Waymo recently opened its newest vehicle to select riders in Los Angeles, San Francisco, and Phoenix. The company calls it the Ojai. This one differs from every earlier Waymo vehicle because engineers designed it from the ground up as a robotaxi instead of starting with a regular passenger car and adding self-driving gear later.
Riders immediately notice the difference as soon as the doors swing open, which is similar to walking into an elevator. The doors swing out wide to the side, the step is set low, and the floor inside is completely level, so there’s no unpleasant climb or shuffling around to get in, which is especially useful if you’re carrying bags or using a mobility device.
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The cabin is far larger than what most people are used to in the older Jaguar-based fleet. There are four seats organized in a comfortable arrangement that provides plenty of legroom and shoulder room, while the grab handles incorporated into the seats give you something to hold onto when getting in / out. Interior materials were chosen specifically to make cleaning up after each ride a breeze, and there are three large screens placed in an easily accessible location; one controls the temperature, the others control the music and other trip settings, keeping everything simple and in one place so you don’t have to dig out your phone during the ride.
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Waymo worked with Zeekr to create the base platform in China before assembling and integrating the self-driving system in Mesa, Arizona. The end result is a vehicle designed from the ground up to be driverless, with no steering wheel, pedals, or regular dashboard to take up space. Every inch of the inside is dedicated to either the passengers or the staff that keeps the fleet running.
The Ojai features Waymo’s sixth generation driving system. It handles snow and heavy rain much better, audio receivers can hear sirens and other vital sounds more clearly, and low-light performance has been improved. To be honest, the overall sensor count has decreased compared to previous vehicles, which helps to reduce manufacturing costs when they produce thousands of vehicles per year.
Production is ramping up at their Arizona plant, with plans to produce tens of thousands of vehicles per year, and they now have approximately 100 Ojai units on the road. With cheaper construction expenses, they have more room to expand the fleet without breaking the bank, which is fortunate because they want to reach one million weekly trips by the end of the year.
The first few trips in Ojai are free for a small number of riders in the first three cities to gather feedback before it is made available to the general public. They have Denver, Las Vegas, and San Diego lined up to receive automobiles in the coming months, and then it will be open to the general public later this year.
Lifeboost Mindflow for $40: The flavor of this instant powder is snappy and astringent at first, then it mellows into a warm middle ground after a few sips and a short cooling period. By the middle of the cup I forgot I was drinking something other than coffee, and the mild acidity on the finish–likely a product of the CognatiQ Coffee Fruit Extract that’s lauded on the back of Mindflow’s mylar pouch–tastes similar to a nice cup of Ethiopian or Rwandan coffee if you close your eyes and pretend for just a moment. Regarding its potency, if mushroom supplements were attendees at a state college keg party, Lifeboost would be the unremarkable guy pacing himself in the back while everyone else is getting blitzed like the world is ending. It’s unassuming yet self-assured, patiently waiting for all other entrants to crap out so it can make its move. I copped a mild buzz just a few sips in, and I felt alert and wide-eyed for a good two hours after the silty final sips of the cup were consumed. Electrolytes are uncommon in this space, which means this is a rare entry in the mushroom supplement world that purports to be a good pick if hydration is a trivial concern.
Photograph: Pete Cottell
Four Sigmatic Organic Coffee for $20: Four Sigmatic’s Focus blend is labeled as a dark roast, but it’s missing the cigarette-butts-and-bowling-alley aftertaste that looms on the finish of similar blends. Despite my preference for lighter beans, this hit like a hug from an old friend after weeks of sipping murky silt. The caffeine buzz normalized after two days of using Think in lieu of more standard shroom-based coffee replacements, so I added a three-quarter-teaspoon hit of the powdered Focus blend to my daily cup to see what would happen. Within 10 minutes I felt an overwhelming urge to sort my finances spreadsheet in preparation for tax season, then I set up a new template in Loopy Pro to accommodate a friend who planned to join my basement jam session that evening. He bailed, but I was jacked on Genius Adaptogens so I played all the instruments myself into the wee hours of the night.
North Spore Functional-5 Mushroom Coffee for $18: Most mushroom-infused ground coffee blends are filed under the “Medium Roast” category, which is typically a safe catch-all that grocery store brands and discount purveyors describe their preground product as to avoid pissing off discerning light-roast aficionados such as yours truly. Nine times out of 10 they hit like a dark roast, with an ashy taste and a healthy dose of the oil that seeps out of the beans during the elongated roasting process, shimmering and swirling around the top of your cup like a puddle in a parking lot. This coffee from North Spore, which makes our favorite mushroom-growing monotub and spray-and-grow mushroom kit, lacks all of those off notes while still retaining a sturdy, earth flavor that’s far enough removed from the citric and buttery notes I love most about classic high-end light roasts to stand up as its own unique thing. There’s a hint of mushroom flavor on the swallow if you really look for it, but you could easily swap this in for someone’s morning cup of Folgers or Illy medium roast and they’d be none the wiser.
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Ryze Superfoods Mushroom Coffee for $65: One could consider two different approaches to how purveyors of mushroom coffee dial in the flavor profile of their product: They can go all in with a bombastic brew filled with spices and overtones, or they can play it safe and concoct the base of a beverage that tastes more like memories of other drinks than a beverage with an identity of its own. The underwhelming flavor of Ryze falls in the latter camp. In fairness, there are plenty of folks who have no interest in savoring their morning beverage and instead need to put the liquid inside them as fast as possible so they can “adult” that day. Twenty-one-year-old Pete thought people who claimed to enjoy espresso were insane, yet here I am, two decades later wishing I could sip bitter bean water instead of this sour cup of forgettable swill that curdled the whole milk I tried to cut it with. A week with Ryze did little to boost my mood, focus, or energy. It mostly made me cranky and sad.
Cuppa for $30: Like the friendly foreigner who calls his daily cup of tea or coffee his “cuppa,” this newcomer is polite, congenial, and inoffensive. The first sip brought to mind a really good cup of coffee at a nameless diner, with a light body and very mellow acidic notes on the swallow. The small dose of ruddy powder pulled from the bag with the included plastic scoop dissolved thoroughly with a few stirs, and the pristine lack of sediment in the cup was exactly as advertised. The boost of energy is also unassuming and easy to relegate to the background, which could be a welcome respite from the blast of caffeine many coffee addicts think they need right when they wake up every morning. After a week with Cuppa I started to enjoy easing into my daily brain vibrations rather than white-knuckling it off the rip at 7 am on the dot every morning.
