Welcome, humans.

Remember our Veo 3 story from yesterday? Well, Google’s new video AI has messed with people’s heads so bad, now they can’t tell if videos like this are real or fake…

(Spoiler: it’s real…you can tell because it doesn’t cut away or morph into some hideous Cronenberg monstrosity after 10 seconds).

Even worse, videos like this one of an emotional support kangaroo that are CLEARLY AI are going viral, and people can’t tell they’re fake.

This level of quality is obviously freaking people out, and for good reason; if you can’t tell what’s real and what’s fake, how can you trust anything you see online? (You can’t).

Some have suggested we watermark AI video like printers, which add invisible yellow tracking dots to every page they print to identify the specific printer model.

Since Google likely saw these issues coming before releasing Veo 3, it created exactly that: SynthID.

SynthID watermarks AI-generated videos, images, audio, and text with imperceptible marks that prove they're AI-made. You can't see or hear these watermarks, but Google's detection tool can spot them instantly when you upload suspicious content.

The catch? This only works for content made with Google's AI tools. Videos from other AI companies, jailbroken models, or future tools won't have these watermarks.

Still, it's a start. And honestly, we'll take any tool that helps us tell the difference between a real emotional support kangaroo and a fake one (and yes, there HAVE been cases of real emotional support kangaroos!).

Here’s what you need to know about AI today:

• Dario Amodei said 50% of entry-level white collar jobs are toast.

• DeepSeek released an update to its R1 thinking model.

• Grok will now operate on Telegram.

• Google announced a new AI that understands sign language.

The CEO of Anthropic (maker of Claude) says there’s a bloodbath coming for white collar jobs…

The Economist just published a reassuring piece about AI and jobs. Their take? Official data shows white-collar employment actually rising, unemployment at 4.2%, and even translation jobs—supposedly AI's first victim—up 7% year-over-year.

Then Dario Amodei opened his mouth.

In a great interview with Axios, the CEO of Anthropic just delivered a blunt warning: AI could wipe out 50% of all entry-level white-collar jobs and spike unemployment to 10-20% in the next 1-5 years.

Here’s what’s coming: Every CEO is “working furiously to figure out when AI can displace human workers at scale.” The second these tools hit human-level performance, businesses will flip the switch—and software will be first. The consensus seems to be that AI agents will be able to do mid-level engineering work by year end.

That said, it’s important to also remember that telling people AI will take your job is good marketing. It might be true, but it’s also a good way to sell $30K a year software!

So, who’s right? Probably not The Economist. They’re looking at current data, but tech adoption follows the “gradually, then suddenly” pattern. The speed and breadth could be unprecedented (~10M jobs lost in a short span). Previous automation hit specific industries over decades. AI could hit multiple sectors simultaneously within 5 years.

While corporate layoffs are happening now, they’re not necessarily going to AI—we’ve read many anecdotes (and seen firsthand) more jobs go overseas than to the bots. And here’s another point to watch for: before AI takes your job, it degrades your job.

Now, Amodei's not just sounding alarms—he's proposing actual solutions:

• Speed up public awareness: Stop sugarcoating what's coming. “The first step is warn.”

• Help workers understand AI augmentation now: Give people a fighting chance to adapt before they're displaced.

• Educate Congress: Most lawmakers are “woefully uninformed” about AI's impact on constituents.

• Start policy debates now: Job retraining, wealth redistribution, the whole toolkit.

• He even offered a “Token tax” proposal: 3% of AI company revenue goes to government redistribution every time someone uses a model.

Whether the job shift hits in two years or ten, the workers who thrive will be those who saw it coming and adapted accordingly. We wrote more on the website here!

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Prompt Tip of the Day

The OpenAI developer community is a great resource for prompt tips—this thread has a ton of interesting insights, which we recapped here.

Treats To Try.

1. *Incogni removes your personal data from the open internet so scammers and identity thieves can’t access it. Protect yourself online with Incogni—get 55% off with code NEURON.

2. rabbitOS is an interesting agent tool that acts like a digital intern, browsing websites, coding projects, and completing complex tasks—free to try it here.

3. Evoto retouches your headshot photos / portraits by removing blemishes, smoothing wrinkles, and changing background images in seconds—free to try.

4. MagicPath lets you design functional websites by talking to AI on an infinite canvas, then instantly interact with your live website (from Pietro Schirano, former Uber / FB dev, who we like!)—free to try.

5. Stitch is Google’s AI UI builder that generates UI designs from text and exports them as code—OpenAI used to get called out for building apps to kill your startup, now it’s Google.

6. Opera Neon is trying to be “the first agentic browser” to hit the market, and it’s accepting waitlist entrants atm.

7. Uplyft turns your Google Analytics into simple dashboards with AI summaries and team to-do lists—free trial, then $9.90/month.

See our top 51 AI Tools for Business here!

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Around the Horn.

• DeepSeek, a leading Chinese AI model, released an update to R1, its flagship thinking model right before NVIDIA’s latest earnings call.

• Google announced SignGemma, an open AI model for sign language.

• Apple’s new iPhone 17 is rumored to come with 12GB of RAM (over 8GB, which is the current norm for iPhone 16) to improve the performance of “Apple Intelligence.”

• Netflix co-founder Reed Hastings joined the board of Anthropic (hmmm, wonder why…).

• xAI paid Telegram $300M to integrate Grok into the chat app’s platform for the next year.

• A fantasy author left part of a prompt they used to copy another writer’s style inside their published book—this was our favorite reaction to this news…

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Thursday Trivia

One is real, and one is AI. Which is which? (vote below!)

A.

B.

Here are the results from last week’s poll:

Here’s what you said:

• J.C. chose B: “A perfectly smooth cobble stone alone on a beach is less likely than a corral (although the corral cobble is pretty unusual too).”

• D.R. chose A: “One would think B is AI. Thats why i chose A.” (we tricked one person at least!)

• M.H. chose B: “The texture of the sand gave orange peel vibes.”

A Cat's Commentary.

Trivia answer: A is AI, and B is real (as far as we know, anyway…).