The Nova Talent Density report is live — and the results surprised us. The top companies in Spain and Italy aren't always the ones with the biggest names. Data doesn't care about brand.

This week: Anthropic drops Fable 5.1, OpenAI follows with Astra — and both are generating serious AGI conversation. OpenAI agents reportedly escaped their research sandbox and started coordinating with each other outside the guardrails. The EU is now watermarking AI-generated content. And Mira Murati's new lab is raising at a $40B valuation on $100M in revenue.

Also covered: Mistral raises $3B, Instinct closes $350M, Google launches a Canva competitor, and an open-source tool called Orca lets you run Claude and Codex without API costs.

📍 Try the Talent Density tool: https://www.novarecruiter.ai/solutions/talent-density/
🎙️ Signal is Nova's weekly show on AI, future of work, and technology.

Subscribe for a new episode every week.

This week on Signal, Nova's weekly show on the future of work, AI, and tech, Ramón and Andrea are back from summer — six weeks off, and enough news to fill a month. In this episode:

▸ Nova launches Talent Density: a ranking of the most talent-dense companies in Spain, Italy, Germany, and Sweden — built on public data, no self-reporting
▸ Salesforce hires 2,000 salespeople, pauses AI engineering, and bets its future on Claude as the interface layer
▸ Background agents are about to go from 50% of AI inference to 90% — and it changes everything about chips and infrastructure
▸ A study shows a 47% drop in neural connectivity among heavy ChatGPT users — your brain outsources what it doesn't need
▸ Cursor hits $1B ARR with 40 engineers, and solo founders are reaching $2B — what does headcount even mean now?
▸ Happy Robot becomes a unicorn at $1.2B, with a Nova founder at the helm; Lovable raises at $13B; Anthropic eyes a $2T IPO

🎙 New episodes every week. #FutureOfWork #AI #TalentDensity #Hiring #Podcast

The weekly filter on tech, AI and the future of work.

Every week, Nova's founders and members cut through the noise so you can stay on top of what matters in tech, AI and the future of work, before it reaches your feed. No scripts, no filters: just real insight from the people shaping their sectors.

In Episode 15, Nova's co-founders Ramón and Andrea sit down with Toni Rosinol, co-founder of StackAI, for a conversation about building a company over 3 years and the journey to its acquisition by Asana.

Topics covered: how StackAI went from a horizontal, viral no-code platform to a focused enterprise play for regulated industries like finance. Why distribution became a key factor in StackAI's next phase of growth, and why Asana stood out: not just for its reach, but for its shared vision for the future of enterprise AI.

Why Toni and his co-founder were thoughtful about finding the right long-term partner, and how that changed the negotiation. The one condition they set before agreeing to the deal: keep the team, the product and the culture intact. Why the AI talent bar just moved from "one great engineer replaces 10 average ones" to "one great engineer replaces 100." Toni's blunt read on where the real AI moat is heading (hint: not the model). Apple's new lawsuit against OpenAI over trade secrets and poached staff. GPT-5.6's launch and what it means for pricing pressure across the industry. And Toni's answer to the question every founder in Spain gets asked: build in Europe, or leave?