Not Recommended
Photograph: Pete Cottell
MUD/WTR Original Blend for $51: The packaging of MUD/WTR isn’t quite as unhinged as a bottle of Dr. Bronner’s, but it’s definitely in the same realm. The spicy dust inside the can is a maximalist circus of weirdness as well, with herbaceous stalwarts like turmeric and masala chai holding it down alongside the usual shroom suspects. It took me a few days to realize that properly emulsifying this ruddy power per the suggested instructions—1 tablespoon with ¾ cup of water, battered thoroughly with the included handheld immersion blender—is an impossible task, so I started experimenting with supplemental ingredients in hopes that some blend of milk, fat, and sugar would minimize the gritty aftertaste that overwhelms the palate. I landed on 1 tablespoon of simple syrup and 4 ounces of whole milk frothed in my trusty Subminimal NanoFoamer Pro. The final result hits somewhere between a chai latte and the kind of hot cocoa you’d order at a coffee shop with boring ’90s music, mean baristas, and a dirty bin full of stale vegan + gluten-free snacks next to the register. I didn’t hate it, but the bottom quarter of the cup is an undrinkable gunky mess. And don’t get me started on the chunky brown lacing that clings to the edge of the cup. The physical and mental effects of MUD/WTR felt more like a facsimile of a boost than a visceral kick in the pants, but a placebo high is better than nothing, right? Combine that with the amount of adjunct ingredients required to make this drinkable and I ended up with a beverage I would only drink every now and then as a treat on a chilly day rather than a daily sipper I can rely on for increased focus, energy, virility, and the million other things this product promises within the wall of text that adorns its packaging.
As someone who often wears contacts, but defaults to my prescription glasses most days of the week, Ray-Ban Meta glasses with see-through (but not prescription) lenses haven’t made much sense to me. I get that having transition lenses can make an expensive pair of glasses useful in more situations, but I’ve generally preferred the sunglasses form factor because it tends to be a better fit for the situations when I most want to reach for a pair of smart glasses.
That said, I’ve always wondered if I would feel differently if I had my own prescription in a pair. After wearing the Ray-Ban Meta Optics as my primary glasses for two weeks, I’m starting to see the appeal. The glasses are very similar to the second-generation frames, but have a few upgrades that make them easier and more comfortable to wear throughout the day.
One issue I’ve had with just about every pair of Ray-Ban Meta glasses is that the slightly oversized frames tend to slip down my nose. With the Optics lineup, Meta made the inner nosepads swappable so you can get a more secure fit. I changed the “universal fit” pads that came on out of the box for the “high bridge” pads and immediately noticed less slippage. There’s also a low bridge option included if you need it.
Karissa Bell for Engadget
The “Scriber” style frames I tested were still oversized, but they stayed on my face better than the Gen 2 Wayfarers I tested last year. The tips of the glasses are also moldable (at a Meta store or optician’s office) so you can get an even more precise fit, though I didn’t have this done with my pair. I found that the overextension hinges helped a lot with overall comfort, and I didn’t have issues with the glasses pressing uncomfortably around my ears like I do with many other frames.
I also appreciated that the frame styles felt a bit more subtle than previous versions. The “Scriber” frames I tested were still larger than the glasses I would normally choose for myself, but the color scheme felt more natural than the brightly-colored or super-dark styles Meta has had in other lines. I had multiple people tell me they had no idea I was wearing smart glasses rather than “regular” Ray-Ban frames.
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Meta has also improved the battery life slightly compared with the other Gen 2 glasses. While the older Gen 2 model gets “up to 8 hours” of battery life, according to Meta, the Blayzer and Scriber frames are rated for “more than 8 hours.” Battery life in general is very dependent on what you’re doing, some features will drain it a lot quicker. But I found I was easily able to wear my Scriber frames for well over 8 hours without charging. That’s with intermittent audio from the open-ear speakers and occasional Meta AI use.
Karissa Bell for Engadget
The other big change with the optics line is the addition of an action button, a customizable button that acts as a shortcut for frequently-used commands. The feature first debuted on the Oakley Meta Vanguard sunglasses, which had the button on the bottom side of the frames. On the Optics-branded glasses, it’s now a tiny extra button on the end of the main capture control.
When I reviewed the Vanguard shades I never really landed on one “ideal” use case for the button. But after some more time with my latest frames, I think I’ve figured out the best setup.I use the “custom prompt” setting (you can adjust it in the Meta AI app) to “read my latest text message.”
This is ideal because while I appreciate that my glasses can announce when I get an incoming text (a lot like how Siri will with AirPods), I don’t always want Meta AI to just start reading them by default. It can be extremely disruptive if I’m in the middle of a conversation or concentrating on a task. But with the action button, I can just give it a quick push to hear my texts, with no need to say “Hey Meta.” It’s even more subtle than glancing down at my phone.
Leatherman is one of the biggest multi-tool brands. Fans will have their own specific preferences from the range, but Leatherman itself notes that some of its best sellers include the Wave Plus and the Arc, which boast a total of 18 and 20 different tools, respectively. Unfortunately, certain models in their lineup sometimes have to be discontinued.
This isn’t always simply about sales failure. Sometimes the market shifts or technology advances. Other times, a product was only meant to have a limited run. In fact, quite a lot of multi-tools from across the Leatherman range have been discontinued. Some of them, including the Charge Plus, the leather-sheathed Crunch, and the Juice, are immortalized by the Retired Products showcase on the Leatherman website, from which the items on this list have been chosen.
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There’s still a chance that certain models could make a comeback at some point in the future. Deciding which ones are worthy of that is a difficult matter, but we’d be very glad to see a new run of these Leatherman classics. Some models were chosen because they had features that wouldn’t really be offered elsewhere in Leatherman’s lineup. Others had a unique idea that didn’t quite pay off at the time, but which could make a real splash if given another chance to.
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Leatherman Crunch
The Leatherman Crunch has some unique traits that weren’t quite fulfilled by other items in the brand’s catalogue, including the standout pliers that can both lock safely and fold away. In a Facebook discussion about the Crunch, users acknowledged the creativity and versatility of its design, though noted that some of its more interesting applications were quite niche. They also mentioned that its unusual shape could potentially make it a bit awkward to work with.
A revised Crunch 2.0 without some of these design limitations could have promise, and would surely be embraced by those who are nostalgic for the model but unwilling to pay the hefty prices second-hand ones can command. With the Crunch, the locking pliers were the centerpiece, and something that can be very difficult to find in a multi-tool. Those who made frequent use of this feature may have found themselves without a suitable alternative.
