Meta’s Connect turns into a Muse takeover

Good morning, {{ first_name | AI enthusiasts }}, and welcome to the 4,981 new readers who joined us yesterday. Meta’s viral Muse and its adorable mascot are everywhere right now, and they’re about to show up in two new places — on your face and in your hand.

With a keychain device called Charm on the way and Meta’s AI glasses next in line, Muse is the new star of the company’s hardware lineup, and Mark Zuckerberg suddenly has one of the first AI agents worth wearing.

In today’s AI rundown:

Meta’s Connect turns into a Muse takeover
Rowan’s Corner: The Rundown team gets together IRL
Use Gemini Canvas to visualize Google Sheets
Google’s AI chips are headed to space

LATEST DEVELOPMENTS

🤖 Meta’s Connect turns into a Muse takeover

Image source: Meta

The Rundown: Meta just introduced a flurry of new AI upgrades for its viral Muse agent at its Connect 2026 event, including a keychain hardware gadget called Charm, coming integrations with its AI glasses, real-time voice and video chats, and more.

The details:

Mark Zuckerberg revealed Charm on stage, a physical device shipping in December, calling it “by far the fastest way to talk to your Muse.”
Muse will hit the company’s AI glasses within months to act on what users see, promising a private processing mode that excludes data from even Meta.
Meta also teased Muse Realtime Avatar, letting users animate their Muse with synched voice, with raters favoring it over avatars from Runway and HeyGen.
Companies including PayPal, Walmart, Shopify, GitHub, and Box have now joined Muse as partners, coming after Amazon moved to block access earlier this week.

Why it matters: Muse is a real viral hit, and the vibes at Meta are sky high (see: Alexandr Wang’s unhinged but hilarious X feed). The company that was once roasted for the metaverse and AI spending now has what every AI hardware maker has wanted but struggled with: an agent people use, and the world’s bestselling AI glasses to put it in.

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ROWAN’S CORNER

🇵🇹 The Rundown team gets together IRL

The Rundown team at our 2026 Lisbon retreat

Rowan: This week, The Rundown had its first-ever team retreat in Lisbon, together with our new partners at Electrify.

The craziest part is that over three and a half years, the team has grown to a little over 20 people, and I hadn’t met half of them in person before this week (we’re fully remote). People flew in from Canada, Switzerland, Seattle, San Diego, Chicago, Florida, Greece, France, India, and Hong Kong. One person traveled over 27 hours to be in the room!

I’ll be honest, being fully remote and async is why we can deliver AI news this fast, and I wouldn’t change it.

But what I didn’t expect was what happens when you put so many smart, ambitious, AI-curious people in one room. You hear how people are really thinking about the risks, where they’re optimistic, and how they’re using AI to improve their lives instead of just for work.

I’m extremely grateful to be surrounded by people like this, and I realize it’s a privilege not everyone has.

So if there’s one thing worth stealing from this edition, it’s to find your AI peer group. Gather a few people who are as curious about this stuff as you are and meet once a month over coffee. These groups dampen the fear, open your eyes to new opportunities, and help you become more human in this fast-paced, increasingly AI-driven world.

And if you don’t know anyone locally as passionate as you are yet, our community is a good place to start (you can connect with local, interesting people through LinkedIn).

AI TRAINING

🧠 Use Gemini Canvas to visualize Google Sheets

The Rundown: In this guide, you will learn how to visualize a Google Sheet as a shareable dashboard. Google’s new tool, Gemini Canvas, might be the easiest and fastest way we’ve found to prototype in Google Workspace.

Step-by-step:

Open a spreadsheet (like a project tracker or content calendar) in Google Sheets. Launch Gemini in a new tab, click the + button, and select Canvas
Prompt Gemini: “Make me an interactive dashboard using the data from tabs one and two”
When it finishes, copy the Canvas link and paste it into your browser to view the dashboard outside the chat
To edit the dashboard, talk to Gemini in the chat like you normally would. If you’ve shared the link with a coworker, they will see the updated version as well

Pro tip: Gemini can also make really fast slide decks in Canvas. Ask it to make slides from the same tabs, then export the result to Google Slides or download it as a PDF.

PRESENTED BY SCRIBE

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With Scribe Optimize, you can:

Instantly map your processes, with no interviews, surveys, or guesswork
Identify the highest-impact opportunities
Build your AI strategy on ground truth, not gut feel

See what’s actually happening in your org.

GOOGLE

🛰️ Google’s AI chips are headed to space

Image source: Google

The Rundown: Google just announced it will launch its first AI chips into orbit next week under Project Suncatcher, a moonshot testing whether space can one day host data centers powered by near-constant sunlight.

The details:

The chips, Trillium TPUs, will fly on SpaceX’s Transporter-18 mission with satellite firm Planet, testing whether they can survive space’s radiation, vibration, and heat.
When a satellite is in the right orbit, it can get 8x more solar energy than on Earth, though cooling gets harder since heat in a vacuum can only escape via radiators.
If the infra holds up, Google envisions laser-linked satellite clusters, each carrying dozens of TPUs, starting with a two-satellite test in 2027.
Alongside Google, SpaceXAI, Blue Origin, and Starcloud are also working on orbital data centers, with SpaceXAI targeting a million-satellite compute network.

Why it matters: Data center buildouts have been anything but smooth, with communities pushing back over noise, grid strain, and rising energy bills. If Google or a rival cracks orbital compute, it could take much of that pressure off. Many, including OAI’s CEO Sam Altman, remain unconvinced that it could take off at scale this decade.

QUICK HITS

COMMUNITY AI WORKFLOW OF THE DAY

▸ Susan used AI to build the perfect playlist for senior fitness classes

Today’s workflow comes from reader Susan Young:

“I built a workflow to select music for a senior fitness class that suits the participants’ general age range and meets the program’s criteria of approximately 120 BPM. I also require the music to be danceable and have a 4/4 beat.

After a successful summer using AI-suggested, danceable Motown songs from the 1970s, I continued using AI to help with music selection. I don’t have a music background or the knowledge to do this myself, so I appreciate the help.

Yesterday, a participant commented on how enthusiastic she was about the music. Her response was simple: I love the music.”

See Susan’s full workflow here. How do you use AI? Tell us for a chance to be featured.

🛠️ Trending AI Tools

🤖 Muse – Meta’s personal agent, now available as a real-time avatar
🧑‍💻 Rollouts – Cursor’s bot to monitor code, catch regressions, trigger rollbacks
📺️ Tesseract – Mirage’s video, motion, and sound editor for AI agents
🗣️ Gemini 3.8 Flash TTS – Google’s text-to-speech AI supporting 100 languages

📰 Everything else in AI today

Dario Amodei and Sam Altman called for AI safety at the UN, with Amodei saying it could be “a risk to humanity” and Altman warning about losing “control of the future to AI.”

FLUX-maker Black Forest Labs released FLUX 3 Action, an open-weight model that steers robot arms from camera footage, beating Nvidia’s Cosmos 3 on a simulation leaderboard at under half its size.

The U.S.’s AI build-out could attract $10.3T by 2032, creating jobs but fueling inflation and squeezing housing construction, reports the Wall Street Journal.

OpenAI hired Patreon co-founder Sam Yam to lead its new Creator Product division, tapping a creator-economy veteran to build tools for creators, The Information reports.

OpenAI upgraded ChatGPT Voice to let users get things done by voice across ChatGPT Work, email, calendars, Slack, and other connected tools.