Starting Thursday, Google AI Ultra subscribers in the U.S. can play around with the experimental research prototype, which is powered by a combination of Google's latest world model Genie 3, its image-generation model Nano Banana Pro, and Gemini. World models are AI systems that generate an internal representation of an environment, and can be used to predict future outcomes and plan actions. Many AI leaders, including those at DeepMind, believe world models are a crucial step to achieving artificial general intelligence (AGI). But in the nearer term, labs like DeepMind envision a go-to-market plan that starts with video games and other forms of entertainment and branches out into training embodied agents (aka robots) in simulation. DeepMind's release of Project Genie comes as the world model race is beginning to heat up. Fei-Fei Li's World Labs late last year released its first commercial product called Marble. Runway, the AI video-generation startup, has also launched a world model recently. And former Meta chief scientist Yann LeCun's startup AMI Labs will also focus on developing world models....

' Hey, Linas here! Welcome to another special issue of my daily newsletter. Each day, I focus on 3 stories that are making a difference in the financial technology space. Coupled with things worth watching & the most important money movements, it's the only newsletter you need for all things when Finance meets Tech. If you're reading this for the first time, it's a brilliant opportunity to join a community of 370k+ FinTech leaders: All of them became launch partners for Anthropic's MCP Apps, a feature that lets Claude render their interfaces directly inside the chat window. Users can now drag Asana tasks, edit Figma diagrams, query Amplitude charts, and send Slack messages without ever leaving Claude. For two decades, SaaS has bundled three things: data, logic, and interface. The interface was the moat. Users learned your workflows, memorized your shortcuts, and built muscle memory around your menus. Switching costs weren't just about data migration - they were about cognitive reinvestment. You didn't leave Salesforce because you knew Salesforce....

Good morning & happy Wednesday! Today's issue is super hot as we're looking into Affirm that's about to become a bank (what's the real strategy here & how it stacks againts the competition + bonus deep dives into the latest financials of Affirm, Klarna & PayPal Bank), Yahoo, which is now trying to replace ChatGPT (why their AI Scout is smarter than it looks, what's the bigger play at stake here + bonus deep dive into Agentic Singularity inside), and Mesh that just became the latest stablecoin unicorn (what their $1B valuation truly tells us & what it means for the future of FinTech + bonus list of the ultimate stables resources inside). Let's jump straight into the finnovative stuff '' The news '' The Buy Now, Pay Later leader just told you exactly how it plans to compete with Klarna KLAR 0.00%'. BNPL pioneer Affirm AFRM 0.00%' recently filed for a Nevada industrial loan company charter, joining PayPal PYPL 0.00%' (Utah, December 2025) in the fintech sprint toward deposit funding. The math is straightforward here: Affirm currently funds loans through warehouse facilities at roughly 7%. Bank deposits cost 2-4%. That spread - call it 300-500 basis points - flows straight to margin on a loan portfolio that hit $6.5 billion in active balances '...

These are not the words you want to hear when it comes to human extinction, but I was hearing them: 'Things are moving uncomfortably fast.' I was sitting in a conference room with Sam Bowman, a safety researcher at Anthropic. Worth $183 billion at the latest estimate, the AI firm has every incentive to speed things up, ship more products, and develop more advanced chatbots to stay competitive with the likes of OpenAI, Google, and the industry's other giants. But Anthropic is at odds with itself'thinking deeply, even anxiously, about seemingly every decision. Anthropic has positioned itself as the AI industry's superego: the firm that speaks with the most authority about the big questions surrounding the technology, while rival companies develop advertisements and affiliate shopping links (a difference that Anthropic's CEO, Dario Amodei, was eager to call out during an interview in Davos last week). On Monday, Amodei published a lengthy essay, 'The Adolescence of Technology,' about the 'civilizational concerns' posed by what he calls 'powerful AI''the very technology his firm is developing. The essay has a particular focus on democracy, national security, and the economy. 'Given the horror we're seeing in Minnesota, its emphasis on the importance of preserving democratic values and rights at home is particularly relevant,' Amodei posted on X, making him one of very few tech leaders to make a public statement against the Trump administration's recent actions....