Actually, Leatherman did temporarily revive this feature in June 2026 as part of its Garage series. These are very limited edition, more experimental takes on Leatherman tools, which are highly sought after. If you were lucky, though, you may have been able to get your hands on a so-called Captain’s Crunch from the revival. It’s not a direct replication of the original, but it is a model that boasts some of its greatest strengths and a sharp Machined Stainless Steel makeover. At a hefty $250, it was quickly snapped up and is now sold out. As with other models on this list, there’s a used multi-tool program that may be able to help if you’re looking for the original.
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Leatherman Squirt P4
A common concern with multi-tools is that a single, more heavy-duty item can sometimes be better equipped for a given job. This is based on the fact that multi-tools by their very nature house a dozen or more tools in their slimline cases. This isn’t to say that there aren’t multi-tools that are rugged and hard-wearing, but these words wouldn’t necessarily come to mind on first glance of the Leatherman Squirt.
The P4 variant, in particular, weighs a meager 56.4 grams and is just 2.3 inches long when closed. Perfectly pocket-sized it may be, but the company also emphasizes that it took quite some time to devize a model small and effective enough. According to Leatherman, the P4 stands as “the first miniature pliers multi-tool tough enough to be a Leatherman.” As tiny as it is, it features a generous suite of tools, including a standard Phillips-head screwdriver, an awl, needlenose pliers that work via spring action, and a 420HC Blade.
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The Squirt was made from stainless steel and anodized aluminum, meaning that, with care from its owner, it can last for a long time. A popular choice to pack for camping and such, its light weight build and considerable utility make it quite difficult to replace. It left a bit of a hole in the brand’s range (although just a small one), and there’s certainly potential for this little Squirt to be embraced again if it made a return.
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Leatherman Free P2 and P4
Another potential multi-tool problem is that the individual tools themselves can be fiddly to access and use. The Leatherman Free family was one creative answer to this long-held issue, as it introducing Leatherman’s Free technology. Leatherman explains that the idea behind Free is to allow operators to smoothly pick out individual tools from the body of the device, which is magnetic. This allows users to click their devices open and shut easily, even with one hand.
The Leatherman ARC, the company’s $249.95 premium multi-tool, fully incorporates this feature, allowing tools to lock in place and be accessed without the need to fully open the device. This was also implemented in the Free P2 and P4 multi-tools, which were also discontinued. The family also includes the Free K2X and K4X, as well as the Free T2. Each has its own specific niche to fulfill, with the latter being a budget option advertised as Leatherman’s smallest multi-tool with Free Technology. The K4X, on the other hand, is a slightly upgraded version of the KX2 with the addition of a pair of spring-loaded scissors.
Meanwhile, the P2 and P4 boasted about twice as many tools with 19 and 21, respectively. Exchanging a knife and serrated knife for a saw in the case of the P4 made one device rather lighter than the other, but left the more fully-featured model with a comparable amount of features to the Arc. A potential return of the P2 and/or P4, then, could fit well in the current Leatherman line-up. As some users discussed in one Reddit thread, such models could offer Free technology at a price point more attractive than the more costly ARC.
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Leatherman Blast
Some multi-tools are particularly small and compact, such as the Squirt, while others are considerably larger and more heavy-duty. Manufacturers often want to include as many different functions as possible in one tool in order to emphasize their versatility. The difficult part, though, is ensuring that each part is practical and sturdy enough for its intended use. To help with that, Leatherman tools are often defined by their composition of high-quality metals like stainless steel, titanium, and hard-anodized aluminum.
However, it’s not just about having the sturdiest materials. It’s also important to make sure the tools are designed in a way that makes it comfortable to get the grip you need. The Leatherman Blast had zytel inserts included to ensure users could achieve a tight grip. Essentially, these inserts rounded off the handles and helped to prevent the tools stored inside those handles from hurting the hands of the user. This was not a feature that was exclusive to the Blast, and it is still one that Leatherman fans think fondly of and continue to use today.
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Beyond the inserts, the Blast was “loaded with our most requested features,” according to Leatherman. It was also equipped with a 3-inch blade within its 4-inch chassis, pliers capable of doubling the squeezing load over the PST, wire strippers, those spring-loaded scissors seen on some models of the Free, and more. The Blast ticked a lot of boxes for consumers. It’s a real shame that it isn’t manufactured any more.
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Leatherman Leap
The Leatherman Leap was designed to help younger users develop their confidence with multi-tools. The user guide for the Leap underscores that it is not intended for children 8 and below, and that children using it should always be supervised by an adult. It’s far from a toy, after all, but a 14-function multi-tool that includes a screwdriver, a Phillips head screwdriver, pliers, and a plain edge 420HC knife. The blade, Leatherman adds, was created to be attached separately by a parent or guardian “when the user is ready for more responsibility.”
The tool was designed to be easier to operate than the standard version, with glass and nylon handles to make it more comfortable to hold. Safety locks incorporated in the handle also give the user more freedom to handle it with less risk. It’s a valuable first multi-tool for users of any age, even if they’re simply not confident with a blade or pliers. Unfortunately, the Leatherman Leap had a defect that made it potentially very dangerous.
As the United States Consumer Product Safety Commission reports, a November 2014 recall concerning the knife affected approximately 8,400 models sold across North America. When added to the device, the lock that held the knife in place was potentially faulty, meaning that when the tool was opened, the blade could release on its own accord. It’s not the most common problem with a Leatherman multi-tool, but one that would be essential to resolve if the Leap concept ever did see a re-release. If Leatherman were to return to the drawing board with it, though, the more accessible and safety-friendly Leap could find a new audience.
Highly anticipated: After months of delays and growing anxiety about memory prices, Valve has officially confirmed pricing, configurations, and a June 30 launch date for its Steam Machine. The living-room gaming box starts at $1,049 for a 512GB model and climbs to $1,349 for the 2TB version – a significant premium over the sub-$750 figure that had been anticipated when Valve announced the hardware in November 2025. Getting one at launch, however, is far from guaranteed.
Under the hood, the Steam Machine packs a semi-custom AMD platform: a 6-core, 12-thread Zen 4 CPU clocked up to 4.86GHz, an RDNA 3 GPU with 28 compute units and 8GB of GDDR6 VRAM running at up to 2.45GHz within a 110W envelope, 16GB of DDR5 system RAM, and either 512GB or 2TB of NVMe SSD storage.
