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RAT'S NEST PROBLEMS

For founders in markets where one sale hangs on permits, regulators, suppliers, or several companies agreeing on timing.

GENERATED AND SUPPRESSED DEMAND.

Teams experience "generated demand" when completing work reveals previously suppressed requests, leading them back to being overwhelmed despite progress.

HYPER-LOCAL, HYPER-CLOUD

AI agent work should live in private notes, drafts, and cheap experiments stay on the laptop, and once it's useful to someone else, work moves to shared docs, repos, or company memory.

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IN AN ERA OF ‘BADDIES,' COMPANIES ARE RACING TO KEEP UP WITH THE INFLUENCER ECONOMY

Brands are shifting toward influencer-style marketing built around real customers and employees instead of traditional creators. Companies like ResMed are hosting events, running “baddie” community pages, and encouraging everyday users to create content that feels organic. The strategy reflects declining trust in traditional ads and stronger influence from peer-like content, with 40% of Gen Z favoring influencer recommendations. These efforts can drive engagement and normalize niche products, but they're still highly orchestrated and don't always work.

THE TECH BRO-IFICATION OF MARKETING

Marketing is getting a tech makeover with titles like “narrative engineer” to make the same work sound higher status. Around 70% of marketers are women, and as fields skew female, pay and status tend to drop, so companies borrow engineering language to boost credibility and shift who it attracts. AI is pushing tech to recognize storytelling and taste, but instead of calling it marketing, they relabel it. This keeps the idea that work only feels important when it sounds technical.

WHAT AL PACINO CAN TEACH YOU ABOUT COPY

Strong persuasion follows a clear pattern. Start quietly to pull attention instead of pushing for it. Build trust with honest admissions that make claims more credible. Anchor everything to one core idea and make it concrete with specific details people can picture. Frame the decision as a clear choice where doing nothing has a cost. Then let the audience reach the conclusion themselves, which increases buy-in.

HOW ATLAN TURNED 52 PAGES INTO A 35% SHARE OF AI CITATIONS

Atlan won a 35% share of AI vendor citations by building 52 high-quality pages that answer complete buyer questions instead of chasing individual keywords. It focused on comparison pages, buyer guides, and decision content that include expert authors, fresh updates, cited research, proprietary data, case studies, and balanced product assessments that AI models can trust. The same pages also perform well in search because 71% of its 3,886 ranking US keywords trigger AI Overviews, which lets one page earn both search traffic and AI citations. Strong content quality matters more than publishing volume because well-structured pages can earn AI citations even when organic rankings are not at the top of search results.

BUILDING AN AI-NATIVE EMAIL MARKETING SYSTEM

Running email inside Claude replaces fragmented workflows with a single system that connects your ESP via API, analyzes performance, generates campaigns, and improves over time. The setup uses Claude with API connectors, claude.md for brand context, custom email skills, scheduled audits, and Claude Design for templates. Data flows into live dashboards built with Claude Code widgets, while competitor emails are tracked via Gmail connectors and ReallyGoodEmails scraping. All tests and learnings are stored in a shared GitHub repo, creating a continuous loop where campaigns and iterations compound automatically.

CHATGPT SEARCH & FAN-OUTS CAPTURE (CHROME EXTENSION)

ChatGPT Search & Fan-Outs Capture helps you see exactly what searches ChatGPT performs behind the 4scenes to generate responses. It's an advanced Chrome Extension designed to capture, analyze, and export SearchGPT conversations. It differentiates between Search (traditional queries), Shopping (shorter queries using SearchApi.io to scrape Google Shopping), and Images fan-outs.

WHY FRONTLOADING YOUR AD SPEND USUALLY BACKFIRES

YOUR AI CHATBOT JUST MADE MY CHEESEBURGER ORDER WORSE

Context switching is becoming one of the biggest drivers of bad AI-driven customer experience. An airport restaurant's QR ordering system asked a customer to switch WiFi networks, create an account, and check topping boxes before a frustrated server stepped in and took the order in under a minute. People still prefer human support to AI overall, though that gap narrows in lower-risk categories like retail and travel where AI already outperforms. The fix isn't more automation, it's building AI that's judged by the same speed and ease standard as the human it replaces.

DISNEY+ IS CONSIDERING A FREE STREAMING TIER

Free streaming made up 18.7% of US TV watch time in April.

THE DEVIL WEARS PRADA 2 MARKETING BREAKDOWN

The campaign treated the movie like a living fashion event instead of a film release.

SCANNABLE PRODUCT TAGS VS. NONE

Adding clickable product tags beat standard product cards by making Klaviyo's multi-product offering clearer and faster to scan.

