Nearly 200 economists, including 16 Nobel laureates, just warned AI could reshape the economy faster than the Industrial Revolution.

Even longtime skeptics like Acemoglu signed this time. What happens when the doubters stop doubting?

Today in the “Incredible AI” world:

  • Economists Want AI Rules Before Chaos

  • The AI Phone That Beat OpenAI to Market

  • Mistral AI Pushes Robots With Vision

  • How to Manage Your Entire Team with AI

  • 5 Super-Useful AI Tools You Should Try

  • Top AI-Generated Image of the Day

Read Time: 4 minutes

- LATEST DEVELOPMENTS -

Nobel Laureates Sound Alarm on AI Jobs:

Oracle quietly axed 21,000 jobs while pouring billions into AI infrastructure. Economists call it progress, workers call it unemployment. Sixteen Nobel laureates now say this isn’t a glitch — it’s the future.

Things to Know:

  • The Letter: More than 200 economists signed “We Must Act Now,” warning AI could become radically more powerful within a decade. They argue this shift will dwarf past industrial revolutions.

  • The Risks: The letter highlights large-scale job displacement as firms accelerate automation. White-collar roles, once considered safe, are now being cut alongside traditional positions.

  • The Opportunities: Despite the warnings, signatories note AI could deliver major gains in living standards. The challenge lies in steering technology toward complementing rather than replacing humans.

  • The Reality Check: Oracle, Microsoft, Amazon, and Meta have already announced sweeping layoffs tied to AI adoption. Economists say these moves foreshadow the scale of disruption ahead.

This isn’t just about jobs lost; it’s about who controls the levers of transformation. Economists want guardrails, but industries are sprinting ahead. The real question: will society catch up before the ground shifts?

Chinese Startup Quietly Unveils AI Smartphone:

StepFun just unveiled an AI smartphone that books your flights, fills customs forms, and translates 32 languages on its own. It won't tell you the price, storage, or release date. Confidence first, specs later.

Things to Know:

  • The Agent Behind It: Amoo, the phone's built-in agent, books rides and handles multi-step tasks completely offline. No repeated prompts, no app switching required.

  • Everyone's In On It: StepFun signed partnerships with Alipay, Didi, Meituan, Ctrip, CapCut before launch. Payments, rides, food, travel, and video editing work now.

  • The Empty Boxes: StepFun showed off a dual-camera setup and a secondary rear display, nothing more. RAM, storage, battery, and pricing remain mysteries.

  • Everyone Else Is Watching: OpenAI remains rumored to be building a phone alongside Jony Ive. StepFun already shipped theirs, specs unknown, ambition fully loaded.

Everyone quietly assumed the first true AI phone would come from Silicon Valley, backed by billions and a former Apple design chief. Instead it shipped from Shanghai, price and specs still a mystery. Confidence, it turns out, ships faster than hardware.

[Webinar] 8 levels of context maturity in AI-native engineering

You pay for every token your agent burns. When it returns code that doesn't fit your system, you prompt again. And again. This is because your agents are still missing the right context. Join live (FREE) on Jul 23 to see how leading teams use a context engine to fix it.

AI Model Redefines Robotic Navigation:

Every robot navigation system straps on LiDAR, depth sensors, or multiple cameras to walk down a hallway. Mistral built one that uses one plain, ordinary RGB camera. It's beating all of them handily.

Things to Know:

  • The Sensor Downgrade: Robostral Navigate skips LiDAR and depth sensors entirely, relying on one ordinary RGB camera. Fewer sensors somehow means better performance.

  • How It Decides Where To Go: Pointing lets the model read pixel coordinates right onscreen, aiming at the target. Losing sight triggers fallback to distance commands.

  • The Training Shortcut: Mistral trained on 400,000 trajectories across 6,000 simulated scenes. Caching cut training tokens twenty-two times, turning months into days.

  • The Payoff: Robostral Navigate scores 76.6% on unseen environments, beating the best single-camera rival by 9.7 points. It even outperforms LiDAR-based systems.

Robotics has spent years assuming more sensors meant more capability. Mistral just proved one single lens and a language model can outrun all of it. Sometimes the smartest possible upgrade is subtraction.

- TRY THIS -

How to Manage Your Remote Team with AI:

Managing teams—especially deskless or mobile workers- can feel overwhelming. From scheduling and training to communication and paperwork, it often means juggling too many tools at once.

Connecteam is an AI-powered platform designed to make team management effortless. It brings scheduling, training, forms, and communication into a single app, with smart AI tools that do the heavy lifting for you.

How it works:

  • Schedule with ease: Automate shifts, prevent scheduling mistakes, and ensure the right people are in the right place at the right time.

  • Track time accurately: Record precise work hours, simplify timesheet approvals, and keep payroll error-free.

  • Streamline daily operations: Use digital forms, checklists, and task assignments to keep work flowing smoothly.

  • Stay connected: Chat instantly, share company updates, and access a searchable employee directory from anywhere.

  • Train and onboard: Deliver bite-sized courses, track progress, and keep resources one tap away for compliance and skill-building.

Stop wasting time on repetitive tasks and clunky systems. With Connecteam AI, you can manage your entire workforce smarter, faster, and easier—all in one place.

- DAILY POLL AND RESULT -

Today’s Poll:

Q) Is AI making knowledge more accessible?

Login or Subscribe to participate

Vote and find out the result tomorrow.

Yesterday’s Result:

Q) Should AI help brainstorm tweet threads?

  • A) Yes, idea expansion - 76% 👑

  • B) No, originality matters - 24%

- TOOLS OF THE DAY -

Elai.io: Elai.io is a video generation platform that creates AI presenter videos with realistic avatars from text in over 75 languages.

WordAI: WordAI rewrites entire articles at the sentence and paragraph level to produce unique, readable content that passes as human-written.

Heap: Heap automatically captures every user interaction on your product and uses AI to surface the most important behavioral patterns.

Summize: Summize is an AI contract review platform that extracts key clauses, flags risks, and summarizes agreements in plain English.

Craft Docs: Craft is a beautifully designed document editor with AI writing assistance built in for notes, docs, and team knowledge bases.

- AI IMAGE OF THE DAY -

Borzoi Watches A Magical Marriage Proposal:

Prompt:

“A surprised Jawa perches atop a glowing translucent blue holographic six-sided dice, its surface alive with shimmering hard-light circuitry. Below, an excited axolotl kneels on one knee, presenting a glowing ring box in a heartfelt proposal, pink gills flared. Softly blurred behind them, a happy Borzoi stands elegantly while a towering tiger-like Wookiee throws its arms up in celebratory roar.”

Try this prompt in any decent AI image generator and let me know your result.

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