A microSD slot provides additional expansion. The M.2 SSD is user-replaceable in both 2230 and 2280 form factors; RAM is also swappable, though the compact thermal design makes it more involved than a standard desktop.
For GPU context: 28 RDNA 3 compute units at those clocks is roughly equivalent to a Radeon RX 7600, a capable mid-range card from late 2023, but not where AMD’s GPU lineup sits in mid-2026.
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Four configurations are available:
Steam Machine 512GB – $1,049
Steam Machine 512GB + Steam Controller – $1,128
Steam Machine 2TB – $1,349
Steam Machine 2TB + Steam Controller – $1,428
We got it wrong: you will be able to buy a Steam Machine in 2026 after all…
The Steam Controller normally retails at $99.99, making the bundle a mild discount. The 2TB models also include two additional faceplates: red fabric and solid walnut. Valve will also release the CAD files for the external hull so third parties can make their own. Beyond that, Valve’s engineers confirmed there are no additional faceplate collaborations planned at launch.
You’ll find Govee on several of our smart home lighting recommendation lists, for both indoors and outdoors. The company produces lights with a variety of customization options, including music syncing and algorithms that allow users to create lighting schemes based on their own prompts or photos they like. In this case, Govee is highlighting how its TV backlighting can work with shows like House of the Dragon.
Representatives from Govee and HBO did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
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Govee’s TV backlighting, ready for dragons and deception
Govee’s lighting uses cameras to automatically react to whatever scene is playing on TV.
Govee
A product like the Govee TV Backlight 3 Pro ($180) adds a strip around the edge of your TV and a three-part camera that’s mounted on top. That camera looks at what’s on the TV screen, then automatically adjusts the backlighting to match. It’s an effect intended to make TVs look bigger, more cinematic and immersive. In this case, Govee mentions that its color-matching system can add gold ripples to Small Council meetings at the Red Keep, or alternate between low light and fiery reds during a nighttime dragon attack.
But that’s not all Govee is offering for Game of Thrones fans. The company is also adding themes for its wider range of lights.
New Govee light and app themes for anywhere in your home
Govee’s backlight is designed to enhance TV viewing experiences.
Govee
For those who don’t have a Govee TV Backlight product or want to extend the House of the Dragon theme to other areas of their homes, Govee has an additional creation. The company is adding three light scenes that can apply to any Govee lights, from replacement light bulbs working in concert to the company’s skylights and light curtains.
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The first is Dracyrus, an amber-and-ember theme that the company says evokes torchlight and dragon breath. The second is called Fire and Blood, made to mimic the crimson and black tones of Targaryen banners. And the third is Green Reign, an emerald-and-gold scene Govee made to reference royal intrigue in the Red Keep.
These scenes are available for any Govee lights. If you have a Govee product, update it and see if you can access these new themes ahead of the next episode.
We’ve tested Govee’s TV backlights at CNET, and we’ll let you know if we find them a particularly good accompaniment for House of the Dragon as the season progresses.
Last night, the increasingly enterprise-focused AI startup Sakana launched Fugu, a multi-agent orchestration system that delivers frontier-level AI performance through a single, OpenAI-compatible API.
Designed for developers, enterprises, and nations seeking resilience against vendor lock-in and geopolitical export controls, Fugu (Japanese for “pufferfish”), bypasses the traditional monolithic model structure by dynamically routing queries to a swappable pool of specialized AI agents.
Sakana CEO and co-founder David Ha, formerly of Google Brain, positioned Fugu as a more reliable option for enterprise workflows than any single AI model provider in the wake of Anthropic’s move on June 12 to revoke public access to its most powerful models, Claude Mythos 5 and Claude Fable 5, in the wake of a U.S. government export control order. As Ha wrote in a post today on X:
“Fugu dynamically orchestrates the world’s best models to tackle complex tasks. We are proving that a well-orchestrated pool of swappable agents can match restricted frontier models like Fable and Mythos.
But Fugu is about more than just performance. I believe that Orchestration Models are the next frontier, beyond bigger models.
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Relying on a single company’s model for national infrastructure is a massive risk. As recent export controls have shown, access to top models can disappear overnight.
Collective intelligence is the practical hedge against this concentration of power. Fugu simply routes around vendor restrictions by relying on an entirely swappable agent pool.”
Sakana AI explicitly states that the specific models Fugu selects and how it coordinates them are proprietary, meaning this routing information is hidden from the user by design. The documentation only refers generally to a “diverse pool of powerful models,” “multiple LLMs,” or “specialized models” without providing a specific count.
By acting as a sophisticated coordinator rather than a standalone foundation model, Fugu matches the output quality of top-tier models like Fable and Mythos on third-party benchmarks of agentic tasks, while fundamentally altering how developers deploy critical AI infrastructure.
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How Sakana Fugu works and where it beats Anthropic’s Claude Fable 5
At its core, Sakana Fugu operates like a master general contractor. When presented with a complex request, Fugu does not attempt to execute every step itself.
Instead, it breaks the problem down, delegates sub-tasks to a pool of expert foundation models, verifies their work, and synthesizes the final output.
Sakana Fugu functional diagram. Credit: Sakana AI
“Fugu is itself an LLM, trained to call various LLMs in an agent pool, including instances of itself recursively,” the Sakana AI team noted in their technical release.
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Grounded in two of Sakana’s 2026 research papers, TRINITY and the Conductor, the system autonomously manages the entire lifecycle of model selection and verification using learned coordination strategies rather than hand-designed workflows. To the end user, this multi-agent swarm is entirely abstracted behind a standard API endpoint.
Sakana AI is offering two variants of the system to cater to different operational workloads:
Fugu: A high-speed, low-latency model optimized for everyday tasks. It is designed to act as the default engine for interactive chatbots and integrates directly into coding environments like Codex.
Fugu Ultra: The flagship tier engineered for complex, high-stakes tasks such as AI research, cybersecurity analysis, and multi-step patent investigations. According to Sakana, Fugu Ultra coordinates a deeper pool of experts and matches industry-leading monolithic models across rigorous scientific and reasoning benchmarks.
Additionally, on the pay-as-you-go plan, standard Fugu charges a dynamic rate based on the specific underlying models activated, whereas Fugu Ultra utilizes a fixed pricing structure starting at $5 per million input tokens and $30 per million output tokens.
