Retter Reboot #7

The Retter Reboot : Your weekly dose of ai & tech news

Anthropic Raises $30B Series G at $380B Valuation

Anthropic has closed a massive $30 billion Series G round led by Singapore’s sovereign wealth fund GIC and Coatue, more than doubling its valuation to $380 billion as enterprise demand for its Claude AI products surges and annualized revenue reportedly reaches around $14 billion; the company says the new capital will fund infrastructure, research, and more “enterprise-grade” tools as it battles OpenAI, which is itself seeking up to $100 billion in fresh funding.

Source: TechCrunch

Spotify Says Its Top Developers Haven’t Written Code Since December Thanks to AI

Spotify told investors that its best engineers haven’t typed a single line of code since December 2025, instead using Anthropic’s Claude Code and an internal AI system called “Honk” to generate, test, and deploy features — sometimes approving builds from their phones on the way to the office. Developers now act more like orchestrators and reviewers while AI handles implementation, a shift Spotify claims has significantly boosted product velocity and signals how quickly AI-led software development is moving from experiment to production reality.

Source: TechCrunch

Uber Eats Launches ‘Cart Assistant’ AI to Build Grocery Carts from Your List

Uber Eats has introduced “Cart Assistant,” a new AI feature in beta that lives inside the Uber app and can turn simple text prompts or photos of handwritten lists and recipes into a ready-to-checkout grocery cart, using your past orders to prioritize favorite brands and items. After the AI fills the basket, users can review, swap products, and adjust quantities, with Uber positioning Cart Assistant as an early step toward more “agentic AI” that handles time-consuming tasks like grocery planning and list execution across partner chains such as Albertsons, Aldi, CVS, Kroger, Safeway, Sprouts, Walgreens, and Wegmans.

Source: TechCrunch

ByteDance Reportedly Developing Its Own AI Chip with Samsung

TikTok owner ByteDance is reportedly developing an in-house AI inference chip and is in talks with Samsung Electronics to manufacture it, aiming to secure a more reliable supply of advanced processors amid U.S. export controls and soaring demand for Nvidia hardware; the project, codenamed “SeedChip,” could see around 100,000 chips produced in 2026 with a ramp toward 350,000 units, though ByteDance has publicly denied the report.

Source: Yahoo Finance

Jony Ive’s OpenAI Hardware Device Delayed to 2027 Amid Trademark Battle

New court filings reveal that OpenAI’s first AI hardware device designed by Jony Ive, originally expected to launch in 2026, won’t ship before the end of February 2027, with the delay tied to an ongoing trademark infringement lawsuit from audio startup iyO over the “io” branding OpenAI adopted after acquiring Ive’s hardware company. OpenAI has now dropped the “io/IYO” name entirely and says it still hasn’t produced packaging or marketing materials for the mysterious ChatGPT-powered gadget, underscoring how legal and branding hurdles are slowing one of the most hyped AI hardware projects in the industry.

Source: iDropNews

OpenAI Starts Testing Ads Inside ChatGPT, Even for Some Paying Users

OpenAI has begun testing ads in ChatGPT in the U.S., showing sponsored content not only to free users but also to entry-level paid subscribers, with ads targeted based on conversation context (for example, recipe chats surfacing meal kit promotions) while promising that advertisers don’t get direct access to chat histories and that sensitive topics like mental health won’t be monetized; users can limit or disable ads at the cost of reduced usage, and wider rollout in regions like the EU will be constrained by stricter privacy rules.

Source: NBC News

Apple May Soon Open CarPlay to ChatGPT, Gemini, and Other AI Assistants

Apple is reportedly preparing to let third-party AI voice assistants like ChatGPT, Anthropic’s Claude, and Google Gemini run directly inside CarPlay, marking a rare loosening of its tight control over in-car software; Siri would remain the default and its button/wake word can’t be replaced, but users could manually launch these AI apps in CarPlay, where they can auto-enter voice mode to handle queries, navigation help, and other tasks while driving.

Source: TechSpot

ByteDance Launches Seedance 2.0, a Next-Gen Multimodal AI Video Generator

ByteDance has released Seedance 2.0, a new AI video model that can generate 15-second clips with synchronized audio using a mix of text, images, video, and audio prompts, handling complex scenes with multiple characters, camera moves, and realistic physics while closely following user instructions. Available through ByteDance’s Dreamina AI platform and Doubao assistant, Seedance 2.0 has quickly gone viral in China and is being compared to top-tier tools like OpenAI’s Sora and Google’s Veo as questions grow around copyright, deepfakes, and how this kind of hyper-real video generation will impact film, advertising, and social media.

Source: The Verge

OpenAI Adds Full-Screen Report Viewer to ChatGPT Deep Research

OpenAI has updated ChatGPT’s Deep Research mode with a dedicated full-screen document viewer that separates long-form reports from the chat window and adds a left-hand table of contents plus a right-hand sources panel, making it easier to navigate, verify, and reuse multi-page AI-generated research. Users can now also steer Deep Research toward specific websites and connected apps, monitor progress in real time, interrupt or refine the plan mid-run, and export finished reports as Markdown, Word, or PDF, with the upgrade rolling out first to Plus and Pro subscribers.

Source: The Verge