If you want to make the most out of a world increasingly filled with AI tools, here’s a habit to develop: start taking screenshots. Lots of screenshots. Of anything and everything. Because for all the talk of voice modes, omnipresent cameras, and the multimodal future of everything, there might be no more valuable digital behavior than to press the buttons and save what you’re looking at.
Technology
The humble screenshot might be the key to great AI assistants
Screenshots are the most universal method of capturing digital information. You can capture anything — well, almost anything, thanks a lot, Netflix! — with a few clicks, and save and share it to almost any device, app, or person. “It’s this portable data format,” says Johnny Bree, the founder of the digital storage app Fabric. “There’s nothing else that’s quite so portable that you can move between any piece of software.”
A screenshot contains a lot of information, like its source, contents, and even the time of the day in the corner of the screen. Most of all, it sends a crucial and complex signal; it says I care about this. We have countless new AI tools that aim to watch the world, our lives, and everything, and try to make sense of it all for us. These tools are mostly crap for lots of reasons but mostly because AI is pretty good at knowing what things are, but it’s rubbish at knowing whether they matter. A screenshot assigns value and tells the system it needs to pay attention.
Screenshots also put you, the user, in control in an important way. “If I give you access to all of my emails, all my WhatsApps, everything, there’s a lot of noise,” says Mattias Deserti, the head of smartphone marketing at Nothing. There’s simply no reason to save every email you receive or every webpage you visit — and that’s to say nothing of the privacy implications. “So what if, instead, you were able to start training the system yourself, feeding the system the information you want the system to know about you?” Rather than a tool like Microsoft Recall, which asks for unlimited access to everything, starting with screenshots lets you pick what you share.
Until now, screenshots have been a fairly blunt instrument. You snap one, and it gets saved to your camera roll, where it probably languishes, forgotten, until the end of time. (And don’t get me started on all the screenshots I take by accident, mostly of my lockscreen.) At best, you might be able to search for some text inside the image. But it’s more likely that you’ll just have to s scroll until you find it again.
The first step in making screenshots more useful is to figure out what’s actually in them
The first step in making screenshots more useful is to figure out what’s actually in them. This is, at first blush, not terribly complicated: optical character recognition technology has long done a good job of spotting text on a page. AI models take that one step further, so you can either search the title or just “movies” to find all your digital snaps of posters, Fandango results, TikTok recommendations, and more. “We use an OCR model,” says Shenaz Zack, a product manager at Google and part of the team behind the Pixel Screenshots app. “Then we use an entity-detection model, and then Gemini to understand the actual context of the screen.”
See, there’s far more to a screenshot than just the text inside. The right AI model should be able to tell that it came from WhatsApp, just by the specific green color. It should be able to identify a website by its header logo or understand when you’re saving a Spotify song name, a Yelp handyman review, or an Amazon listing. Armed with this information, a screenshot app might begin to automatically organize all those images for you. And even that is just the beginning.
With everything I’ve described so far, all we’ve really created is a very good app for looking at your screenshots, which no one really thinks is a good idea because it would be just one more thing to check — or forget to check. Where it gets vastly more interesting is when your device or app can actually start to use the screenshots on your behalf, to help you actually remember what you captured or even use that information to get stuff done.
In Nothing’s new Essential Space app, for instance, the app can generate reminders based on stuff you save. If you take a screenshot of a concert you’d like to go to, it can remind you that it’s coming up automatically. Pixel Screenshots is pushing the idea even further: if you save a concert listing, your Pixel phone can prompt you to listen to that band the next time you open Spotify. If you screenshot an ID card or a boarding pass, it might ask you to put it in the Wallet app. The idea, Zack says, is to think of screenshots as an input system for everything else.
Mike Choi, an indie developer, built an app called Camp in part to help him make use of his own screenshots. He began to work on turning every screenshot into a “card,” with the salient information stored alongside the picture. “You have a screenshot, and at the bottom there’s a button, and it flips the card over,” he says. “It shows you a map, if it was a location; a preview of a song, if it’s a song. The idea was, given an infinite pool of different types of screenshots, can AI just generate the perfect UI for that category on the fly?”
If all this sounds familiar, it’s because there’s another term for what’s going on here: it’s called agentic AI. Every company in tech seems to be working on ways to use AI to accomplish things on your behalf. It’s just that, in this case, you don’t have to write long prompts or chat back and forth with an assistant. You just take a screenshot and let the system go to work. “You’re building a knowledge base, when today that knowledge base is confined to your gallery and nothing happens with it,” Deserti says. He’s excited to get to the point where you screenshot a concert date, and Essential Space automatically prompts you to buy tickets when they go on sale.
