ZeroSlop — August 1, 2026
Today: Smallest.ai raises $13M to build ultra-fast voice AI…; Drones offer alternative to balloons for weather…; Supabase Releases Evals: an Open Source Benchmark That…
12 stories worth knowing about today — AI breakthroughs, launches, and innovations making a difference.
1. Smallest.ai raises $13M to build ultra-fast voice AI that sounds genuinely human
TechCrunch AI
The startup is building voice models designed to make AI phone calls pass the Turing test….
2. Drones offer alternative to balloons for weather research
The Guardian Tech
Pre-programmed flights gather data at different altitudes then return to bases to recharge and download Weather happens in the boundary layer, the atmosphere from ground level to a few thousand metres, but this can be difficult to study in detail: weather stations are too low, and aircraft are expen…
3. Supabase Releases Evals: an Open Source Benchmark That Scores Claude Code, Codex and OpenCode on Real Supabase Tasks
MarkTechPost
Supabase has open sourced supabase/evals, an Apache-2.0 benchmark and framework that runs coding agents including Claude Code, Codex and OpenCode against real Supabase tasks — building schemas, debugging Edge Functions, fixing RLS policies — inside containerized stacks, then scores them with determi…
4. Gemini Robotics ER 2: powering robotics with video understanding, task orchestration, and multi-robot collaboration
Google DeepMind
Gemini Robotics ER 2 helps robots reason, collaborate, and solve real-world tasks. It represents a step change in video understanding, tool orchestration, and multi-robot collaboration for robotic applications….
5. Friend re-launches its AI pendant with a speaker that talks to you, for twice the price
The Verge AI
Do you remember Friend? The Friend that launched an AI pendant, spent $1.8 million of its $2.5 million in funding to acquire friend.com, and plastered the NYC subway with ads promoting artificial companionship? Yeah well, if you didn’t remember, Friend is back. And now, it’s twice the price. This mo…
6. OpenAI’s Hacking Debacle Comes Down to Human Error
Wired Security
If the generative AI giant had followed well-known security best practices, it’s likely that its AI agent would never have escaped to the open internet and hacked multiple companies….
7. New MCP Specification Addresses the Main Barrier To Enterprise Adoption
Slashdot
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: This week, the Model Context Protocol (MCP), an open source standard for how AI systems interact with external tools and data sources, saw its largest update since its introduction. Most notably, MCP’s protocol core is now stateless, so requests…
8. deepseek-ai/DeepSeek-V4-Flash-0731
Simon Willison
deepseek-ai/DeepSeek-V4-Flash-0731 The latest release in DeepSeek’s V4 family, “with substantially enhanced agentic capabilities”. It’s 304 billion parameters - 167GB on Hugging Face - but it appears to punch well above its weight. Artificial Analysis rank it ahead of MiniMax M3 - a 428B model. It’s…
9. Adding a custom MCP server to Claude and ChatGPT
Simon Willison
TIL: Adding a custom MCP server to Claude and ChatGPT Connecting a custom MCP server to Claude and ChatGPT’s standard chat interfaces is possible, but can take quite a few steps. Tags: ai , generative-ai , chatgpt , llms , claude , model-context-protocol…
10. Balancing speed and safety: A control framework for AI coding agents
AWS Security
AI coding agents are part of the developer toolchain. Tools like Kiro and Claude Code generate features, tests, and code refactors from natural-language prompts. A single agent can open dozens of pull requests (PRs) across your repositories in an afternoon. That productivity comes with a trade-off: …
11. American Being Prosecuted for Wiping His Phone Before Handing It Over to Border Officials
Schneier on Security
He’s being prosecuted for giving border officials a code that wiped his phone : The case centers on a feature included in GrapheneOS, a custom Android operating system that runs in place of the software on most modern Google Pixel devices. Tunick’s attorneys confirmed GrapheneOS was running on his p…
12. The Zero Trust Imperative for the Frontier AI Era
Cisco Security
Discover how to apply Zero Trust principles to secure AI adoption, manage agentic risk, and mitigate the threats of frontier AI models….