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Welcome, humans. |
"Is anybody else bored of talking about AI?" That question hit the top of Hacker News yesterday with 358 points and 277 comments. The top response? A senior engineer arguing the people getting the most value from AI are the ones who were already great at their jobs. "Give a great craftsman a new tool and he will find a way to apply it." |
Anthropic's own data backs this up. Their 5th Economic Index report found that people who've used Claude for 6+ months have a 10% higher success rate than new users, even controlling for task complexity. The experienced users iterate more, hand over less autonomy, and tackle harder work. So the question isn't whether AI is useful. It's whether you've put in the reps. |
Meanwhile, OpenAI decided to announce approximately fourteen things in one Tuesday. So yeah. We're not bored yet. |
Here's what happened in AI today: |
🙀 OpenAI killed Sora, prepped a new model called "Spud," and Sam Altman handed off safety oversight to focus on data centers and fundraising 📰 Arm unveiled its first-ever chip after 35 years of only licensing designs, with Meta as launch customer 📰 A federal judge called the Pentagon's actions against Anthropic "troubling," and Meta was ordered to pay $375M in a child safety case 🍪 Anthropic's Claude can now control your Mac while you're away and run tasks from your phone 📖 AI designed new polymers that turned out to be 4x tougher than expected, surprising even the scientists who built them
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… and a whole lot more that you can read about here. |
P.S: Want to reach 675,000 AI-hungry readers? Click here to advertise with us. |
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🙀 OpenAI Had the Busiest Tuesday in AI History |
You know those days where you clean the house, do laundry, fix the leaky faucet, meal prep for the week, AND reorganize the garage? OpenAI just did that, except the house is a $300B company and the garage is a $1B Disney deal they're lighting on fire. |
Here's what happened: |
Sora is dead. The standalone AI video app launched six months ago, briefly topped the App Store, and is now being shut down entirely, app and API both. Employees said it was devouring GPU resources during a period of intense competition with Anthropic and Google. The Disney deal is dead too. Disney's $1B investment and 200-character licensing agreement? Over. Disney said it "respects OpenAI's decision to exit the video generation business." Ouch. Sam Altman handed off safety and security oversight to focus on raising capital, supply chains, and "building data centers at unprecedented scale." OpenAI completed initial development of its next major AI model, codenamed "Spud." ChatGPT's shopping feature flopped. Instant Checkout is being scaled back after users largely ignored it. OpenAI is raising another $10B, bringing its latest round to ~$120B total. The OpenAI Foundation, now sitting on ~$130B in equity, committed $1B+ this year to AI-driven scientific discovery and societal resilience.
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Why this matters: |
This looks like seven separate stories. It's actually one: OpenAI is pruning everything that isn't ChatGPT ahead of its IPO. |
Video generation? Gone (too expensive, too many copyright headaches). Shopping? Scaled back (users didn't want it). Safety oversight by the CEO? Delegated (he's building data centers now). What's left is a super-app strategy: ChatGPT + Codex + the Atlas browser, powered by whatever Spud turns out to be. |
The Sora shutdown validates what Anthropic bet on all along: focus compute on text and code, not flashy demos. While OpenAI was licensing Disney characters, Anthropic was shipping Claude Cowork and watching software stocks tank. |
Our take: |
The Disney deal dying is the detail that stings most. Three months ago it was OpenAI's biggest mainstream partnership. Now it's a press statement with the word "respect" doing heavy lifting. |
The real question isn't about Sora. It's about Spud. If the next model is good enough, none of today's pruning matters. If it isn't, OpenAI just killed a product, lost a partner, and handed off safety for nothing. |
DEEP DIVE / FULL BRIEF |
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🎓 AI Skill of the Day: How to Actually Run Open Source AI Models (It's Easier Than You Think) |
If you've been meaning to try open source AI models but assumed you needed fancy hardware, Tina Huang just published the best explainer we've seen. Tina is fantastic at making AI easy to understand, and this is simply the best "how to use open models" guide out there. |
She ranks four approaches easiest to hardest: Local (download Ollama, pick a model, chat in 2 minutes), Browser/Hosted (arena.ai or Hugging Face Spaces, zero setup), Managed API (get an API key from GroqCloud, call it in 5 lines of code), and VPS ($5-10/month virtual server, full control). |
The key insight most people miss: any usable computer can run smaller models. A MacBook Air M4 with 16GB handles 4B and 8B models fine. No GPU required unless you're fine-tuning. |
Step 1: Download Ollama from ollama.com Step 2: Open terminal and run: ollama pull qwen3.5:4b Step 3: Run: ollama run qwen3.5:4b Step 4: Start chatting. Everything stays on your machine.
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Our favorite insight: lots of people are buying Mac Minis to run models 24/7 without tying up their laptop. Same workflow, dedicated hardware. |
Want more tips like this? Check out our AI Skill of the Day Digest for this month. |
Have a specific skill you want to learn? Request it here. |
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Trending: Three popular Neuron podcast eps… |
New episodes air every week on: Spotify | Apple Podcasts | YouTube |
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📰 Around the Horn |
Arm unveiled the AGI CPU, its first-ever in-house chip after 35 years of only licensing designs. The 136-core processor is designed for AI inference (the part where models answer your questions), with Meta as launch customer and OpenAI, Cerebras, and Cloudflare also signed up. A federal judge called the Pentagon's actions against Anthropic "troubling," saying "it looks like an attempt to cripple Anthropic." Meanwhile, Apple is testing a standalone Siri app with an "Ask Siri" button for iOS 27. A supply chain attack was discovered in LiteLLM (a popular AI library with 97M monthly downloads): a malicious file harvested SSH keys and cloud credentials on every Python startup. Karpathy signal-boosted the warning. Meta was ordered to pay $375M for violating New Mexico law after a jury found it failed to safeguard its apps from child predators. Separately, Baltimore became the first U.S. city to sue xAI over Grok deepfake porn. Amazon acquired Fauna Robotics, entering the consumer humanoid market. And Figma launched an MCP tool letting AI agents design directly on the live Figma canvas. Halter, a startup making AI-powered collars for cows, raised $220M. Yes, cows. The future is unevenly distributed and apparently grazing.
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📖 Midweek Wisdom |
This week's must-listen: Latent Space sat down with MIT professor Heather Kulik, one of the first materials scientists to combine AI with computational tools before it was cool. |
The highlight: her team used AI to design new polymers that turned out to be four times tougher than expected. The AI discovered a purely quantum mechanical effect that surprised even the lab scientists who synthesized them. But she also drops a great reality check: LLMs still can't design a 22-atom ligand (a molecular structure) that any chemistry expert could sketch in seconds. The wins are real, but only if you deeply integrate domain expertise. Nature doesn't care about how hyped a model is. |
Full episode: YouTube | Latent Space |
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| That's all for now. | | What'd you think of today's email? | |
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