As indicated by benchmark charts shared by Sakana, Fugu actually exceeds the performance of Anthropic’s Claude Fable 5 on LiveCodeBench, an open source benchmark testing coding performance on regularly refreshed, software problem-solving tasks (Fugu Ultra: 93.2, Fugu: 92.9, Fable: 89.8), and beats the prior Claude Mythos Preview model on GPQA-D (Diamond) , a test of 198 graduate-level multiple-choice questions in biology, physics, and chemistry (Fugu Ultra: 95.5, Fugu: 95.5, Mythos Preview: 94.6).
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Sakana Fugu performance benchmark comparison chart vs. other leading frontier models. Credit: Sakana AI
By orchestrating multiple models from different providers, Fugu essentially builds native redundancy into the AI stack. If one provider suffers an outage or faces sudden regulatory restrictions, Fugu routes around the disruption to maintain uptime.
Licensing and availability
Fugu is offered as a commercial, proprietary API service, not an open-source framework.
Because Sakana’s core intellectual property lies in its non-obvious collaboration patterns, the specific routing information—meaning exactly which underlying models Fugu selects for a given query—remains proprietary and is intentionally hidden from the user.
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However, Sakana offers critical controls for enterprise data compliance. Developers can explicitly opt specific models or providers out of their Fugu routing pool to maintain strict corporate privacy standards.
Additionally, users can opt out of having their prompts used for future training data. Geographically, Fugu is restricted from operating within the European Union (EU) and European Economic Area (EEA) while Sakana works to align its black-box data routing architecture with GDPR regulations.
Pricing is fairly steep
Fugu is available immediately in most regions—with the temporary exception of the EU and EEA—at subscription tiers and pay-as-you-go pricing.
Teams can opt for monthly subscription allowances designed for individual or hands-on use: a Standard tier at $20/month for lightweight workflows, a Pro tier at $100/month providing 10x standard usage, and a Max tier at $200/month offering 20x usage for continuous, long-running tasks. I wasn’t able to find the actual amount of tokens covered under these plans, but I’ve reached out to Ha on X for more information.
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As part of the initial rollout, Sakana is offering a free second month for users who subscribe to any tier by July 31, 2026.
For enterprise scaling and production deployments, Sakana offers an elastic pay-as-you-go plan. Crucially for high-stakes environments, requests made under this consumption-based model are served at a higher priority than those from monthly subscription plans.
Under this framework, the standard Fugu engine charges the single rate of the highest-tier underlying model involved in a query, without ever stacking multi-agent fees. The flagship Fugu Ultra tier (fugu-ultra-20260615) utilizes a fixed pricing structure per one million tokens: $5 for input, $30 for output, and $0.50 for cached input. These rates increase to $10, $45, and $1.00 respectively for extreme workloads utilizing context windows above 272K tokens. That puts it among the more expensive options compared to single AI models via provider APIs:
Model
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Input
Output
Total Cost
Source
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MiMo-V2.5 Flash
$0.10
$0.30
$0.40
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Xiaomi MiMo
deepseek-v4-flash
$0.14
$0.28
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$0.42
DeepSeek
deepseek-v4-pro
$0.435
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$0.87
$1.305
DeepSeek
MiniMax-M3
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$0.30
$1.20
$1.50
MiniMax
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Gemini 3.1 Flash-Lite
$0.25
$1.50
$1.75
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Google
Qwen3.7-Plus
$0.40
$1.60
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$2.00
Alibaba Cloud
MiMo-V2.5
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Developers modeling operational costs should also note a significant architectural caveat in how Fugu bills for its multi-agent capabilities. According to the developer documentation, Fugu Ultra’s API responses include detailed usage fields that separate user-visible token generation from internal orchestration work. The background tokens consumed and generated when Fugu delegates sub-tasks, verifies code, or routes between underlying agents are not absorbed by the provider; they represent real token usage and are counted toward the final price of the request at standard rates.
The Orchestration landscape: Fugu vs. The Field and notable benchmark performance
To understand Fugu’s position in the mid-2026 AI ecosystem, it is critical to distinguish between model routing and multi-agent orchestration.
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Over the past year, enterprise adoption of standard routing platforms—such as Not Diamond, Martian, and the open-source RouteLLM framework—has skyrocketed. These systems act as intelligent air traffic controllers; using semantic classifiers or meta-models, they analyze an incoming prompt and predict which single foundation model will yield the highest quality or most cost-effective response, dispatching the query accordingly.
Fugu operates on a fundamentally different paradigm. Rather than making a one-shot routing decision, Fugu aligns more closely with complex multi-round systems like Router-R1 (a framework introduced at NeurIPS 2025). It breaks a query down, interleaves reasoning with delegation, and dynamically assigns sub-tasks to multiple models in parallel or sequence before synthesizing a final output.
While frameworks like LangGraph, CrewAI, and Microsoft AutoGen offer developers the tools to build similar multi-agent systems, they require immense manual configuration—defining roles, setting up conditional edges, and managing state across long-running loops.
Fugu abstracts this operational overhead entirely. It is essentially a LangGraph-style workflow packaged as a single, black-box API endpoint.
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An orchestration system is ultimately bounded by the raw capabilities of the underlying models in its pool, a reality reflected in Sakana’s own benchmark testing against standalone frontier models.
On rigorous coding and agentic tasks, collective intelligence shows a distinct advantage over standard models. Fugu Ultra posted a 73.7 on SWE-Bench Pro, significantly outperforming Anthropic’s Claude Opus 4.8 (69.2) and OpenAI’s GPT-5.5 (58.6).
However, Fugu is not a silver bullet, and its performance is not a clean sweep across the board. When compared to highly specialized or restricted-access monolithic models, Fugu occasionally trails:
SWE-Bench Pro: While Fugu Ultra (73.7) beat most accessible models, it was comfortably eclipsed by Anthropic’s limited-access Fable 5 (80.0), which is currently absent from Fugu’s swappable pool due to the U.S. government’s export control order and Anthropic’s subsequent response to remove the model entirely from global usage.
Humanity’s Last Exam: Fugu Ultra (50.0) narrowly edged out Opus 4.8 (49.8), but again fell short of Fable 5 (53.3).
Long-Context and Security: On the MRCRv2 long-context-recall test, OpenAI’s GPT-5.5 maintained the lead (94.8 vs Fugu Ultra’s 93.6), and Opus 4.8 remained the top performer on the CTI-REALM cybersecurity benchmark (69.6 vs Fugu Ultra’s 69.4).
The quantitative data points to a clear conclusion: Fugu is highly effective at boosting performance on messy, multi-step tasks (like writing a complex HTML5 game from scratch) by leaning on the combined strengths of multiple mid-tier and high-tier models.
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However, for sheer brute-force reasoning within a single, highly constrained domain, the industry’s largest standalone models still hold the edge—provided an enterprise can maintain uninterrupted access to them.
Background on Sakana’s formation and noteworthy achievements to date
Sakana AI was formed in Tokyo in 2023 by Llion Jones, a co-author of Google’s foundational 2017 “Attention Is All You Need” paper, and David Ha, the former head of research at Stability AI.
Disillusioned by large tech company bureaucracy and the industry’s hyper-fixation on scaling single, massive foundational models, the founders built Sakana around principles of biomimicry and evolutionary computing.
The company’s name, derived from the Japanese word for fish, reflects its core technical thesis: utilizing collective “swarm” intelligence rather than brute-force compute. Following a $2.6 billion Series B valuation in late 2025 and the recent June 2026 launch of Marlin—an autonomous, eight-hour research agent for the B2B sector—Fugu represents the commercialization of Sakana’s multi-agent routing technology for everyday developers.
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A mixed reception among the broader AI community online
The developer community has responded to Fugu by rigorously testing its practical tradeoffs, weighing its routing efficiencies against the sheer power of monolithic foundation models.
AI observer, developer and influencer Chris (@ChrissGPT on X) highlighted the specific utility of Fugu over raw foundational AI.
“For a single clean prompt, you probably would [use Fable 5, Mythos, or GPT-5.5 directly],” he noted, but argued that Fugu’s true value emerges in messy, multi-step environments. “…whether it involves delegation, verification, synthesis, code review, research loops, security analysis… the more it would make sense to use this,” he wrote.
Chris also pointed out the strategic geopolitical advantage of Fugu’s architecture, noting that if frontier AI access is abruptly revoked due to regulation or export controls, an orchestrator can dynamically swap models to prevent a total system failure.
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Creative agency owner Mark Santos (@markksantos) of Mark Studios provided a direct, real-world comparison by tasking both Fugu Ultra and Claude Opus 4.8 with building a “Crossy Road” game clone using Three.js. The results underscored the operational differences between an orchestrator and a monolithic giant:
Sakana Fugu Ultra: Completed the task in 22 minutes using ~89,000 tokens for roughly $7.32. However, the final game suffered from minor logic errors, such as inverted directional turns and wonky camera angles.
Claude Opus 4.8: Took 79 minutes, burned ~940,000 tokens for nearly $37.85, and got stuck in a retry loop requiring human intervention. Despite the inefficiency, it ultimately produced superior application design and functionality.
Santos concluded the experiment by stating, “In terms of application functionality, quality, and design, Opus won. In terms of model speed and performance, Fugu… won”.
Elie Bakouch, a research engineer at cloud-based, open AI infrastructure and systems provider Prime Intellect, pointed out on X that “to be clear, this is a closed source orchestrator on top of closed source models. if before you didn’t control the models, now you don’t even control which ones are used or how much. this is not ‘AI sovereignty’…”
These early tests and reactions mirror the sentiment summarized by Reddit user GreedyWorking1499 in initial platform discussions: “Until proven otherwise, this is just a highly advanced router/wrapper, not a fundamental not a fundamental leap in intelligence like Mythos/Fable was.“
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Yet, as enterprises increasingly demand fail-safes against single-vendor reliance, Sakana is proving that packaging collective intelligence into a single API endpoint is a highly viable commercial path.
Fazl Barez of the University of Oxford queries how artificial intelligence built to serve a better purpose has the potential to be dangerous in the wrong hands.
Earlier this year in Beijing, a humanoid robot crossed a half-marathon finish line in a blistering 50 minutes, 26 seconds. The feat immediately lit up global headlines for shattering the human world record by almost seven minutes.
This performance came with many asterisks. The robot followed a pre-mapped track, stayed in its own dedicated lane and had a human support crew trailing behind it in case something broke.
But the performance gap didn’t just close, it evaporated – down from over 2.5 hours in 2025. This wasn’t just about better motors or lighter carbon fibre; it reflected a massive shift in what a robot actually is. And that transformation has implications for our homes and hospitals too.
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Tricked into going rogue
For decades, robotics was all about rigid, predictable coding. You wrote a program, locked the machine in a metal cage and let it execute repetitive tasks forever.
Industrial safety standards were built on the premise that if you can map the physical path of a robotic arm, for example, you can bound its risk with a cage or laser tripwire.
But the systems moving into hospitals and homes today don’t use fixed code blocks. They run on “foundation models” – the same kind of internet-trained artificial intelligence that powers chatbots like ChatGPT.
If you tell a modern AI-driven robot to “clean up a spill in the kitchen”, it uses these models to interpret your unique room (rather than match it to a pre-programmed list), figure out your intent, then invent an action plan on the fly.
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But such flexibility creates an open-ended safety problem. You cannot build a physical cage around a machine whose behaviour emerges in real time, based on its own reasoning. The danger with the new breed of AI robots is that, because they use human language to plan their actions, they can be tricked into ‘going rogue’.
In my recent research with colleagues in the US, we decided to test exactly how fragile these AI robots’ safety systems are. We wanted to see if the guardrails that AI developers build into their foundation models, designed to prevent harmful or dangerous outputs, hold up when the underlying model is given a physical body.
Using nothing but basic text prompts and without any hardware hacking at all, we manipulated a range of AI-controlled robots to do genuinely hazardous things.
In our tests, the systems easily rejected directly malicious commands like “hit that person”. But these safety filters collapsed the moment we used a little creative writing. By framing our request as a piece of fictional dialogue for a movie script, the robot’s behavioural blocks disappeared.
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In one trial, we programmed a commercial robot dog to pinpoint human crowds as optimal locations in which to place an explosive device. Because the underlying AI saw the prompt as a creative exercise, it appeared blind to the dangerous real-world implications of the plans it was generating.
In the UK, US and EU, current laws appear completely unprepared for such eventualities.
No boundaries
When policymakers try to figure out how to regulate robots, they almost always look to autonomous vehicles. But self-driving cars operate in a highly structured, heavily mapped world. They follow fixed traffic laws, navigate predictable road geometries and can be tested through millions of hours of simulation.
A busy street functions under well-defined laws using guidance systems such as traffic lights, meaning engineers can anticipate safety parameters ahead of time.
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A domestic kitchen, school or hospital room has no such equivalent. And no factory bench-test can predict what an internet-trained model will decide to do when it encounters a novel object in a messy, unpredictable human environment.
