đ§ Neural Dispatch: AI in finance, Metaâs partnership and decoding Anthropicâs policy updates
The biggest AI developments, decoded. August 27, 2025
Hello!
ALGORITHM
This week, we chat about the use of AI generated voice summaries that may be very relevant for the financial services industry, what Metaâs partnership with Midjourney may mean for its social media apps, and Elon Musk trying to convince everyone âMacrohardâ is the real deal.
Axis Capital brings AI to research
Iâm all ears when someone talks about an artificial intelligence (AI) implementation which makes sense as an assistant, not some gross overestimation that AI is as smart as humans (it isnât, thats a fact).
Which is why, then financial services company Axis Capital shared information about Sound Bytes, it made enough sense for us to have a conversation about it this week. Sound Bites will be an AI-generated summaries, two-minutes briefs of its equity research, available for subscribers.
The pitch is simple: institutional investors are drowning in PDFs and information, and audio abstracts let them filter quicker. âAudio inputs simply require less mental processing and have been proven to reduce fatigue,â they say. Axis is of course using Large Language Models (which ones, they havenât specified) for automated summarisation, and insists these audio summaries will adhere to strict regulatory guidelines, but instead reduce turnaround time for investors. The move is significant, for those it impacts.
Many Wall Street institutions have experimented with AI podcasts and dashboards, but few have re-engineered research consumption at scale for the Indian market. Axis is making a case for audio as a default medium of financial intelligence summarisation.
Metaâs Midjourney chapter
Meta has quietly signed a licensing deal with AI company Midjourney, for access to the latterâs image-generation technology. Metaâs new chief AI officer, Alexandr Wang calls this a âtechnical collaboration between our research teamsâ, but there are no further specifics.
That leads us to believe there are two parts to this partnership. First, Meta isnât willing to bet solely on in-house AI models, having first dabbled with an AI image generator as far back as late 2023. Secondly, itâs willing to buy cultural relevance by tapping into a community-driven AI player that shaped much of the internetâs AI-art aesthetic in the last couple of years.
A few questions are worth asking at this point. How does this help Metaâs Llama models? Do we see Midjourney integration within Meta AI? When (it may well be a matter of when and not if) does this find integration in Facebook and Instagram? For Midjourney, is this a bid for scale?
This deal also highlights a larger shift in AI, where tech giants no longer see focused AI players or startups as threats but as accelerators to a mission. For Meta, access to Midjourneyâs video and imaging models, will help it compete with OpenAIâs Sora and Googleâs Veo, for instance. One can only wonder, whether Midjourneyâs unique âaestheticâ survives mass-market deployment, or if Meta smooths it into something thatâll definitely be less distinctive.
Elon Muskâs âMacrohardâ jab
Macro for Micro. Hard for Soft. Macrohard for Microsoft. It doesnât get more tongue-in-cheek than this. Elon Musk, in a recent post on X, floated the idea of starting a company called âMacrohardâ. A thinly veiled dig at Microsoft? Likely.
Musk has had long-standing friction with Big Tech, from accusing Microsoft of using Twitter data to train AI, to clashing over AI ethics and licensing. Muskâs own AI startup xAI will host Macrohard (or whatever it is finally called; billionaireâs whims), what he calls a âpurely AI software companyâ. The idea is to build AI simulation systems for software companies to use to simulate how things work, since these companies donât themselves manufacture physical hardware which can be used to test things with â particularly how humans interact with a software.
Weâll see how this goes, and where this goes.
PROMPT
This week, we explore Adobeâs vision with the new Acrobat Studio, and an attempt to transform PDFs into AI-powered productivity hubs.
Adobe has launched Acrobat Studio, a new platform that weaves together Adobe Acrobat, Adobe Express and artificial intelligence (AI) automation in a single window. âAcrobat Studio marks a significant milestone in the history of PDF, which Adobe invented in 1993 and has since become the standard for the worldâs most important information,â the company says.
More than anything else, this re-emphasises Adobeâs fast-paced integration of AI utility across its apps and services. At the heart of Acrobat Studio is PDF Spaces, which are essentially hubs where a user can consolidate up to 100 files (PDFs, Word docs, web links), then query, compare, or summarise (this has personalities too, for the desired result) conversationally, complete with clickable citations.
Speaking of personalities, âThe Analystâ is ideal if you want the responses to be structured for deeper insights, âThe Instructorâ works best for simple explanations and clarity of complex information and âThe Entertainerâ, as the name suggests, is creatively playful. If this isnât enough, thereâs the option of a custom agent personality within the suite. At this point, a user could shift to creating infographics, presentations, flyers and social posts using Adobe Express, within the same interface. There is also the element of Firefly generative AI, which may be able to add more.
Some prompts to try inside Acrobat Studio:
âSummarise the top 5 risks from these annual reports.â
âExplain this legal clause in simple language.â
âDraft a social post highlighting key insights from this white-paper.â
âCreate a slide deck summarising findings of these research papers.â
Mind you, this comes as yet another subscription from the house of Adobe. Acrobat Studio is priced at $24.99 per month (or âš1,357 in India) for individuals and $29.99/month for teams (thatâs âš2,969 per license, in India).
Adobe says this is âearly access pricingâ thatâs available till October 31. This now sits alongside Acrobat Standard ($12.99 per month) and Acrobat Pro ($19.99 per month), and the exclusive functionality includes an Acrobat AI Assistant as well.
THINKING
âToday, weâre sharing some updates to our Usage Policy that reflect the growing capabilities and evolving usage of our products. Our Usage Policy serves as a framework for how Claude should and shouldnât be used, providing clear guidance for everyone who uses Anthropicâs productsâ
Anthropic, in an official post, August 16, 2025
The context: For an AI company that very clearly wants its Usage Policy to be seen as a living document, that is evolving as AI risks themselves evolve, it should come as no surprise that they donât their AI model Claude to be misused, even in a âjailbrokenâ format (these are hacks that may be deployed to bypass failsafes and guardrails put in place by the model developers based on ethical guidelines, and be able to perform restricted actions.
Anthropicâs new Usage Policy, thats effective September 15, 2025, doubles down on guarding against misuses of rising agentic tools like Claude Code and Computer Use, explicitly banning the creation of malware, network exploitation, denial-of-service attacks, and other cyber threats, while still enabling authorised security testing with consent.
The universal usage standards, updated by Anthropic, state that Claude shouldnât be used to engage in any illegal activity that breaks local laws, compromise a computing system or network, compromise critical infrastructure, be used to develop or design weapons, compromise privacy or identity rights.
A reality check: At the same time, the firm has refined its approach to political content, and gone is the blanket prohibition on lobbying or campaign-related material. Now, only deceptive or disruptive usesâlike voter targeting or campaign manipulationâare barred, allowing researchers and civic educators to use Claude more freely.
As the AI company evolves the terms of use, Claudeâs safeguards get a layered approach. The âhigh-riskâ scenarios like legal, financial, or employment advice, require additional safeguards such as human-in-the-loop oversight and AI disclosure. However, Anthropic now says those rules now apply only when Claude's responses enter consumerâfacing domains, and not inside B2B workflows.
Neural Dispatch is your weekly guide to the rapidly evolving landscape of artificial intelligence. Each edition delivers curated insights on breakthrough technologies, practical applications, and strategic implications shaping our digital future.