Making sense of screenshots isn’t always so straightforward
Making sense of screenshots isn’t always so straightforward, though. Some you want to keep forever, like the ID card you might need often; other things, like a concert poster or a parking pass, have extremely limited shelf lives. For that matter, how is an app supposed to distinguish between the parking pass you use every day at work and the one you used once at the airport and never need again? Some of the screenshots on my phone were sent to me on WhatsApp; others I grabbed from Instagram memes to send to friends. No one’s camera roll should ever be fully held against them, and the same goes for screenshots. Lots of these screenshot apps are looking for ways to prompt you to add a note, or organize things yourself, in order to provide some additional helpful information to the system. But it’s hard work to do that without ruining what makes screenshots so seamless and easy in the first place.
One way to begin to solve this problem, to make screenshots even more automatically useful, is to collect some additional context from your device. This is where companies like Google and Nothing have an advantage: because they make the device, they can see everything that’s happening when you take a screenshot. If you grab a screenshot from your web browser, they can also store the link you were looking at. They can also see your physical location or note the time and the weather. Sometimes this is all useful, but sometimes it’s nonsense; the more data they collect, the more these apps risk running into the same noise problem that screenshots helped solve in the first place.
But the input system works. We all take screenshots, all the time, and we’re used to taking them as a way to put a marker on so many kinds of useful information. Getting access to that kind of relevant, personalized data is the hardest thing about building a great AI assistant. The future of computing is certainly multimodal, including cameras, microphones, and sensors of all kinds. But the first best way to use AI might be one screenshot at a time.
The video game disc is dead, and Sony’s been planning to kill it for some time, according to a report out of Austria. The man who leads Sony’s discmaking operations, Sony DADC president Dietmar Tanzer, told ORF Salzburg that the company’s Thalgau plant produces 600,000 discs every day, half of which are for PlayStation. But since it’ll only be making 10 percent of that volume in 2028, it’s planning to retrain all 300 employees to work on optical microlenses instead.
Thalgau isn’t just one of Sony’s disc plants. It’s where the disc-making division is headquartered, and appears to be its only remaining wholly owned disc manufacturing facility. Sony made discs in the United States for decades, originally in Terre Haute, Indiana and later in New Jersey, but it closed the latter plant in 2011 and moved all manufacturing from Indiana to Thalgau in 2022. Today, the Indiana facility markets itself to automakers who need help packaging and assembling headlights and the like instead.
This transition didn’t happen overnight. A behind-the-scenes video from December 2024 shows that the Thalgau plant was already working on microlenses as of then:
Those lenses, too, are created using discs:
ORF Salzburg writes that Sony has now invested €30 million to manufacture these microlenses, and that mass production may begin “as early as next year.”
Microlenses are theoretically used in all kinds of emerging applications where you might want to bend light, including headsets, but it appears that Sony may cater to automakers here, too. The head of Sony’s micro optics division gave ORF Salzburg the example of “a car turn signal that is projected onto asphalt.”
All of this is to say: Sony didn’t make this decision in a hurry, and it isn’t likely to change its mind despite the predictable backlash. It’s been winding down disc manufacturing for decades, and it’s ripping off one last band-aid with PlayStation.
According to Sony DADC’s website, it has produced over 26.4 billion discs to date — the vast majority, 23 billion of them, were made between 1983 and 2022 in Terre Haute, Indiana.
This is how light can be used to transmit data
At Coherent’s Sherman, Texas facility, CEO Jim Anderson and NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang detail how their plant is at the forefront of AI innovation. They describe using light to efficiently transmit data for AI data centers, explaining the technology to Will Cain. Coherent is set to quadruple its output by next year, demonstrating rapid growth.
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A new sodium-ion battery from Chinese battery giant CATL could eventually affect something much closer to home: the power grid that keeps your lights on. CATL has introduced its TENER Sodium Energy Storage System. The company says it is the world’s first field-validated sodium-ion energy storage system ready for commercial use.
Think big energy project, not phone upgrade. This battery is built for large storage sites that can support the grid. That kind of storage is getting more attention as electricity demand rises. AI data centers use a lot of power. Heat waves can strain local grids. Solar and wind power also need storage so electricity is available when people need it.
However, CATL has not announced a specific U.S. launch for this system. So, this is more about where grid storage may be headed than what your local utility will install tomorrow.
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CATL unveiled its TENER Sodium Energy Storage System in Munich as sodium-ion batteries move closer to commercial grid storage. (CATL)
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New sodium-ion battery targets grid storage
CATL just launched the TENER Sodium Energy Storage System in Munich, Germany. The company says cumulative shipments should reach 1 gigawatt-hour by the end of 2026. Deliveries in China are expected to start in September 2026. Global deliveries are scheduled to begin in June 2027.
That timeline shows sodium-ion batteries are moving closer to commercial use. The system is designed for stationary storage. In other words, it could help store electricity from solar farms, wind projects or other power sources for later use.
That becomes important when demand jumps during hot afternoons or renewable power drops later in the day.
Sodium-ion battery storage could ease lithium pressure
Most large battery storage projects today use lithium-based systems. Lithium works well, but supply chains can be tight. Prices can also move when demand climbs. CATL says sodium is more than 1,000 times more common than lithium. The company also says sodium is widely distributed around the world.
That could make sodium-ion batteries attractive for grid storage. These batteries do not need to be tiny enough for a phone or light enough for an electric car.
CATL isn’t saying sodium will replace lithium overnight. Instead, the company says sodium and lithium could work together in future energy storage systems.
For you, the larger point is choice. More battery options could help energy companies reduce their dependence on a single material.
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CATL says the battery fits existing systems
One of CATL’s bigger claims is that TENER Sodium can fit into existing lithium iron phosphate energy storage platforms. CATL says the system shares the same physical footprint as LFP systems. That could help developers avoid changing enclosures, redesigning projects or repeating certification steps.
The system delivers more than 30 megawatt-hours of rated capacity. CATL says each module weighs about 42 metric tons, or about 46 U.S. tons. The company says only 34 units are needed for a 1-gigawatt-hour storage site. The modular design also supports flexible storage durations of 1, 2, 4, 6 and 8 hours. That gives developers more room to tailor projects based on local power needs.
Sodium-ion battery design can handle tough conditions
The TENER Sodium system is built for large energy projects, not home use, with modules designed to store power for the grid. (CATL)
Battery storage has to work in places that get brutally hot or freezing cold. CATL says TENER Sodium is designed for better extreme-temperature performance, enhanced safety and lower operating costs. The company also says its battery management system gives the sodium-ion system an additional 20 percent safety margin compared with lithium-ion batteries.
The system also uses a top-discharge airflow design that CATL says reduces heat generation by nearly 30 percent compared with conventional systems. CATL says auxiliary power consumption drops from the industry average of 2 percent to 1 percent.
That could be useful for large grid storage projects, especially in places where heat, storms or heavy power demand can strain local systems. CATL also says TENER Sodium operates at only 65 decibels, which is 10 decibels lower than conventional systems. That could help address local concerns when battery storage sites are built closer to where power is needed.
Sodium-ion battery shipments signal commercial momentum
CATL says TENER Sodium has reached full commercial maturity across technology, production capacity and supply chain readiness. The company says it has worked on sodium-ion battery research and development since 2016. CATL also says it has invested about $1.4 billion, depending on exchange rates, over the past decade.
CATL has expanded sodium-ion production lines at its Fuding base in China. The company says that adds 40 gigawatt-hours of annual capacity. Another planned base in Jining, Shandong, could support 160 gigawatt-hours of sodium-ion battery production capacity. CATL also says it signed a three-year, 60-gigawatt-hour sodium-ion energy storage order with HyperStrong in April 2026. The company described it as the world’s largest sodium-ion commercial contract.
Those numbers show CATL is treating sodium-ion storage as a serious commercial product. That said, U.S. adoption is a separate question. American utilities, regulators and developers would still need to weigh cost, performance, supply chain risk and security concerns.
What this means to you
This sodium-ion battery system may never be something you buy directly. However, the technology behind it could still affect how electricity gets stored and delivered. If sodium-ion storage proves reliable, it could give energy companies another way to support the grid. That may become more important as AI data centers increase electricity demand.
Better storage can help utilities use power more efficiently. It can also help balance supply when demand rises quickly. Still, there are limits. A new battery chemistry will not fix old transmission lines, slow permitting or local grid bottlenecks by itself.
The real takeaway is that sodium-ion batteries could become part of the grid storage mix. They are not a magic fix, but they could help energy companies build more flexible storage projects.
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Kurt’s key takeaways
CATL’s new sodium-ion battery may sound like a faraway energy story, especially since there is no announced U.S. rollout yet. Still, it is important because the grid is under growing pressure from AI data centers, extreme weather and the need to store more renewable power. What stands out is the use of sodium, which CATL says is far more common than lithium. If this technology proves reliable in major energy projects, it could give utilities another way to store power and keep the grid steadier when demand spikes.
Would you be comfortable with Chinese-made battery systems supporting part of the U.S. electric grid if they helped make power more reliable? Let us know by writing to us at CyberGuy.com.
CATL says sodium is far more common than lithium, which could give energy companies another storage option as electricity demand rises. (CATL)
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