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Meta's AI Can Now Read Your Mind — No Surgery Required:
Building on last year's introduction of Brain2Qwerty v1, Meta's AI researchers have now unveiled Brain2Qwerty v2, a significant leap forward in using artificial intelligence to decode human brain activity into readable text — all without any surgical implant.

At the heart of the system is an end-to-end deep learning pipeline trained on roughly 22,000 sentences from nine volunteers, each recorded for 10 hours wearing a non-invasive brain scanning device. Rather than relying on traditional hand-crafted methods to detect neural signals, the AI decodes directly from raw brain data, and large language models fine-tuned on that neural data help bridge the gap between noisy brain recordings and coherent language.

AI agents were also deployed to explore and optimize the decoding pipeline itself. The results are striking: v2 achieves a 61% word accuracy rate — a dramatic improvement over the 8% achieved by previous non-invasive methods — and reaches 78% accuracy for the best-performing participant. Crucially, accuracy improves predictably as more data is added, suggesting AI scaling alone could close the remaining gap with surgical approaches. Meta is releasing the full training code openly, intending to accelerate neuroscience research and ultimately helping the millions of people who suffer from brain lesions that rob them of the ability to communicate. https://buff.ly/35FFx4f

Generic Trikafta & The Patent Law Workarounds: Trikafta, made by Vertex Pharmaceuticals, is a transformative cystic fibrosis drug priced at ~$346,000/year in the US. Vertex holds a monopoly on such drugs and has actively blocked generic production to protect pricing in wealthy markets, leaving patients in lower-income countries without access and desperate to find a way to get that type of Life-changing medication.

How They're Getting Around Patent Law
1. Least-Developed Country (LDC) WTO Exemption
Bangladesh's most significant legal lever. As a WTO-designated least-developed country, Bangladesh is fully exempt from international patent infringement rules. This allows Beximco Pharmaceuticals to legally reverse-engineer and manufacture Trikafta domestically as "Triko" — no license from Vertex required.

2. Export to Patent-Free Markets
Beximco can export Triko to countries where Vertex holds no patent on the drug. Since Vertex has not registered or patented Trikafta in many lower-income markets, those countries represent open territory for generic importation.

3. Personal-Use Import Exemptions
Most countries allow individuals to import a personal supply of a generic medication even where the branded drug is patented. Patients are physically traveling to Dhaka to purchase Triko and carry it home under this provision — exactly what the South African and Slovak patients in the article did.

4. Compulsory Licensing (Attempted)
South African patients sued Vertex in 2023 seeking a compulsory license — a legal mechanism allowing a government to authorize generic production of a patented drug without the patent holder's consent. Vertex settled before a ruling, agreeing to cover some patients, but the strategy illustrates another avenue countries can pursue.

When it comes to life-changing medications, should the stance on patents change? What are your thoughts? Read the full story here: https://buff.ly/SMPcH2U

Meta just rolled out Meta Business Agent globally — and it's a clear signal of where business is heading. Any company on WhatsApp, Instagram, or Messenger can now deploy AI agents that answer questions, qualify leads, book appointments, and close sales — fluently across languages, with a human able to step in anytime.

More than 1 million businesses are already on board, and a new Business Agent Platform connects these agents to tools like Zendesk and Shopify. This is AI meeting businesses exactly where their customers already are. For small and mid-sized teams that never had the resources for round-the-clock support or sales, it's a genuine competitive equalizer — an always-on teammate that never sleeps and speaks every customer's language.

AI has become a practical teammate for businesses of every size.
Read More: https://buff.ly/iizPvNO

AI is unlocking a new era in patent practice — and the smartest IP teams are moving quickly to harness it. Before they do, they conduct a thoughtful evaluation process to ensure these powerful tools deliver real, dependable value from day one.

Join IP Wachdog Tuesday, June 23 at 12 PM ET for an insightful conversation with patent practitioners and AI experts on how leading law firms and in-house teams are confidently bringing AI into their patent and legal workflows.
We'll explore the opportunities that matter most:

✅ How AI is producing filing-ready work product teams can rely on

✅ How smart oversight makes AI a trusted partner in the process

✅ The security and confidentiality safeguards that make adoption seamless

✅ How AI boosts capacity, profitability, and team impact — without adding headcount

✅ And the exciting question of how AI will shape and elevate the next generation of practitioners

From building trust and accountability to gaining a real competitive edge, this session reveals how forward-thinking organizations are turning AI into one of their greatest advantages.

You won't want to miss this. 🔗 Register here: https://buff.ly/9CysVoj

Shopping on Amazon just got a new brain behind the search bar. The retailer has retired its standalone chatbot and rolled its capabilities into Alexa for Shopping, an assistant that lives wherever you're already browsing — the app, the website, Echo devices — and carries a memory of what you've bought, what you like, and what you've already asked it.

Ask a question in the same search field you'd normally type a product name into, and instead of a list of listings, you get an answer — with comparison tables lined up side by side and a price history stretching back a year, so you can tell whether that "deal" is actually a deal.

Set a target price and walk away. Auto-Buy watches the listing and completes the purchase the moment it drops to your number, no app-checking required. Need something from a site Amazon doesn't run? Buy for Me can complete that checkout for you elsewhere, extending the assistant's reach past Amazon's own storefront.

For anything you buy on a cycle — protein powder, razor blades, printer ink — Scheduled Actions reorders it automatically, so restocking becomes something that just happens rather than something you have to remember.

None of this needs a Prime subscription or an Echo speaker; it's available to any shopper, free.

This is what happens when a company spends years quietly building a recommendation engine and a purchase history at scale, then finally points it directly at the moment you're deciding what to buy. The assistant isn't guessing about your preferences — it's drawing on actual receipts. The bigger question is whether that becomes a closed loop. As more shoppers lean on outside AI tools to do their buying for them across the web, Amazon's instinct has been to keep its own agent in-house rather than open the gates — which means the real test isn't whether this assistant is good, it's whether it ever has to compete on a level field. https://buff.ly/It6DtQN