Can AI Lead, Design, Govern—and Still Get the Details Right?

What happened to X (Twitter) CEO

• Linda Yaccarino is out as CEO of X, capping a turbulent two-year run after Elon Musk’s takeover of Twitter.

• Her departure comes as the platform grapples with AI controversy, falling ad revenue, and rivals like Threads gaining ground.

• She was the business brain to Musk’s product vision, but the Everything App dream just lost its lead navigator.

Google Gets a Front Row Seat in UK Government Tech

• The UK just handed Google a golden opportunity: access to public sector infrastructure in exchange for free tech and AI training.

• But critics say what looks like a smart deal now could trap the government in a future of Big Tech dependency.

• With no tender and rising concerns about data sovereignty, privacy, and political influence, some see this not as progress, but a power handoff.

AI Test Drivers for Your App

• Blok, a new startup backed by $7.5M in funding, helps app developers simulate real-world user behavior using AI personas before launching features.

• Founded by Tom Charman and Olivia Higgs, Blok allows teams to predict how different users might interact with a design based on event data and design files, offering early insights without releasing live betas.

• With early traction in finance and healthcare, the company hopes to replace gut-driven A/B testing with predictive simulations.

Is Perplexity going to surpass Google Chrome?

• Perplexity has launched Comet, an AI-powered web browser that integrates its search engine and a virtual assistant to automate tasks like summarizing emails and navigating webpages.

• Initially available to Max subscribers, Comet represents Perplexity’s boldest move yet to rival Google Search and Chrome.

• While the assistant impresses with simple tasks, it falters on complex ones and requires extensive access to user data. Still, Comet marks a notable step in the evolving AI-browser landscape.

Replit Links Up with Microsoft, Nudging Google Cloud Aside

• In a power move, Replit is teaming up with Microsoft to land in Azure’s marketplace and integrate with core cloud services.

• That’s a win for both — and a quiet blow to Google Cloud, where Replit apps are usually hosted. While the deal isn’t exclusive, it signals a broader shift in the cloud wars.

• Replit’s rise is fast, its toolkit is flexible, and now, it’s playing in two big sandboxes.

Tencent’s New AI Taste Tester

• Tencent has launched ArtifactsBench, a new benchmark designed to evaluate creative AI models based not just on code functionality but on user experience and design quality.

• It uses an automated pipeline — from sandbox testing to a multimodal LLM judge — to score results on aesthetics, interactivity, and performance. The benchmark showed 94.4% alignment with human evaluations, significantly outperforming older methods.

• Surprisingly, generalist AI models outperformed code-specific ones, pointing to the growing strength of all-purpose AI in creative tasks.