Sep 23, 2025 6 min read Daily Rundown

🛎️ End of Vending

Plus: Bank Bans Hugging Face, Rules Without Rulers

Good Morning, AI Enthusiasts!

Today's story marks a crack in the old order, which shows us how quickly familiar systems can vanish when technology redraws the boundaries.

RETAIL

Vienna Gets a Store With No Staff, No Hours, No Excuses

📌 What’s happening: Xpand (ex-1MRobotics) just opened its first European autonomous store on Vienna’s busiest shopping street. The “store-in-a-box” runs 24/7 with AI, robotics, and real-time inventory control—no clerks, no cashiers, no shrink. Backers include Ibex Investors, a Denver-based global venture capital firm, and Emerge, an Israel-based early-stage venture capital fund, betting this pilot will scale into a global blueprint.

🧠 How this hits reality: Forget vending machines. Xpand is packaging an entire convenience store into a plug-and-play module. For landlords, that means instant tenants; for retailers, zero labor costs; for legacy chains, an existential margin squeeze. If the model works, expect high-traffic streets and transit hubs to swap human-run corner shops for autonomous pods that never close, never unionize, and never leak inventory.

🛎️ Key takeaway: Retail’s dirtiest secret, labor and shrink, just got automated out of the business model.

TOGETHER WITH AI GRAPH MAKER

Your Data Deserves Better Visuals

AI Graph Maker is your chart-making accomplice. Feed it data, text, or even vague ideas, and it spits out graphs so clean they look like you actually paid attention in statistics class. No fiddling with Excel, no design disasters—just instant visuals that make you look smart.

Key Features

⚡ Instant graph generation from text, files, or data
📊 Multiple chart types (bar, line, pie, scatter, etc.)
🎨 Auto-designed visuals that look presentation-ready
🔍 Smart formatting that highlights key insights

Turn messy numbers into polished charts in seconds—no design skills, no spreadsheet pain.

Save Big Today 👉

BANK

Lloyds Locks Hugging Face Out of the Vault

📌 What’s happening: Lloyds Banking Group just made it clear that open-source AI isn’t welcome in the banking system. The UK giant has blocked Hugging Face internally, warning staff that downloading community-hosted models risks turning customer data into hacker bait. Instead, it’s rolling out “safer” options like Microsoft Copilot and Google Gemini, already pushing 100+ AI pilots across operations.

🧠 How this hits reality: This is the collision point between two worlds. Open-source AI thrives on speed, remixing, and permissionless adoption; banks operate on compliance, liability, and zero-trust security. For financial incumbents, community repos aren’t a playground, they’re an existential threat to data integrity. The message to fintechs betting on open-source stacks is brutal: regulators and banks will default to walled gardens, even if innovation slows.

🛎️ Key takeaway: Open AI wants freedom, old finance wants control. And in this fight, security trumps ideology every time.

CALL

AI Red Lines Signed by Everyone Except the People in Charge

📌 What’s happening: Over 200 names, from Nobel laureates to DeepMind scientists, signed a “Global Call for AI Red Lines,” urging governments to outlaw certain uses like human impersonation or self-replication. It is the biggest symbolic chorus yet around AI safety, timed to echo through UN week.

🧠 How this hits reality: The signatures are long on prestige but short on power. No sitting heads of state joined. No Altman, Amodei, or Hassabis either, the very CEOs racing AGI are not in the room. What remains looks more like moral theater than regulatory muscle. Without political teeth or buy-in from the actual capital allocators, the initiative risks being shelved next to voluntary pledges no one enforces.

🛎️ Key takeaway: When everyone signs except the people holding nukes and GPUs, it’s less rulebook and more press release.

QUICK HITS

Meta is adding an AI assistant and a weekly “surprise match” feature to Facebook Dating to better compete with rivals like Tinder and Hinge.
Google DeepMind updated its Frontier Safety Framework to proactively address AI manipulation and shutdown risks by adding stricter reviews and new critical capability levels.
Amazon launches beta AI ad assistant “creative partner” that leverages retail data to support brands from research to final campaign assets.
Perplexity has launched Email Assistant, an AI agent for Gmail and Outlook that drafts replies, triages inboxes, and handles scheduling, available only to Max users.
Starting November 2025, LinkedIn will by default use member profiles and activity to train its AI, unless users opt out.

TRENDING

Daily AI Launches

Strata has launched an MCP server that guides AI agents through complex, multi-app workflows by eliminating context overload and ensuring accurate tool selection.
Snapdeck has launched an AI-powered tool that lets you effortlessly create professional presentations with AI slide generation and customizable designs.
alphaAI Capital has launched an AI platform that dynamically manages your investment portfolio, shifting between aggressive and defensive strategies based on market conditions.
Pie has launched as an AI QA team that automatically finds bugs before your users do, allowing your team to set it up in minutes and ship faster with confidence.

Featured AI Tools

📚 Heardly is the Fast Way to read Best Book.
🪶 CopyOwl is the First AI Research Agent, deep research on any topic in one click.
🦾 Flot AI writes, reads, and remembers across any apps and webs.

TOGETHER WITH US

AI Secret Media Group is the world’s #1 AI & Tech Newsletter Group, boasting over 1 million readers from leading companies such as OpenAI, Google, Meta, and Microsoft. Our Newsletter Brands: