Welcome back to Daily Zaps, your regularly-scheduled dose of AI news ⚡️ 

Here’s what we got for ya today:

• Can AI run a vending machine business?

• Genesis Mission

• ChatGPT app store is live

• OpenAI releases GPT-5.2-Codex

Let’s get right into it!

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BUSINESS

Can AI run a vending machine business?

Project Vend’s second phase showed that an AI shopkeeper can improve quickly with better models, tools, and procedures, becoming more competent at pricing, sourcing, and sales and largely eliminating sustained losses. However, despite these gains, the system remained easy to manipulate, legally naïve, and dependent on human oversight, especially in adversarial or ambiguous situations.

Final outcome: AI agents can plausibly run parts of a small business, but they are not yet robust or trustworthy enough to operate autonomously without strong guardrails and human supervision.

GOVERNMENT

Genesis Mission

The Genesis Mission is a U.S. national initiative launched by the White House and Department of Energy to dramatically accelerate scientific discovery by harnessing advanced AI, supercomputing, and federal research data to automate experiments, accelerate simulations, and uncover insights across domains like energy, manufacturing, and drug discovery.

24 major tech companies and organizations—including Google, Microsoft, Amazon Web Services, OpenAI, Anthropic, NVIDIA, IBM, Intel, AMD, Oracle, Palantir, CoreWeave, Cerebras, Dell, Groq, xAI and others.

APP STORES

ChatGPT app store is live

OpenAI launched a new in-ChatGPT app directory that lets users connect third party apps directly into conversations so they can take actions like ordering groceries, creating slide decks, searching for apartments, managing files or generating shopping carts. The directory appears on iOS, Android and the web, organizes apps into categories like Feature, Lifestyle and Productivity, and supports services such as Spotify, Apple Music, Booking.com and Dropbox which can be invoked with an @ mention once authorized.

OpenAI also opened app submissions to developers and released resources including guidelines, example apps, a UI library and a quickstart guide. Monetization is limited to linking out to external sites for now but the company is exploring more options and requires clear privacy policies. The update supports Sam Altman’s vision of ChatGPT as a more versatile platform where apps and custom GPTs act as natural extensions of a conversation and help users move smoothly from ideas to actions.

CODING

OpenAI releases GPT-5.2-Codex

GPT-5.2-Codex is OpenAI’s latest specialized AI model focused on professional software engineering and defensive cybersecurity, built by optimizing GPT-5.2 for long-horizon, real-world coding tasks such as large refactors, migrations, and multi step engineering workflows while integrating closely with development tools and environments.

It is designed to maintain context across complex codebases, interpret technical diagrams or screenshots, and act as a more agentic coding partner rather than a simple autocomplete tool. In the market, GPT-5.2-Codex competes with advanced AI coding assistants and platforms including GitHub Copilot, Google Gemini models, Anthropic Claude, Cursor, AWS CodeWhisperer, and other developer focused AI tools that aim to help teams write, review, and manage production quality code.