Episode Details

Please support this podcast by checking out our sponsors:
- SurveyMonkey, Using AI to surface insights faster and reduce manual analysis time - https://get.surveymonkey.com/tad
- Discover the Future of AI Audio with ElevenLabs - https://try.elevenlabs.io/tad
- Lindy is your ultimate AI assistant that proactively manages your inbox - https://try.lindy.ai/tad


Support The Automated Daily directly:
Buy me a coffee: https://buymeacoffee.com/theautomateddaily

Today's topics:

AI revives buried ancient texts - AI-assisted “virtual unwrapping” and particle-accelerator imaging are making the Herculaneum scrolls readable, revealing new ancient books and longer continuous passages.

Open-source AI challenges US leaders - China’s Zhipu released GLM 5.2 as open source, with agentic benchmark results close to top closed models and far lower cost, boosting “intelligence per dollar” and enterprise control.

AI boom raises gadget prices - Memory and storage chips are being pulled into AI data centers, pushing up consumer electronics costs and slowing upgrades as supply stays tight through at least 2027.

Under-16 social media bans spread - Australia’s under-16 social media ban is prompting copycat policies across Indonesia, Malaysia, and the UK, while US lawmakers push new child-safety rules amid lawsuits over addictive design.

Drones become everyday military tools - South Korea wants every soldier trained on drones while Ukraine escalates long-range drone strikes, showing how inexpensive unmanned systems reshape tactics and defense planning.

SpaceX eyes retail mobile service - After major spectrum purchases and FCC approval, SpaceX is reportedly considering a direct-to-consumer Starlink mobile offering, signaling bigger ambitions beyond partnerships.

CAR T therapy for bladder cancer - Researchers engineered MUC16-targeting CAR T cells delivered directly into the bladder, hinting at safer, more practical approaches for solid tumors and bladder-sparing treatments.

Episode Transcript

AI revives buried ancient texts
Let’s start with that breakthrough in reading the Herculaneum scrolls—carbonized papyrus buried in 79 A.D. and long treated as essentially unreadable. Researchers at the University of Kentucky say they’ve now digitally unwrapped one scroll completely and recovered more than seventy columns of text from another. They’ve also identified two previously unknown ancient books. One finding suggests the Epicurean philosopher Philodemus may have written a longer series than scholars believed survived. What’s changed here is that the project is moving past tiny excerpts and into something closer to complete arguments—meaning historians may soon be debating full works, not just fragments. There are still hundreds of scrolls left, and the next challenge may be less about decoding and more about careful editing and interpretation.

Open-source AI challenges US leaders
Staying with AI, but shifting to today’s enterprise reality: China’s Zhipu has released GLM 5.2 as an open-source model, and it’s drawing unusually quick adoption from developers. Reporting highlighted that on a major benchmark aimed at “agent-like” tasks—things like planning, writing code, testing, and iterating—GLM 5.2 is landing close to a top US closed model, while being far cheaper to run. That gap matt