AI Giants Drop Updates + What Devs Are Buzzing About

The AI giants are moving fast—Anthropic's heading to Iceland, Gemini's polishing presentations, and devs are deep in the agentic AI debate.

Hello Builders! 👋

From education partnerships to canvas tools and the future of small language models, today's updates show the ecosystem expanding in every direction. Meanwhile, the v0 Ambassador program is back for round two, and the community can't stop discussing whether agents are actually the answer.

Iceland is going all-in on AI in the classroom. Anthropic just announced they're partnering with Iceland's Ministry of Education to bring Claude to teachers nationwide—making it one of the first comprehensive national AI education pilots in the world.

This is a teacher-focused rollout, which honestly makes way more sense than the "let's replace homework with ChatGPT" chaos we've seen elsewhere. Iceland's small enough (population ~400k) to actually run a real pilot with meaningful data, but big enough that the results will matter for policy wonks everywhere watching this experiment.

The cynic in me wonders how they'll measure success beyond "teachers used the tool X times," but props to Iceland for treating this like an actual pilot instead of a press release.

Gemini Canvas can now build full presentations - Google's finally letting you go from "create a presentation about Q2 results" to actual slides.

v0 Ambassador Program Cohort 2 applications open - Vercel wants more people building and showing off v0 projects. You get monthly credits, early feature access, and swag. Basically paid in t-shirts and API calls.

Olas launches Pearl v1, the "AI Agent App Store" - An app store for AI agents. Because what crypto needed was more ways to install things that might drain your wallet autonomously.

Dia browser adds Arc's best features - The Browser Company's new AI browser is cherry-picking what actually worked from Arc.

DuckCoding: one-click AI tool setup - Cross-platform desktop app that configures Claude Code, CodeX, and Gemini CLI for you.

Knowledge Distillation: Making LLMs 10× Smaller - @MaryamMiradi breaks down how to compress models without losing intelligence.

Non-Agentic vs AI Agents vs Agentic AI - @AndrewBolis maps out when to use simple prompts versus full agents.

AWS Strands Agents SDK: 15 Lines to Build an Agent - @Arindam_1729 demos AWS's dead-simple SDK for MCP-powered agents.

Applying Vision Language Models to Long Documents - Eivind Kjosbakken tackles the practical challenge of using VLMs on actual documents instead of toy examples.

Building Multimodal RAG with Images and Tables - Partha Sarkar shows how to make RAG systems that actually return the charts and tables from your PDFs, not just text summaries.

The messy reality of AI-assisted frontend dev - Rizèl Scarlett shares her actual workflow. Spoiler: it's not all prompt-and-ship magic.

David Sacks: AI's real risk is Orwell, not Terminator - a16z's David Sacks argues the biggest AI threat isn't killer robots but thought control. "Woke AI" doesn't quite capture it.

Marc Andreessen on AI democratization - Will AI be controlled by a few companies/governments or widely distributed? Andreessen makes the case for hyper-democratization.

Downgrading from Claude Pro to Cursor - Pat Walls ditched his $200/month Claude plan because Cursor's $20 CODEX got good enough. Competition working as intended.

Claude Code's git archaeology skills - Claude Code found an 8-month-old commit for a removed feature and restored it. The AI actually reads your git history now.

Vibe coding for school kids - Hot take: make vibe coding mandatory in schools. Honestly not the worst idea I've heard this week.

Wharton study: 46% of enterprise execs now use AI daily - Up from 11% in 2023. That's a 4x jump in two years across 800 enterprise leaders surveyed.

Studio Ghibli, Bandai Namco tell OpenAI to stop training on their content - Japanese IP holders via CODA sent OpenAI a cease-and-desist. The "scrape first, apologize later" strategy finally meeting organized resistance.

Lambda scores multibillion-dollar AI infrastructure deal with Microsoft - Microsoft announced this hours after dropping $9.7B on Australian data centers. Someone's really betting big on GPU capacity.

Who's Hiring: November 2025 - The monthly HN jobs thread is live. Still one of the best places to find companies actually building stuff.

Sam Liu discovers a UI motion library - When a vibe coder finds a motion library that "actually feels good" in their project, you know it's worth checking out.

From idea to AI video platform - Community member ships entire AI video production platform.

AI browsers for editing long-form text - Olivia Moore nails why ChatGPT Atlas is useful: seeing your screen beats copy-pasting versions back and forth.

Google AI Developer Updates - Latest tools and API releases

What is vibe coding? AI writes the code so developers can think big - High-level design with AI implementation

It Doesn't Need to Be a Chatbot - Rethinking AI interface design patterns

What are you actively saying "no" to right now? I'm genuinely curious what features, pivots, or shiny objects you're deliberately ignoring to stay focused. Hit reply and tell me what's on your "not now" list.

Keep shipping,

P.S. If you've been putting off that "scary" launch because you want to add "just one more feature"—this is your sign to cut it and ship anyway. I'll wait. 👀