Meta's cyborg smart glasses for soldiers

PLUS: ArXiv cracks down on AI-slop research

Good morning, tech enthusiasts. The U.S. Army wants soldiers to call in drone strikes with their eyes. Meta and defense startup Anduril have built a prototype AR system that snaps onto military helmets, letting troops cue drones, artillery, and battlefield intel with eye-tracking and voice commands.

After Microsoft’s combat headset stumbled through years of delays and soldier complaints, the Pentagon may finally have a serious contender — if the Meta-Anduril prototype lives up to its promise.

In today’s tech rundown:

  • Meta and Anduril’s smart glasses for war

  • ArXiv sets one-strike rule for AI slop

  • China’s undersea data center is up and running

  • Startup to treat Alzheimer's with ultrasound

  • Quick hits on other tech news

LATEST DEVELOPMENTS

META & ANDURIL

Image source: Ideogram / The Rundown

The Rundown: Meta’s year-long deal to build mixed‑reality gear for U.S. troops with defense startup Anduril is now yielding a battlefield headset prototype that fuses AI, drones, and targeting into soldiers’ line of sight, MIT Technology Review reports.

The details:

  • Anduril holds a $159M Army prototyping contract to develop AR glasses that attach to existing military helmets, built in partnership with Meta.

  • New details reveal that soldiers can use eye-tracking and voice commands to cue drone or artillery strikes from the headset.

  • Anduril is also self-funding EagleEye, an integrated helmet-and-headset combo developed with Meta; it is expected to reach production after 2028.

  • EagleEye plugs into Anduril’s Lattice command-and-control platform — the same software the Army awarded a $20B integration contract in March.

Why it matters: Microsoft’s path to a $22B production contract for its own battlefield AR system was cancelled after its system failed to prove viable, leaving the Army’s slot wide open. Whoever delivers the headset soldiers will actually use stands to embed their platform — and their AI stack — into Pentagon procurement for years to come.

TOGETHER WITH SLACK FROM SALESFORCE

The Rundown: What if your AI agents didn’t need a separate app? Slack is the agentic work OS, where your people, your Salesforce data, and your AI agents come together in one place — surfacing insights, taking action, and handing off to humans in the flow of work.

Slack’s on-demand webinar covers:

  • Why AI is only as effective as the platform and context it lives on

  • How agents can surface insights, trigger actions, and loop in the right people automatically

  • Real examples of teams moving work out of the inbox and into an agentic flow

ARXIV

Image source: Ideogram / The Rundown

The Rundown: ArXiv, the world’s dominant scientific preprint server, is cracking down on AI slop with a one-year ban for researchers who submit papers containing hallucinated references or other evidence that they let an LLM do the work unchecked.

The details:

  • ArXiv’s computer science chair Thomas Dietterich announced the news, saying that papers showing authors didn’t verify LLM output can’t be trusted.

  • Red flags that will trigger the ban include hallucinated references and LLM prompts or responses left in the submission.

  • After the one-year ban expires, affected authors face an additional restriction: all future arXiv submissions must first be accepted by a peer-reviewed venue.

  • The process includes safeguards, with moderators flagging the violation, a section chair confirming the evidence, and authors retaining the right to appeal.

Why it matters: ArXiv circulates cutting-edge science and tech research before peer review, meaning AI hallucinations left unchecked can corrupt the scientific record upstream. Fabricated citations are already rising in biomedical literature, and arXiv’s enforcement model may be one others follow.

CHINESE TECH

Image source: Shanghai Hailanyun Technology

The Rundown: China has begun full commercial operation of what it says is the world’s first offshore wind-powered underwater data center, a $226M facility sitting more than 30 feet beneath the East China Sea off Shanghai’s Lingang Special Area.

The details:

  • The data center sits between two phases of an offshore wind farm, drawing 95% of its electricity from wind generation while using seawater for passive cooling.

  • The 24 MW facility houses nearly 2K servers, including GPU clusters from China Telecom and LinkWise, and is designed to handle AI workloads.

  • Developers say the system cuts electricity consumption by 22.8%, eliminates freshwater use entirely, and reduces land use by more than 90%.

  • Microsoft’s Project Natick previously proved submerged servers can be up to 8x more reliable than land-based ones, but the company shelved the program.

Why it matters: By ditching industrial chillers for passive seawater cooling, China says it has built a data center that runs at a PUE of 1.15 — while powering it almost entirely from wind. The catch is the same one that sank Microsoft’s Project Natick: when a server fails 30 feet underwater, maintenance is a costly feat.

BIOTECH

Image source: Ideogram / The Rundown

The Rundown: Sound Wave Innovation, a Tokyo-based startup, just closed a $17M funding round to bankroll a Phase 3 pivotal trial for LIPUS-Brain, its low-intensity pulsed ultrasound device targeting early-stage Alzheimer’s disease.

The details:

  • The two-year trial enrolling 220 patients is expected to wrap by year’s end, with regulatory approval targeted for 2027, the Wall Street Journal reports.

  • Rather than attempting to open the blood-brain barrier — the approach pursued by many ultrasound rivals — LIPUS-Brain targets cerebral blood flow.

  • Japan’s Ministry of Health, Labour and Welfare designated it the country’s first-ever “Breakthrough Medical Device” in September 2022.

  • Sumitomo Heavy Industries has a deal in place to manufacture and distribute the device once it gets regulatory clearance.

Why it matters: The non-invasive Alzheimer’s treatment race is ramping up — Korean researchers recently showed focused ultrasound can reduce amyloid plaques through a different mechanism entirely. Meanwhile, SoundWave’s approach, which targets blood flow rather than plaques directly, could reach the market first.

QUICK HITS

Apple is reportedly boosting sales and margins by putting slightly defective chips into cheaper, popular devices, turning silicon “leftovers” into a highly profitable product line.

Researchers at Arizona State University found that heat from large Phoenix-area data centers can raise downwind neighborhood air temperatures by as much as 4°F.

Uber increased its stake in Delivery Hero to 19.5%, becoming the German food delivery company’s largest shareholder — but noted it’s not pursuing a takeover (yet).

California is studying a proposal for high-speed “bullet buses” that would use dedicated freeway lanes to connect LA and San Francisco in just over three hours.

OSHA is investigating the death of a worker who died Friday morning at SpaceX’s Starbase site in South Texas, marking the latest in a series of incidents at the facility.

The U.S. government required everyone traveling on Air Force One from Trump’s summit in Beijing to discard all gifts, souvenir pins, and gadgets they received in China.

UC Davis chemists engineered molecules that replicate the antidepressant effects of psychedelics in animal models but without the hallucinations.

COMMUNITY

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Rowan, Joey, Zach, Shubham, and Jennifer — The Rundown’s editorial team

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