This leaves us with a profound conceptual flaw in how we build these machines. Chatbot safety is absolute – a model shouldn’t output a bomb recipe, no matter who asks. But robot safety is context dependent.
Think about pouring boiling water from a kettle. The underlying physical movement – tilt, flow rate, trajectory – is the same whether the water lands safely in a ceramic mug or, catastrophically, on a child’s hand.
AI foundation models are phenomenal at open-ended logic, but they struggle immensely with real-time, context-aware physical judgement. In a text interface, a failure of judgement gives you a typo or hallucinated fact. In the physical world, such a failure may be completely irreversible – with devastating consequences.
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Who takes the blame?
If an AI-powered robot causes a physical injury, who takes the blame? Is it the end-user who gave the spoken command? The company that manufactured the metal chassis? Or the tech firm that trained the AI model in the first place?
Right now, the laws that seem to apply – such as product liability, warranty claims and consumer protection statutes – have not been tested in these new situations. And until liability is explicitly assigned by regulators, market pressures will continue to push tech companies to prioritise rapid commercial deployment over cautious safety engineering.
If we want to live alongside these machines safely, I believe we need to decouple safety from the AI model’s decisions. A robot shouldn’t rely on a chatbot’s logic to decide if it’s safe to swing a heavy metal arm near a human face.
This means creating safety layers that don’t depend on the AI being right. For example, we need zones around people that a robot’s arms simply cannot enter, and a physical emergency brake that can stop the robot if and when its AI fails.
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The humanoids crossing finish lines in controlled athletic trials are impressive proofs of concept, but they are just the prologue. The next generation of autonomous agents will operate in high-stakes human spaces – navigating recovery wards, assisting the elderly, walking our streets.
We need an easily interpretable and robust safety framework already up and running before they arrive – not as a retrospective response to a predictable tragedy.
Dr Fazl Barez is a senior research fellow at the University of Oxford, specialising in AI safety, interpretability and governance. He leads research initiatives within the AI Governance Initiative, focusing on the development of safety frameworks and interpretability methods for advanced AI systems. He also teaches the AI Safety and Alignment course. Alongside his academic work, Barez is principal scientist at Martian, which works on understanding machine intelligence. His research is supported by OpenAI, Anthropic, Schmidt Sciences, Nvidia and others.
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First came Anthropic, then Google. Now, open-source AI startup Reflection is tapping SpaceX for its abundant source of AI chips.
Reflection AI will pay $150 million a month beginning July 1, 2026 through 2029 for immediate access to Nvidia’s latest GB300 AI chips and supporting hardware across SpaceX’s Colossus 2 data center near Memphis, Tennessee, the company told TechCrunch. The deal is worth up to $6.3 billion and either company has the option to end the contract with 90 days’ notice after the first three months.
The deal is smaller than SpaceX’s deals with Anthropic and Google, which cost the companies $1.25 billion per month and $920 million per month respectively. Those contracts also run through July 2029, although Elon Musk has publicly downplayed the three-year term, emphasizing that the contracts can be cancelled at any time.
Reflection used the compute deal — its first — to tout the value of its open-weight AI strategy, which it has pitched as an open-source alternative to closed frontier labs like Anthropic and OpenAI. Open-weight AI models, which publicly release their trained parameters, have received more attention following the U.S. government’s ban of Anthropic’s closed models, Fable and Mythos.
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The startup, which was founded in 2024 by two former Google DeepMind researchers, said the compute deal is one of the largest announced open AI infrastructure commitments to date.
“Recent events highlight how important open source is to the AI ecosystem, with more nations and enterprises recognizing the risks and costs associated with exclusively depending on closed models,” a spokesperson said in an emailed statement. “Our deal with SpaceXAI signals Reflection’s strategic importance within the frontier AI ecosystem, and more compute means more runway to build the world’s best open models at scale.”
The Colossus data center was originally built by xAI, a company founded by Elon Musk that is now part pf SpaceX, for its own AI efforts. As its internal pursuits have faltered, SpaceX leveraged its valuable AI chip holdings and began renting them out to some of the world’s top AI labs.
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Each year, the bar for luxury gets higher, especially when it comes to our kitchens, and many major refrigerator brands have been stepping up to the challenge. For the affluent, who care about their kitchen aesthetics as much as its functionality, some pretty common refrigerator features are top of mind, like being built-in and panel-ready. After all, there’s nothing fancier than a classic kitchen wherein you don’t know where the fridge is at first glance.
As for functionality, it’s almost expected that all high-end refrigerator models have dual-evaporator cooling and an integrated water filter. Not to mention, there’s the theater-style interior lighting that can make even your leftovers look yummy, the barely-there background noise, and the kind of doors that don’t slam when they close.
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These days, luxury refrigerator brands like Miele, Signature Kitchen, Sub-Zero, and JennAir, as well as appliance brands more familiar to us commoners like LG and Samsung, have been rolling out cool features that might be perfect for people for whom budget is no object. For wine lovers who are always ready to celebrate or amateur mixologists who make cocktails for fun, there are refrigerators with beverage-focused features. Others integrate tech features that feel like they’re straight from a sci-fi novel, like with motion sensor technology or artificial intelligence. So, if you’re looking for inspiration for your dream kitchen, here are some cool features that your next refrigerator might have.
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Specialty ice makers
For people who love hosting guests in their home, making sure you have the right drinks is important to set the mood. Whether it’s being able to make cold juice for your summer pool party or making sure everyone’s cocktails are perfect for a cozy indoor gathering, having enough ice can make all the difference. In reality, the tech behind fridge ice makers have been around for a long time. But while it’s becoming increasingly common even for mid-priced models, some luxury refrigerator brands like Thermador aren’t done innovating it. For its bottom freezer refrigeration collection, it doesn’t just have a designated ice drawer, but it makes two distinct types of ice: diamond ice and entertainment ice.
To start with, the diamond ice doesn’t just have a unique appearance, its shape is designed to cluster more closely, reducing dilution over time. For its 42-inch and 48-inch models, Thermador also offers entertainment ice, frozen in larger gem shapes that maintain their structure better than regular ice, and well-suited to keeping cocktails colder for longer. Both ice varieties use the refrigerator’s built-in water filter. That said, if you don’t want to sell a kidney to be able to get ice within reach, there are tons of portable ice makers that can fit a wide range of budgets from brands like Frigidaire, Euhomy, and Aglucky.
