🤖  AI meets improv

👋  Good morning. And if your grocery bill looked higher this week, blame the guy in your life. When men take on more of the grocery shopping — after switching to remote work — households spend ~5% more on similar items, according to a recent study from the National Bureau of Economic Research. More expensive and somehow still forgot the eggs… cool.

NEWS FLASH 

💧  Drink up: OceanWell, a California desalination startup, is developing a subsea system to make ocean water drinkable — a possible solution for Arizona’s dwindling Colorado River water supply. The startup is three years into its research and development project, Water Farm, which it’s building 4.5 miles off the coast of Malibu. The underwater operation will include purification pods ~1.3k feet below the surface, using ocean pressure to push water through reverse osmosis membranes.

🔍  What can we trust? The New York Times requested that AI startup Oumi conduct an analysis of Google’s AI Overviews’ accuracy. It found that results are accurate 85%-91% of the time — that’s still tens of millions of wrong answers provided hourly — and 50%+ of accurate results were “ungrounded,” or linked to websites that didn’t fully support the provided answer. Google argued that Oumi’s analysis relied on a benchmark test built by OpenAI which also contained inaccuracies. Moral of the story? It’s best to fact check everything via multiple sources. 

🥚  Freeze! Family building platform Sunfish launched an AI-powered egg-freezing program that predicts outcomes and covers the cost of an additional egg-freezing cycle if a patient doesn’t reach their targeted number of eggs within their budget. Sunfish reports a 70.8% success rate, compared with the national average of 54.3%, and partners with 50+ fertility providers.

MORE NEWS TO KNOW

• Music matters: Bill Ackman’s hedge fund, Pershing Square, wants to buy Universal Music Group in a ~$64B deal. Ackman praised UMG’s star-studded roster (e.g., Taylor Swift, Ariana Grande, Kendrick Lamar) but criticized its slumping share price.
  

• Boo! Binge, a movie tracking app, warns Apple users when a jump scare is coming. It doesn’t sync with streaming services, however, so you need to pause for bathroom breaks.
  

• For ebook fans: Amazon’s The Audible Story House will pop up in NYC for the month of May, featuring audiobook samples and listening spaces.
  

• Arch support: Instacart data from 11 Coachella Valley cities during 2025’s festival season found foot insoles and inserts to be the hottest commodity, with orders rising ~3.9k% to ~6k%, depending on the fest. 
  

FROM OUR FRIENDS AT MINDSTREAM

The smartest thing? Using less

AI is consuming a growing share of US electricity — and demand is only expected to rise.

Researchers are testing a new approach called neuro-symbolic AI, which combines neural networks with symbolic reasoning to solve problems more efficiently using less data, time, and energy.
👉 Read more on Mindstream.

THE BIG IDEA

We tried an AI video game and got eaten by a monster
In “Fabula Rasa: Dead Man Talking,” a VR game from Brazil-based studio Arvore, you’re on trial. You must convince the medieval kingdom that you deserve clemency, or the king will lower you into a pit with a voracious monster.
Here's what's innovative: In most games, players speak to NPCs (non-playable characters) by choosing from a list of dialogue options. In “Fabula Rasa,” every character — the cunning witch, the helpful goblin, the lovesick prison guard — improvises in real-time in response to the player’s voice.
How’d Arvore do it?
The characters are a collection of prompts built with LLMs like Claude and ChatGPT, while their voices were crafted with Eleven Labs. A second AI acts as a director, keeping the story moving and choosing which NPCs appear when.
But it wasn't simple. The team spent a year fine-tuning the characters and their shared context about their world and each other.
“We didn't want it to feel like you're having one interaction with a character and then a separate interaction with another character," Luiza Justus, Arvore’s head of creative development, told The Hustle. "We wanted [the story] to build on itself, and for you to feel like the thing you said back there matters over here.” 
The result is that the player has a unique experience, which makes the game surprisingly social. At SXSW, players couldn’t wait to share their fate and attempted machinations.
Is this the future of gaming?
It’s a future, but don’t expect to see it everywhere. 

According to Ricardo Justus, co-founder and CEO, Arvore used AI not to shorten production times or cut costs, but as a new narrative vehicle.
“That was the challenge from the very beginning. In fact, we made a point of not using any gen AI art,” he said.
The characters still pause to generate answers, which works in a short, comedic experience, but would feel awkward in cinematic games where actors deliver emotional impact (it’s okay, we also cried during “Clair Obscur: Expedition 33”).
“I think there is going to be room for games with very defined stories that are going to be handcrafted and with voice actors… and there’s going to be room for crazy games like this one that are only possible because of this medium,” Ricardo Justus said. 

“Fabula Rasa” is currently playing at festivals with plans for a commercial release in the future.

🔗

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NEWSWORTHY NUMBER

Minutes it takes to ride China’s “Goddess” escalator from end to end, per The Financial Times. At over half a mile long, it is the world’s largest outdoor escalator system, made up of ~24 escalators and elevators that share a single platform. Since opening in February, it now transports ~9k people up and down the mountainous city of Wushan each day, including many locals who previously had to budget in an hourlong daily hike to get to work.

And you thought your morning commute was bad. 

AROUND THE WEB

📅  On this day: In 1967, the first Boeing 737 took its maiden flight.

🖼️  That’s interesting: Check out a bunch of 3D renderings from the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s collections. 

📕  That’s cool: Lithub’s picks for the best book covers of the last decade.

🚨  Don’t forget: It’s your last day to enter The Hustle’s referral contest for a chance to win a $100 Amazon gift card.

🐕  Aww: Hi, Cinnamon.

SHOWER THOUGHT

Because access to sports is uneven and the global talent pool is only partially sampled, the true genetically optimal athlete for any given sport is likely never identified and may be doing something entirely unrelated. SOURCE

Today's email was brought to you by Juliet Bennett Rylah and Singdhi Sokpo.

 Editing by: Sara "Non-playable character" Friedman.

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