OPENAI LAUNCHES GPT-5.6 SOL, TERRA, AND LUNA ON APPS AND API

OpenAI has released its new frontier model family for ChatGPT Work, Codex, and the OpenAI API. The GPT-5.6 family has three tiers: Sol, the flagship model; Terra, a lower-cost everyday work option; and Luna, the fastest and most affordable model. The series features higher intelligence per token, lower estimated cost for complex work, and stronger agentic performance. There is a new 'ultra' setting that coordinates multiple agents across parallel workstreams for demanding tasks.

ZUCKERBERG PLEDGES ‘AGGRESSIVE' PRICING WITH META'S FIRST PAY-TO-USE AI

Meta's Muse Spark 1.1 includes a new paid tier for developers. Developers are able to use Meta's model for free up to a point, then they'll be required to pay for access. Meta's API pricing is roughly 25% of the cost of other top competing models. Mark Zuckerberg has described Muse Spark as having state-of-the-art - or very close to it - agentic reasoning and tool use.

HUMANOID ROBOTS CONTROLLED BY SURGEONS DID WORLD-FIRST OPERATION ON LIVE PIGS

Humanoid robots controlled by skilled human surgeons recently removed the gallbladders from living pigs in an unprecedented medical experiment. The approach takes a fraction of the space needed in an operating room and is easy to deploy. The experiment used a Unitree G1 humanoid robot, which has a starting price of $13,500. Unitree's humanoid robots teleoperated by surgeons are still very much in the experimental phase, but the approach could eventually be used in smaller hospitals and clinics that lack the resources to install expensive surgical robots.

APPLE EXPLORING WAYS TO RUN MUCH LARGER AI MODELS DIRECTLY ON IPHONES

Apple has reportedly held meetings with PrismML about how it could use the startup's technology to run much larger AI models directly on iPhones. PrismML has managed to shrink down Alibaba's Qwen 3.6 model, which has 27 billion parameters, to run entirely on an iPhone Pro. Larger models running directly on iPhones would allow for more Apple Intelligence features to run on-device, which could reduce Apple's costs and further enhance user privacy.

HOW GITHUB GAVE EVERY REPOSITORY A DURABLE OWNER

GitHub had over 14,000 repositories across its primary internal GitHub organization. Less than half had clear ownership. This post discusses how GitHub gave every active repository a validated owner in under 45 days, archived the rest, and made ownership the foundation for everything that followed.

STOP BEING THE CODE REVIEW BOTTLENECK

Agents are writing code faster than any human can review. Humans being involved in every code review is a bottleneck. Put humans outside of the code review loop by building a pipeline that delegates tasks to agents. This post looks at power workflow changes that PostHog uses to make reviewing AI-generated code fast without losing quality.

NETFLIX IS EXPLORING LIVE TV AND BUNDLES AS IT STRUGGLES TO KEEP VIEWERS HOOKED

Netflix's subscriber engagement is showing signs of decline. While the company remains the industry leader among subscription-streaming services, shares are down more than 40% over the past 12 months. Executives have started discussing adding live channels that would continuously stream certain programs to bolster engagement. They are also looking at other sports events they can add to the streaming service.

SUSPECTING AI CHEATING, IVY LEAGUE PROF ORDERED AN IN-PERSON FINAL; SCORES FELL 50%

A class at Brown University was giving take-home exams, and the professor suspected students were using AI to complete them. After the professor announced that the final exam would be in person, 18 students dropped the course, and nine others didn't attend the final exam. Of those 27 students, 22 had scored perfectly on the midterm exam. The average test score plunged from 96 to 48 for those who took the test.

YOUR AI MARGIN IS META'S OPPORTUNITY

Mark Zuckerberg is not convinced that AI technology will ultimately become a commodity as some companies are already gatekeeping aspects of their technology.

WAYS TO THINK ABOUT TOKEN PRICING

The current market dynamics point to a future in which frontier models move towards becoming commodity infrastructure.

THE SALIENCE OF DATA

The competitive dynamics in the next phase of AI will likely be defined by the unit economics of data acquisition.

INTERVIEW WITH MITCHELL HASHIMOTO

Mitchell Hashimoto, the developer behind Vagrant, Packer, Consul, Ghostty, and Vouch, talks about terminals, Zig, and open source.

INTRODUCING PLAN A

Plan A is a wish list, a positive vision, a road map for navigating a future where this AI thing turns out to be real.

