The brief · 25 February 2026

The AI brief, 2026-02-25

MIT is sequencing your cells, Better.com has you chatting with a bot for your mortgage, and finance is finally trading slideshows for actual results. Four industries, one common thread: AI is done promising and has started delivering.

2 min read J / K to navigate

Better.com's AI voice agent Betsy is already handling mortgage calls end to end

This isn't a text chatbot anymore, it's an AI-generated voice that picks up the phone and processes your loan application from start to finish. Call your bank or a broker in the coming months, and there's a decent chance you'll be talking to a system like this without even realizing it.

practitioners › Betsy handled 1.89 million calls in 2025, fully automated 35.5% of requests end to end, and freed up more than 1,666 hours per month for loan officers, per the ElevenLabs/Better.com case study dated February 25, 2026.

ElevenLabs / Better.com →

Finance firms are finally seeing real results from GenAI

Broadridge surveyed financial services firms and the story has shifted. This is no longer about promising pilots, it is about measured business gains, and attention is already moving toward agentic AI. If your bank or insurer is still pitching you a chatbot, they are already behind the curve.

practitioners › Broadridge Financial Solutions study published February 25, 2026, financial services sector.

Broadridge Financial Solutions →

Under the radar

MIT trains AI to cross-reference your cell data

Biologists are drowning in cell measurements that don't talk to each other: imaging, sequencing, proteomics, each stuck in its own silo. This framework teases out what's shared across modalities versus what's specific to each one, giving a unified picture of cell state instead of scattered fragments. That's directly useful for pinning down disease mechanisms or planning the next experiment without flying blind.

practitioners › Paper published in Nature Computational Science on February 25, 2026, MIT with Broad Institute, ETH Zurich, and PSI.

news.mit.edu →

Devin finally organizes its model picker by family

If you use Devin to code, choosing a model was getting messier every time Cognition added a new one. The updated selector now groups variants by family and shows hovercards to tweak reasoning effort or speed without leaving the menu. You can also pin your go-to model so you're not hunting for it every session.

practitioners › Devin v1.9566.9, official changelog dated Feb 25, 2026: model grouping by family, toggle hovercards, model pinning.

Cognition changelog →

ChatGPT Projects can now pull in sources from anywhere

Previously, feeding a ChatGPT Project meant copy-pasting or uploading files one at a time. Now you can add links straight from compatible apps into your project. Less friction when centralizing your sources before diving into work.

practitioners › Update from February 25, 2026, noted in ChatGPT's official release notes.

OpenAI →