Hollywood sues, Starbucks brews & more (June 12, 2025)

Meta’s new physics-savvy model, Midjourney faces Hollywood lawsuits, and Starbucks pilots an AI assistant for baristas, plus Claude Squad and Dia browser launch.

Author

David Pawlan
June 12, 2025

Welcome back to Byte-Sized: your daily dose of AI, served hot off the press. Today’s blend? A shot of physical world models, a splash of lawsuits, and a sprinkle of coffee-fueled automation.

Let’s dive in 👇

🏛️ Disney & Universal Sue Midjourney

Hollywood’s major studios, Disney, Marvel, Lucasfilm, Universal, are taking Midjourney to court. The claim? Mass copyright infringement via AI training and outputs. This could be a landmark case defining how “fair use” applies to generative AI.

☕ Starbucks Tests AI for Barista Support

Starbucks is piloting a new tool called Green Dot Assist, an AI-powered assistant designed to help baristas answer questions, troubleshoot on the fly, and navigate tasks in real time. It's another example of AI sliding into frontline work without replacing the human touch.

🧬 Claude Squad & Weak-to-Strong Decoding

Open-source agents are getting agentic. Claude Squad lets devs run isolated git workspaces in parallel, while a new decoding method, Weak-to-Strong, boosts alignment by pairing small aligned models with large base ones to complete responses.

🧠 New Frontiers in AI

🧩 Meta's V-JEPA 2: AI Meets the Physical World

Meta unveiled its new world model, V-JEPA 2, trained on over 1 million hours of video to help AI understand real-world physics. Think robots grasping new objects without ever seeing them before. It’s faster than Nvidia’s Cosmos and scores SOTA on reasoning benchmarks.

🌐 Dia Browser: AI Built Into Your Web Experience

The Browser Company launched Dia, a reimagined AI-first browser that lets you talk to your tabs, generate content, and automate tasks, all straight from the URL bar. It's a pivot from the Arc experiment, but this time, they’ve got real-time “Skills” to back it up.

🔍 Black Hole Decoding with AI

A team at Wisconsin’s Morgridge Institute trained a model on black hole simulations to re-analyze blurry radio data. It’s already revealed that the Milky Way’s central black hole might be spinning faster than we thought. AI astronomy just got a whole lot cooler.

🛠️ Tools of the Day

  • Tato – AI-native project tracker for IT teams

  • Guidde – Turn docs into scroll-stopping how-to videos

  • Heynds – Voice and text into content magic

🧾 Prompt of the Day

Sales Strategist Mode
Craft a tailored proposal for a specific client by analyzing their industry, trends, and pain points. Use dependency grammar, structure by benefit, and end with a strong CTA.

⚡ Quick Hits

🧃 TLDR

Meta’s new model brings AI into the physical world, Hollywood’s lawsuit against Midjourney could redefine IP in the AI era, and Starbucks rolls out AI tools to help baristas, not replace them. Meanwhile, new browsers and agent frameworks are reshaping how we work and surf.

Until tomorrow,
David