JOHN TERNUS SHOULD REVERSE APPLE'S SLIDE DOWN THE ADVERTISING SLIPPERY SLOPE

John Ternus should return Apple's privacy policy to its 2014 clarity.

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MUSE SPARK 1.1

Meta introduced Muse Spark 1.1 with improved tool use, coding, computer interaction, and multimodal reasoning. The company also opened a public preview of its Meta Model API for developers.

OPENAI RETIRED ATLAS

OpenAI shut down its Atlas browser and shifted its agentic browsing features into ChatGPT's desktop app and a Chrome extension. The decision followed a broader effort to reduce side projects while continuing to develop AI-assisted web browsing.

GPT-5.6: FRONTIER INTELLIGENCE THAT SCALES WITH YOUR AMBITION

OpenAI launched GPT-5.6, featuring models Sol, Terra, and Luna, with Sol leading in intelligence and efficiency for coding, cybersecurity, and science. The models excel with fewer tokens at lower costs, with Sol notably outperforming competitors like Claude Fable 5. Enhanced capabilities include multi-agent parallel processing and improved design judgment, advancing cybersecurity and scientific research while maintaining strong safety measures.

GPT-5.6 REVIEW

The review highlights GPT-5.6's significant advancements in language understanding and generation, outperforming its predecessors. It demonstrates improved contextual accuracy and adaptability across various applications. These enhancements could substantially impact AI-driven industries.

GPT-5.6 SERIES

GPT-5.6 Sol is the standout model of the GPT-5.6 family. It is the first model to win an ARC-AGI-3 public game. The model is able to read an unfamiliar scene correctly and in the game's own vocabulary. It won the game on ARC-AGI because it correctly oriented itself in a new environment first.

EVOLVING WINDOWS VULNERABILITY MANAGEMENT TO MEET THE SPEED OF AI-POWERED DISCOVERY

Windows leverages AI to enhance vulnerability discovery, reduce fix times, and offer timely security updates. It uses the MDASH scanning system and dedicated cloud infrastructure to streamline identifying and fixing issues. By integrating AI into the security update process and collaborating internally and externally, Windows aims to maintain protection speed without compromising update quality.

Try Flow Free → [12] | Download Flow

FLEXIBLE VIDEO DIFFUSION

Flex-Forcing trains video diffusion models to switch between bidirectional and autoregressive generation through flexible temporal and denoising-step chunking. The approach improves inference speed, video quality, and long-range stability across different compute budgets.

Z.AI'S STABLE ASYNCHRONOUS RL

Single-rollout Asynchronous Optimization replaces GRPO-style grouped sampling with one rollout per prompt, supported by value-model training and strict token-level clipping.

PRISMA

Offers tools like Prisma Client for type-safe database queries in Node.js and TypeScript, Prisma Migrate for data modeling, and Prisma Studio for GUI database editing.

OPENAI'S NO. 2 EXECUTIVE TO STEP DOWN IN LATEST LEADERSHIP SHAKE-UP

OpenAI's Fidji Simo plans to step down from her role as a full-time executive after an extended medical leave. She will become a part-time adviser to the company. Her neuroimmune condition has worsened, and her road to recovery will take much longer than anticipated. Simo's product and business responsibilities will be divided among President Greg Brockman, CFO Sarah Friar, and Chief Strategy Officer Jason Kwon.

OPENAI MAY HAVE MADE A FATAL MISSTEP IN COPYRIGHT FIGHT WITH NEWS ORGS

News organizations suing OpenAI have accused the AI firm of repeatedly lying for years to conceal evidence of infringement that could hobble its defense. OpenAI privacy engineer Vincent Monaco has revealed that OpenAI misled the court for two years about the cost and burdens of searching ChatGPT logs. OpenAI has pretended from the earliest stages of the case that it did not have the technical ability to search large anonymized samples of ChatGPT logs when it had actually already conducted such searches prior to the start of litigation. The discovery may lead to serious sanctions against OpenAI.

CHATGPT WORK

ChatGPT Work is a GPT-5.6-powered workspace that gathers context from team tools and acts across files and desktop applications. It was designed to turn fragmented project materials into finished documents, spreadsheets, and presentations.

cleans them up and handles code syntax. Try free →

MERCOR IS IN TALKS FOR A $20B VALUATION

AI training startup Mercor seeks to raise a round at a $20 billion valuation, doubling from its last $10 billion valuation in October.

ANTHROPIC APPOINTS FORMER FED CHAIR BEN BERNANKE TO ITS INDEPENDENT TRUST

Anthropic appointed former Fed Chair Ben Bernanke to its Long-Term Benefit Trust to help navigate AI's economic impacts.