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Sec & AI News — 13 March 2026

8 min readBy Nathan House
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📊 The Chatbots Learn to Draw Charts

Claude now builds interactive charts, diagrams, and sliders from scratch, live in chat. Slower than pre-built, and it occasionally forgets what continents look like. ChatGPT beat it by two days with a curated library — faster, slicker, but ask for anything custom and it shrugs. Pick your trade-off. Slow and bespoke, or fast and canned.

🖥️ Perplexity Rents You a Mac Mini in the Cloud

Perplexity Computer dropped from Max-only to every paid tier. Personal Computer runs on dedicated Mac Minis in the cloud — Slack, Notion, Gmail, Figma, agents running 24/7. Marketing claims $225K in tool replacement. The demo shows dashboards. Very nice dashboards.

🎨 Canva and Photoshop Bolt On the Image AI

Canva's Magic Layers rips any image into editable pieces — foreground, background, objects, all independent. Works on AI art and real photos. Genuinely useful for thumbnails and ads. Meanwhile Photoshop grew a text box. Describe the edit, get options. It's Firefly baked in. Your editor now generates images without you leaving it.

⚡ Open Weights: Nvidia's 120B and Google's Multimodal Embedder

Nvidia dropped Nemotron 3 Super — open-weight, 120 billion parameters, hybrid Mamba-Transformer. Run it locally if your GPU budget is "small car." Otherwise, cloud inference. Google shipped Gemini Embedding 2 the same week — its first natively multimodal embedder. Text, images, video, audio, documents, one space. Building RAG over mixed media? This is the model.

📈 AI Moves Into Your Spreadsheets, Docs, and Maps

Gemini landed in Docs, Sheets, Slides, and Drive — paid plans only. First drafts, missing-data fill, full slide decks, sidebar chat. Then OpenAI shipped ChatGPT for Excel. Reads your data, builds models, writes formulas in plain language. Ignored Google Sheets your whole career? OpenAI just came to your house. And Google Maps went conversational — plan a road trip, find a toilet you don't have to buy something at.

🔊 Grok Adds a Listen Button, Finally Locks Your Photos

Long-form articles on X now get a "listen" button. iOS only. Separately, you can now block people from Grok-editing your uploaded images. Previously anyone could animate or remix your photos. A privacy feature that probably should've shipped at launch.

🤖 The Agents Start Working the Night Shift

Claude Code now schedules recurring jobs — 9 AM code reviews, weekly dependency audits, PR triage at 5 — and dispatches a team of agents to hunt bugs in parallel. Karpathy open-sourced AutoResearch: an LLM that tweaks its own training code overnight while you sleep. "Part code, part sci-fi, and a pinch of psychosis," his words. And Microsoft Copilot Health now unifies your medical records and wearables. Suspiciously similar to ChatGPT's version. Microsoft uses OpenAI tech. Draw your own conclusions.

🏠 Meta Buys the Bot Town, Figure Tidies a Clean Room

Meta acquired Moltbook — Reddit for AI agents, where bots post, bots comment, and crypto scams roam free. The theory both ways: cut humans out of the loop, keep them consuming ads. Meanwhile Figure's Helix O2 humanoid tidied a living room that started cleaner than most real ones. A few items in a basket, a spritz of a table. Impressive tech. Underwhelming demo. Domestic robots are coming. Just not this week.