Alexa+ 🤖, GPT-5 AMA 💬, Agent.md config 👨‍💻

Alexa+ is a remodel of Alexa that aims to marry the conversational skills of generative AI chatbots with the daily tasks the old Alexa did well ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌  ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ 

Sign Up |Advertise|View Online TLDR Together With TLDR 2025-08-11 🧭 Shaping the Future: HR's Expanding Role in Tech and AI (Sponsor) The future of work technology isn't being decided in IT alone—it's being shaped by HR. From AI governance to workforce alignment, HR leaders are guiding the strategy that drives enterprise innovation and ethical adoption. Join Sapient Insights and Betterworks for a webinar that will explore: – How AI is redefining HR systems and processes – The market trends influencing enterprise tech buying – The ways HR is setting the ethical and strategic agenda Be part of the conversation shaping the future of enterprise tech. 👉 Save your seat 📱 Big Tech & Startups Alexa Got an A.I. Brain Transplant. How Smart Is It Now? (10 minute read) Alexa+ is a remodel of Alexa that aims to marry the conversational skills of generative AI chatbots with the daily tasks the old Alexa did well. It is now being rolled out widely after being in a testing program for a few months. While the new Alexa is more fun to talk to and has some new capabilities, it is still too buggy and unreliable. It lags behind voice models that other companies provide, and it is noticeably worse than the original Alexa at some basic tasks. Tesla Robotaxi scores permit to run ride-hailing service in Texas (4 minute read) Tesla has obtained a permit to run a ride-hailing business in Texas. Elon Musk said on Tesla's earnings call last month that he believes Tesla could serve half the US population by the end of the year with autonomous ride-hailing services. Tesla's autonomous vehicle efforts have faced a number of challenges across the country, including federal probes, product liability lawsuits, and recalls following injurious or damaging collisions. The company currently lags way behind competitors in the robotaxi market, like Alphabet's Waymo in the US and Baidu's Apollo Go in China. 🚀 Science & Futuristic Technology Diabetic Man With Gene-Edited Cells Produces His Own Insulin—No Transplant Drugs Required (4 minute read) Scientists in Sweden and the US have helped a 42-year-old man with long-standing diabetes make his own insulin using gene-edited pancreatic cells. The patient was given donated islet cells that were genetically modified using CRISPR to prevent immune rejection. Donated islet cell transplants seem to be able to provide a self-sustained replacement supply of insulin for type 1 diabetics, but these transplants require lifelong immunosuppressive therapy to ensure the host's body doesn't attack the donated cells. The study, while preliminary, suggests that it is possible to avoid provoking an immune response. Butter made from carbon tastes like the real thing, gets backing from Bill Gates (3 minute read) Savor, a company in Batavia, Illinois, makes butter from carbon and hydrogen with no agriculture whatsoever. The butter looks, smells, and tastes like real butter but without the farmland, fertilizer, or emissions tied to the typical process. The company expects its products to be available on shelves for the average consumer by around 2027. Savor is backed by billionaire Bill Gates, who says lab-made fats and oils have an immense potential to significantly reduce humans' carbon footprint. 💻 Programming, Design & Data Science LangExtract (GitHub Repo) LangExtract is a Python library that uses large language models to extract structured information from unstructured text documents based on user-defined instructions. It can identify and organize key details while ensuring that the extracted data corresponds to the source text. LangExtract features precise source grounding, reliable structured outputs, optimizations for long documents, interactive visualizations, flexible model support, and more. It can be used with both cloud-hosted and on-device models. AGENT.md: The Universal Agent Configuration File (9 minute read) This document presents a standardized format that lets codebases speak directly to any agentic coding tool. Developers currently have to maintain separate config files for each tool they want to use. AGENT.md allows them to use one file for all agents. Its format is designed to be human-readable while providing structured information that can be parsed by agentic coding tools. 🎁 Miscellaneous GPT-5 AMA with OpenAI's Sam Altman and some of the GPT-5 team (Reddit Thread) Sam Altman and several members from the GPT-5 team recently held an Ask Me Anything session on Reddit. In the thread, Altman says OpenAI will bring back GPT-4o for Plus users and agrees that Plus users should have access to an unlimited model. Other members of staff present in the thread include Sulman Choudhry from Engineering, Tarun Gogineni and Christina Kim from Research, Saachi Jain from Safety, and Daniel Levine from Product. Massive Pixel leak spoils everything ahead of Google launch event (4 minute read) Google plans to unveil the Pixel 10 series on August 20, but a new leak may have already revealed everything about the devices, along with details on the Pixel Watch 4 and the Pixel Buds 2a. The leaked images show the devices and their various color options and spec sheets. The Pixel 10 series may ditch physical SIM cards in the US, but the Pixel 10 Pro Fold will likely hold out and retain its physical SIM tray. The leaked images are available in the article. ⚡ Quick Links Death rates from cardiovascular disease have fallen dramatically — what were the breakthroughs behind this? (25 minute read) We now have several lifesaving tools that didn't exist until quite recently in history. The current state of LLM-driven development (11 minute read) Large language models are currently good tools for certain jobs, but they still have many shortcomings that haven't been fixed since their inception, and these problems don't look to be solvable with the current approach. POML: Prompt Orchestration Markup Language (GitHub Repo) POML is a novel markup language that provides a systematic way to organize prompt components, integrate diverse data types, and manage presentation variations, addressing common challenges in prompt development and empowering developers to create more sophisticated and reliable AI applications. After User Backlash, OpenAI Is Bringing Back Older ChatGPT Models (2 minute read) OpenAI is looking at giving ChatGPT Plus subscribers the option to keep using the older 4o model. TypeGPU (GitHub Repo) TypeGPU is a modular and open-ended toolkit for WebGPU that enables resource management in a type-safe, declarative way. An engineer's perspective on hiring (9 minute read) Most companies suck at hiring - this article explains why hiring is hard, how existing approaches fail, and what a better approach might look like. Love TLDR? Tell your friends and get rewards! Share your referral link below with friends to get free TLDR swag! https://refer.tldr.tech/7c97ce4b/ Track your referrals here. Want to advertise in TLDR? 📰 If your company is interested in reaching an audience of tech executives, decision-makers and engineers, you may want to advertise with us. Want to work at TLDR? 💼 Apply here or send a friend's resume to jobs@tldr.tech and get $1k if we hire them! If you have any comments or feedback, just respond to this email! Thanks for reading, Dan Ni & Stephen Flanders Manage your subscriptions to our other newsletters on tech, startups, and programming. Or if TLDR isn't for you, please unsubscribe.