Frankensteining an AI Practice // BRXND Dispatch vol 94
Mike Houston's BRXND NYC talk on building Amazon's creative AI lab through messy experiments, monthly show-and-tells, and using AI for the monotonous work so creatives can actually create.
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Claire here. This week, we’re spotlighting another session from BRXND NYC. Mike Houston’s presentation shows us what AI adoption actually looks like on the ground: messy, experimental, and surprisingly fun.
Mike is the AI Creative Lead and Technical Product Manager at Amazon. His talk walks through how his team built an AI practice at Amazon’s creative department, using Frankenstein as the central metaphor—setting up a lab, finding mad scientists, and zapping dead stuff. (Perfect for Halloween!) Mike is hilarious, and I also relate to the career path he describes: pivoting from creative work into something more technical, where you’re not quite sure how to explain what you do anymore.
His team didn’t try to figure everything out before starting. They began with small experiments—monthly show-and-tells, bi-weekly workshops, ideas that sometimes flopped but still got people excited. They also use AI to handle the recreative, monotonous work—regionalizing assets across markets, scaling executions, sifting through 300 million customer reviews to find entertaining stories instead of making creatives read them manually—so creatives can focus on creating. I think this talk is something we can all learn from.
Watch Mike’s full talk here to see how Amazon’s creative department Frankensteined their way into making AI useful.
What caught our eye this week
Anthropic released Skills, letting Claude load specialized instructions, scripts, and resources when it needs them rather than cramming everything into context. Simon Willison argues Skills might be a bigger deal than MCP because they outsource the hard parts to the LLM and the coding environment instead of forcing developers to build protocol implementations. The token efficiency is wonderful: each skill takes a few dozen tokens until Claude actually needs it.
Claude Code also moved to the cloud! You can now kick off coding sessions from your browser without opening a terminal, run multiple tasks in parallel across different repos, and ship faster with automatic PR creation.
Meta is axing around 600 roles from its Fundamental AI Research (FAIR) division and AI product teams while ramping up hiring for TBD Lab, its new superintelligence team. This comes months after Meta invested $14.3B in Scale AI and hired CEO Alexandr Wang, then paused hiring and announced a restructuring. FAIR leader Joelle Pineau left earlier this year, and Wang’s memo says FAIR research will now “integrate and scale” into TBD Lab’s larger model runs. Impacted employees can apply for other roles internally, but the message is clear about where Meta’s priorities sit.
Apple engineers testing iOS 26.4—the build that’s supposed to finally deliver the rebuilt Siri in spring 2026—reportedly have “concerns” about the voice assistant’s performance. This is the Siri that was originally promised for iOS 18, then delayed a full year because it didn’t meet Apple’s quality standards. Apple has two teams working different approaches (on-device models vs. Google Gemini on Private Cloud Compute), and it’s unclear which one is being tested.
ChatGPT Atlas is here, a Mac-only browser with ChatGPT baked in. Agent mode lets ChatGPT navigate and interact with pages for you, complete with a sparkle overlay effect. Simon Willison remains skeptical about the security and privacy risks, noting the main defense appears to be “watch it closely at all times.”The user-agent is identical to Chrome, which has implications for how sites will (or won’t) detect AI browsing. Browser agents still feel more like watching a first-time computer user than useful automation, but OpenAI’s betting big on this.
If you have any other questions, please be in touch. As always, thanks for reading.
Noah and Claire