Grok Unveils 3D Anime AI Companions✨

Welcome to this week’s edition of your AI newsletter—where the digital world keeps getting more interactive, imaginative, and intelligent.

Grok has just made a bold move into the anime universe with the launch of interactive AI companions on iOS, introducing voice-enabled, emotionally responsive 3D avatars like Ani and Rudy. Whether you're chatting with a goth anime girl or a mischievous red panda, Grok is gamifying social AI in a way that could redefine mobile companionship.

Meanwhile, over in the creative space, Claude AI now integrates directly with Canva, letting you design, edit, and manage content just by chatting. It's the first of its kind to use the Model Context Protocol (MCP)—a game-changing open-source standard that connects Claude to powerful tools like Figma and Notion.

And Google is elevating research and learning with Featured Notebooks in NotebookLM. These curated collections, crafted with experts and major publishers, offer everything from mind maps to cited answers and audio summaries—ushering in a new era of AI-powered knowledge sharing.

Let’s dive into all the groundbreaking updates transforming how we interact, create, and learn with AI.

Grok Launches Interactive Anime AI Companions on iOS

Grok has launched a significant feature on its iOS app by introducing interactive AI Companions—fully animated 3D avatars that users can converse with using voice mode. The initial rollout includes two companions: Ani, a flirty goth anime girl whose responses become more suggestive as users progress through relationship levels, and Rudy, a red panda whose attitude can shift to "Bad Rudy" with snarky or mischievous interactions. These avatars can change backgrounds, perform different animated movements, and unlock new features the more a user engages, adding a gamified layer to the companion experience. There are already hints of further expansions, with a male anime avatar named Chad and another female character in development. These AI characters are also promoted through their own accounts on X and appear to be associated with a studio called Animation Inc., though the nature of xAI's relationship with the company is not confirmed. With this move, xAI positions Grok ahead of major competitors like Character AI and Microsoft, providing emotionally rich, customizable chatbot experiences that strongly appeal to fans of anime and virtual companions and setting a new standard for gamified social AI on mobile platforms.

Claude AI Now Lets You Design and Edit in Canva Using Chat

Anthropic’s Claude chatbot has launched an integration with Canva that allows users to create, edit, and manage their Canva designs simply by using natural language commands within a Claude chat. Through this update, paid subscribers to both Canva and Claude can instruct the chatbot to generate presentations, resize images, autofill templates, search and summarize content in Canva Docs and Presentations—all without ever leaving the chat interface. The integration works via the Model Context Protocol (MCP), an open-source standard likened to a “USB-C port for AI” that enables secure connections between Claude and third-party tools, streamlining the creative workflow. Claude is the first AI assistant to support Canva design tasks through MCP, and Anthropic has introduced an integrations directory to make discovering and connecting other supported tools, such as Notion and Figma, even easier for users.

Featured Notebooks Debut on NotebookLM

Google’s NotebookLM has introduced "featured notebooks," offering curated collections on topics ranging from expert longevity advice and data-driven trend analysis to Shakespeare’s complete works and financial earnings reports. Created in partnership with authors, researchers, and prominent publications like The Economist and The Atlantic, these notebooks enable users to explore content with powerful tools such as cited answers, audio overviews, and mind maps. Users can also publicly share their own notebooks, fostering broader access to curated expertise and in-depth knowledge across diverse subjects, with more featured notebooks and partnerships set to roll out soon.

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Top AI Products from this week

• TestSprite - TestSprite is the easiest AI agent for frontend and backend software testing, automating the entire testing workflow—from test planning and code generation to execution and debugging.

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This week in AI

• AI Photo & Video Avatars—No Prompts Needed - Higgsfield Soul generates ultra-realistic AI images and videos with 60+ presets and 100+ camera moves for avatars—just pick a style and edit details instantly

• Gemini Embedding Model Now Live - The gemini-embedding-001 model is now generally available via the Gemini API and Vertex AI, supporting 100+ languages and offering top performance for text tasks at $0.15 per 1M tokens.

• AI Won’t Take Your Job—But Someone Using It Might - Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang says it's not AI replacing jobs, but people who use it. Adapt now—AI-savvy workers are shaping the future job market.

• Meta May Shift to Closed AI Models - Meta’s new superintelligence lab, led by Alexandr Wang, is considering replacing its open-source AI with a closed model, signaling a major shift in AI strategy.

• Meta’s $100B+ Bet on AI Supercenters - Meta will invest hundreds of billions to build giant AI data centers like Prometheus and Hyperion, aiming for superintelligence and claiming the world's biggest AI superclusters

Paper of The Day

Perspective-Aware AI in Extended Reality (PAiR) introduces a groundbreaking framework that fuses AI-driven user identity modeling with immersive XR experiences. By creating dynamic user models called Chronicles—digital representations built from diverse behavioral and contextual data—PAiR enables XR systems to deliver personalized, context-aware, and interpretable interactions. This approach addresses the limitations of current XR personalization, which typically relies only on surface-level cues, and instead grounds immersive experiences in the user’s evolving perspectives, emotions, and needs. PAiR is demonstrated in environments like a financial helper or adaptive desk, where both explicit instructions and passive emotional cues dynamically shape the user’s virtual experience. This new direction enables more relational, inclusive, and human-centric XR, setting the stage for next-generation immersive technologies.

To read the whole paper, go to the official publisher’s site.