live in all day.

He's already got his own coding AI, Grok Build, and a million people using Cursor every day is a goldmine of data to train it on, so maybe Cursor's really just fuel for Grok 🤷‍♂️

Anthropic put out a new AI called Fable 5 a few days ago. Three days later it was gone, not because it broke, the US government straight up told them to switch it off.

The government got worried someone found a way to trick the AI past its safety filters into doing dangerous stuff, so they ordered Anthropic to block anyone who isn't American from using it. Problem is, Anthropic can't tell who's American and who isn't through a screen, so instead of blocking some people they just turned it off for everybody.

So a working tool people were already paying for and building on vanished overnight. Anthropic says the flaw was minor and they want it back soon, and all their other AIs still work fine.

Anyone else here was actually using it before it got pulled?

Elon Musk became a trillionaire today, the first person ever to pull that off (officially). His rocket company SpaceX went public, the biggest stock launch in history, and that alone pushed him past a trillion on paper.

A few months back SpaceX bought his AI company, the one behind the Grok chatbot, and that's actually where a lot of the money is coming from now. The rocket company owns these huge buildings stuffed with computers, and Anthropic and Google are paying him something like two billion a month combined just to rent them for their AI. So the richest man alive basically got there being the landlord for the whole AI boom.

Thing is, it's all paper money, SpaceX lost money last year, and one of the big Wall Street firms reckons it's worth less than half of what people are paying for the stock right now. If the AI companies ever slow their spending, a big chunk of that just evaporates.

You know how they say in a gold rush the ones who get rich are the people selling shovels, not the ones digging? Computers are the shovels now, and Musk just became the biggest shovel seller around. That whole trillion holds up only as long as Google and Anthropic keep cutting the checks.

Honestly feels a bit like the dot-com days to me, when everything was worth a fortune right up until it wasn't.

Anthropic put out their most powerful AI yet yesterday, and they shipped it as two different things with the same brain inside. One is called Fable 5 and the other Mythos 5.

Fable 5 is the one normal people get, same model they showed off back in April and said was too dangerous to release, the one an unauthorized group managed to get access to a couple months back. They bolted a layer of safety on it and put it out for everyone.

If you ask Fable something in a touchy area like hacking or biology or chemistry, it doesn't flat out refuse. It quietly passes your question to an older, weaker version of Claude and lets that one answer instead. So you could be talking to the genius model one minute and a simpler one the next, depending on what you ask. They say it only kicks in on a small slice of chats.

Mythos 5 is the exact same model with that safety switched off in those risky areas. That one isn't for the public, it's locked to a small group of cybersecurity defenders and, later, biology researchers. Same engine, way fewer guardrails, way fewer people allowed near it.

For normal work it sounds like a monster, Stripe said it knocked out a giant coding job in a single day that would've taken a full team over two months by hand. It's also pricey, roughly double what their last top model cost to run.

It's free to try until June 22 if you're on a paid Claude plan, then it moves to pay-as-you-go.

Anyone tried Fable yet? Curious whether that model swap is noticeable when it happens, or if you'd never even catch it.

Apple finally showed off the new Siri yesterday, and the part nobody's really talking about is who's actually running it.

For years Apple sold the idea that it does AI on its own, in private, without leaning on anyone else. Turns out the brain behind the new Siri is partly Google's. Apple is reportedly paying Google around a billion dollars a year to use a custom version of Google's AI, and it runs on Apple's own private servers so your personal stuff supposedly stays locked to you. They renamed the whole thing "Siri AI", which tells you how badly they wanted a fresh start after the last big Siri update never really showed up.

The new Siri can look at whatever's on your screen and answer questions about it, dig through your old messages and emails to pull out a hotel booking number you forgot about, find that restaurant a friend texted you weeks ago, or point your camera at a plate of food and tell you roughly what's in it. It can also do things across your apps instead of just setting timers and reading you the weather. There's a standalone Siri app now too, kind of like a chat window that remembers your past conversations and syncs them across your iPhone, iPad and Mac.

If you've never touched ChatGPT or anything like it, this is going to feel like a huge jump and you'll probably love it. If you have, a lot of the demos looked like stuff other apps were already doing a couple of years back. Apple is playing catch-up here and they're pretty open about it now, which is the whole reason the Google deal exists.

The part that stings for a lot of people is that it's not launching in Europe or China at first. Apple says European rules got in the way, so people there won't get it when everyone else does this fall. It needs an iPhone 15 Pro or newer, and it's a free update when it lands.

Anyone else find it wild that the most privacy-obsessed tech company is now quietly running its assistant on its biggest rival's AI? Or does none of that matter as long as the thing finally works?