Bringing Back Dire Wolves and All Things AI

Apr 11

Emerging Tech Roundup — April 11, 2025

The Quantious team’s top picks for timely trending news in the tech world.

This week in tech: Dire wolves are reborn as Colossal unleashes world’s first de-extinction, Snapchat rolls out Sponsored AI Lenses for brands, Tapestry’s app can now de-dupe your social feeds, Amazon enters real-time AI voice race with Nova Sonic, Samsung's cute Ballie robot arrives this summer with Google Gemini, Anthropic's Max plan offers nearly unlimited Claude usage, and Google launches new Ironwood chip to speed AI applications.

Game of Clones: Dire Wolves Reborn as Colossal Unleashes World’s First De-Extinction

(Interesting Engineering, April 7)

Colossal Laboratories & Biosciences has achieved a groundbreaking milestone by bringing the dire wolf back from extinction, marking the world’s first successful de-extinction. The Dallas-based company produced three litters, including two adolescent males named Romulus and Remus, and a female pup, Khaleesi. Once mythologized in pop culture through Game of Thrones, Dungeons & Dragons, and more, the dire wolf has now returned as a biological reality.

Snapchat Rolls Out Sponsored AI Lenses for Brands

(Tech Crunch, April 8)

Snapchat has launched Sponsored AI Lenses, a new ad format that lets brands create immersive, AI-generated experiences using Snap’s proprietary generative AI tech. Unlike traditional sponsored lenses, these interactive ads allow users to take selfies and see themselves transformed into up to 10 different AI-generated scenes. By analyzing facial features and using preset prompts and poses, Snapchat enables brands to engage users in more dynamic and personalized ways.

Tapestry’s App Can Now De-Dupe Your Social Feeds

(Tech Crunch, April 8)

Tapestry—the app designed to unify the open social web—is launching a new feature called Crosstalk that automatically removes duplicate posts from user feeds. This update, arriving with Tapestry 1.1 on iOS, helps users avoid seeing the same cross-posted content from platforms like Mastodon and Bluesky more than once, even if the posts differ slightly. Created by the team behind Twitterific, Tapestry continues its mission to support decentralized social media by giving users control over customized, clutter-free feeds spanning blogs, YouTube, Reddit, podcasts, and more.

Amazon Enters Real-Time AI Voice Race with Nova Sonic, a Unified Voice Model That Senses Emotion

(Geek Wire, April 8)

Amazon has unveiled Nova Sonic, a unified speech-to-speech AI model that recognizes and generates speech while adapting to users' tone and emotions, aiming to make voice interactions more natural and human-like. Unlike traditional systems that separate speech recognition and response generation, Nova Sonic preserves full conversational context, allowing seamless, real-time responses—even mid-task. Available through Amazon Bedrock and powering the new Alexa+, the model supports English now, with more languages in development.

Samsung's Cute Ballie Robot Arrives This Summer with Google Gemini in Tow

(Engadget, April 9)

Samsung's long-awaited home robot Ballie will officially go on sale this summer in the U.S. and South Korea, now powered by Google’s Gemini AI through a partnership with Google Cloud. With multimodal capabilities, Ballie can process voice, audio, and visual inputs to control smart home devices, and even provide health and style recommendations. While pricing remains unannounced, the robot has evolved since its original 2020 debut, with the latest version showcased at CES 2024.

Anthropic's Max Plan Offers Nearly Unlimited Claude Usage for $200 Per Month

(Engadget, April 9)

Anthropic has launched Claude Max, a premium subscription tier offering significantly expanded access to its Claude 3.7 Sonnet model for $100 or $200/month, depending on usage needs. The Max tier was created in response to demand for the powerful new model, especially among users tackling coding and hybrid reasoning tasks. Subscribers also get priority access to upcoming models and features, though usage limits still apply due to high compute costs, similar to OpenAI’s own Pro plan restrictions.

Google Launches New Ironwood Chip to Speed AI Applications

(Reuters, April 9)

Alphabet has unveiled Ironwood, its seventh-generation Tensor Processing Unit (TPU), designed to accelerate AI inference tasks like those used by chatbots such as ChatGPT. Unlike general-purpose chips, Ironwood focuses on the rapid, cost-efficient execution of AI models rather than training them from scratch. Available only to Google engineers and Google Cloud customers, this chip marks a serious alternative to Nvidia’s dominant AI processors in the growing market for AI infrastructure.