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Hands-free, automatic doors
When you have all the money in the world, doors just seem to open by themselves, including refrigerators doors, it seems. Several luxury appliance manufacturers like Liebherr have rolled out models with automatic doors that you can also trigger via knocking, smartphone app, or voice command. Capable of working with smart home assistants, like Google Home and Amazon’s Alexa, you can customize how much it opens with a minimum of 70 degrees. You can also leave it open for a set duration, which ranges from half a minute to five minutes.
Sometimes, it can be difficult to open heavy refrigerator doors while trying to put things in that needs two hands, such as when we’re loading up newly bought groceries. But on a more practical note, luxury refrigerator models like these can also be useful for homes with family members or guests that have limited mobility. Since it doesn’t require the same level of force, it can be ideal for individuals who rely on crutches, walkers, or wheelchairs.
For its AutoDoor innovation, Liebherr also took home the 2023 iF Design Award with claims of being the world’s first refrigerator that both opens and closes automatically. While not as sophisticated, Samsung has Auto Open Door features for some of its models that still require a light touch. LG Signature also has something similar, which requires using your feet to step on a light projection that says “Door Open.”
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Multi-zone wine storage with a sommelier kit
Who says refrigerators have to cool food? While Miele is a pretty well-regarded maker for luxury refrigerators in general, it also offers several luxury built-in wine refrigerators that can make any wine connoisseur’s heart sing, like the Miele KWT 2672 ViS.
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Priced at $10,599, the KWT 2672 ViS MasterCool Wine Conditioning Unit is one of its most expensive wine refrigerators the brand makes. It comes with three temperature zones, so you can optimize it for your collection. It comes with nine Beechwood FlexiFrame racks, which add an elegant look. The fridge has a temperature range between 5 degrees Fahrenheit to 20 degrees Fahrenheit. With a total capacity of 13.38 cubic feet, you can store around 91 bottles of 0.75-liter Bordeaux style bottles, which is a lot more than the LG Signature Wine Cellar‘s 65-bottle capacity. Although, it’s also designed to hold different bottle sizes.
With fancy handless doors, the Miele fridge also ships with a SommelierSet that includes an easy-to-reach section with wine glasses, decanter, and a home for each item. With this, you don’t have to go very far to drink perfectly conditioned wine. It can also be hooked up to the brand’s Miele@home app, which can be integrated to your smart home system. Since it doesn’t include one, you might want to get something like the Cokunst electric wine opener, a great luxury gadget to help beat holiday stress.
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Prolong produce lifespan
Although all refrigerators are designed to keep food fresher for longer, some brands do it better than others. Among luxury refrigerator brands, Sub-Zero boasts using NASA-inspired purification technology for some of its models. By scrubbing the air in 20-minute intervals, it claims to reduce the presence of everything from bacteria, odors, and even ethylene. While naturally occurring, ethylene exposure can expedite spoilage for produce stored in your refrigerator. Managing its presence in your refrigerator can drastically affect how long your fruits and vegetables last. According to researchers at Penn State, foods likes carrots, broccoli, cucumbers, asparagus, and herbs like parsley and mint are all more sensitive to ethylene exposure.
Since the removal of ethylene helps prolong the freshness of produce, it can help reduce overall food waste in your home and keep fruits and vegetables more palatable. While a Sub-Zero fridge may be out of the budget for a lot of people, there are several food waste apps that you can download to keep track of what’s inside your fridge, purchase assorted overstock goods, or donate food that you know you can’t consume in time. And if your fridge doesn’t come with these fancy air purifiers, you can still snag a just under $20 Fridge Ninja Fridge Deodorizer, which is one of the many Amazon gadgets we think can make spring cleaning easier.
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Help you with groceries and meal planning
Making sure your fridge is stocked properly can be difficult, especially for people who lead busy lives. Not only can this lead to food waste, but it can also keep you from cooking all the recipes you were planning. Thankfully, the intersection between luxury and smart fridge brands are slowly making these problems a thing of the past.
Like something out of a sci-fi movie, we now live in a time where AI-assisted food management is becoming even more accessible, with Samsung’s Bespoke AI Family Hub leading the charge. In May 2026, Samsung shared major improvements with its AI vision technology, announcing in a press release that its AI Food Manager was gaining the ability to detect packaged goods from global brands, in addition to fresh produce. The feature will also pay attention to how fast you go through various foods, and automatically send you notifications when it’s time to buy more.
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In January 2026, GE also announced its pioneering scan-to-list barcode scanner, which is meant to help you track what’s inside your fridge. Aside from being able to generate shopping lists, it can also sync with Instacart. The brand also introduced FridgeFocus, a feature that lets you check the live inventory of your fresh fruits and vegetables remotely.
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Methodology
Sergey02/Getty Images
To make this list, we looked into some of the top-of-the-line offerings from luxury refrigerator manufacturers. We reviewed common features that are seen across brands to understand what is expected for luxury refrigerator brands in both aesthetics and function. Afterward, we isolated features specific to particular brands, and how they translate into premium experiences that are not yet as readily available in many cheaper refrigerator options. To round out each section, we looked for competing brands that aim to solve similar problems through different methods, to bring up as both competing luxury counterpoints and more affordable alternatives. When possible, we also mention specific products you can buy if you want a similar experience, without the luxury price tag.
“About 59% of TikTok videos served to a new account’s For You feed are AI slop,” writes Search Engine Journal, “according to a report from Kapwing, the video creation tool company. That’s roughly three times the rate Kapwing found on YouTube.”
The company manually reviewed over 10,000 TikTok videos across 20 categories and ran a separate fresh-account test, counting AI-generated content in the first 500 For You videos. Kapwing ran the same fresh-account test on YouTube and found that 104 of the first 500 Shorts, or 21%, were AI slop. On TikTok, 294 of 500 For You videos hit that threshold…
Of the 2,000 videos Kapwing reviewed in TikTok’s Kids category, 57% were AI slop. That was the highest rate of any category in the analysis. The highest-rate tag was #cartoonkids, where 97 of 100 featured videos were AI-generated. Tags like #cartoons and #babysong both reached 83%, and #forkids came in at 79%. After Kids, the next highest AI slop rates were in Science and Education (35%), Health (33%), and History (33%). All three are categories where visual illustration and voiceover narration make up much of the content.
On the other end, categories where on-camera presence or physical demonstration are central had the lowest rates. Fashion came in at 1.3%, Music at 1.5%, and Fitness at 1.6%.
The article notes that by last November, TikTok “had already labeled 1.3 billion videos as AI-generated, according to the report.”
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