🧠 AI Goes Practical: Languages, Models, and Etsy Listings

🔥🔥🔥 Three big updates

1. Merriam-Webster picks “slop” as 2025 Word of the Year

Merriam-Webster’s human editors named “slop” — defined as “digital content of low quality usually produced in quantity by AI” — as the 2025 Word of the Year. The choice reflects the cultural pushback against low-effort, AI-generated digital output — from absurd viral videos to junk texts — and highlights a collective instinct to differentiate between noise and meaningful content in the age of ubiquitous generative models.

2. NVIDIA debuts Nemotron 3 open AI models

NVIDIA released the Nemotron 3 family — a set of open AI models in Nano, Super, and Ultra sizes — aimed at efficient, agentic, and reasoning-ready use cases. The new models support up to 1 million token contexts and come with training data and tools that help developers build highly customizable systems without relying exclusively on closed proprietary releases. Nemotron 3 Nano is available now with larger variants expected in early 2026.

3. Thinking Machines launches Tinker with advanced vision and sampling

Thinking Machines — a research and product lab founded by veterans of major AI projects — announced the general availability of Tinker, a new platform that adds support for advanced vision input models (including the Kimi K2 model) and simplified sampling from multimodal AI models. Tinker is designed to make it easier for builders to experiment with cutting-edge AI workflows that handle text, images, and structured reasoning together. This marks a step toward more customizable, collaborative AI systems that can work with users across a broader set of tasks.

🔥🔥 Two tools worth trying

Unloop 
A workflow platform that helps teams build internal tools, dashboards, and logic flows without writing traditional code. If you’re iterating quickly or need lightweight automation without dev overhead, Unloop simplifies turning ideas into interactive applications.

VArchive 
A context-aware knowledge archiving assistant that ingests your documents, chats, and media, then lets you query, summarize, and extract insights conversationally. Great for teams that need a searchable, AI-enhanced binder of institutional knowledge.

🔥 Things You Didn’t Know You Can Do With AI

Turn an Etsy shop into a self-running AI experiment

Here’s how one builder turned AI into a near-autonomous product engine:

1. Use an AI agent to research trending products and niches.

2. Generate designs automatically with an image model.

3. Upscale and clean the designs to production quality.

4. Remove backgrounds and prepare assets for print-on-demand.

5. Push listings to a POD partner and sync to the shop automatically.

6. Monitor sales and let the agent iterate on successful designs.

Result: ~1,000 new listings in ~72 hours and $1,000 in revenue in the first 30 days — all from a largely automated pipeline. Great pattern for creative ecommerce teams and solopreneurs.