Why Big Tech is flocking to OpenAI

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Welcome back, Superhuman

Silicon Valley is like a stack of Jenga blocks. If you take out a key piece, the entire column collapses. That dynamic could help explain why companies like Microsoft and Nvidia are so eager to join OpenAI’s latest funding round.

Today’s Insights

• OpenAI sets the stage for something big

• Tutorial: How to turn books into quizzes

• Chart: What do people use chatbots for?

• Everything else you should know today

• 5 new AI tools to boost your productivity

• AI-Generated Images: Fractal facades

NEXT IN AI

Tech titans go all-in on OpenAI

Everyone wants a piece of OpenAI: Nvidia, Apple, and Microsoft have all reportedly shown interest in contributing to the startup’s latest funding round, which, if all goes to plan, would value OpenAI at over $100B. 

It’s welcoming the attention with open arms: 

• OpenAI might even rework its corporate structure to make it easier for VCs to invest

• Right now, it’s part nonprofit and part for-profit; but execs have allegedly debated whether to fully drop the nonprofit label

• That’d theoretically let OpenAI go public, giving anyone the chance to contribute to its success

Why now? OpenAI reportedly only has about 12 months of savings left — and without help, it could be forced to declare bankruptcy. Other tech companies — friends and foes alike — aren’t going to let that happen. 

Why not? At first glance, OpenAI seems like a bad bet, with Sam Altman himself admitting the company might be “the most capital-intensive startup in Silicon Valley history.” But think about it this way: Without OpenAI, Nvidia would lose a major client, while Microsoft and Apple would miss the chance to incorporate ChatGPT into their products, setting them back years.

What can we expect from the new funding boost? OpenAI appears to be on the verge of some exciting breakthroughs, including a reasoning-focused model that could become the basis for GPT-5. The new funding could be just the push it needs to get past the finish line.

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THE AI ACADEMY

How to convert any book into a quiz with AI

You can now convert any book into a quiz app with AI. Watch the tutorial here or follow the instructions below:

• Go to the Claude website.

• Upload a document, book, or other text that you want to create a quiz from.

• Enter the prompt: Generate a 10 question quiz app from the document attached below. Make the questions multiple choice.

• Click the Run button and your quiz app will be generated.

Pro tips:

• You can customize the number of questions in your quiz by changing the number in the prompt.

• You can also customize the type of questions in your quiz by adding more information to the prompt.

Once you’ve created the quiz, you can also share the app link with others.

CHART

What do people actually use chatbots for?

The Washington Post recently analyzed more than 200,000 chatbot conversations to find out what people actually use AI models for. While we might assume that most inquiries are job-related, the most common prompts — more than one-in-five — turned out to involve either creative writing or role-playing.

Roughly 18% of prompts mentioned homework help, while just 15% were related to work or business. Despite AI’s impressive language skills, only about 2% of prompts involved English help and translation.

PROMPT OF THE DAY

Improve work-life balance

Prompt: Can you provide detailed, actionable strategies tailored to help me manage my [SPECIFIC NEED] more effectively while balancing the responsibilities of my role as a [YOUR OCCUPATION]? 
I'm looking for advice that can improve my work-life balance without compromising my professional performance.

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AI & TECH NEWS

Everything else you need to know today

• Cluster Clout: Elon Musk claims xAI’s massive Nvidia cluster is now online, making it “the most powerful AI training system in the world.”

• Talk to Claude: Set for release in October, Amazon’s revamped Alexa assistant will reportedly be powered by a custom version of Anthropic’s Claude model.

• Coming Soon: A leaked press release suggests Lenovo will soon announce more affordable Copilot Plus AI PCs featuring a new Snapdragon 8-core chip.

• Likeness Limits: California’s legislature passed a bill that, if signed by the state’s governor, would bar producers from using AI to recreate deceased celebrities without consent.

• Movie Buff: The Chinese e-commerce giant Alibaba released a new model called Qwen2-VL that’s capable of analyzing videos that are more than 20 minutes long.

😄 One Fun Thing: Which tasks are advanced AI models already capable of — and which have they yet to master? A developer created a quiz that lets you test your knowledge of what AI can or can’t do — and then compare your results with other participants.

🧠 Brain Food: Researchers recently taught a neural network how to find a type of bacteria that’s often used as nematode food. Then, they plugged their model into the tiny, millimeter-long worms and activated their neurons so they could find the food themselves — essentially creating what might be the world’s first “cyborg worms.”

PRODUCTIVITY

5 AI Tools to Supercharge Your Productivity

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✅ Collato: Turn your meetings into documents instantly using customizable templates.

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✅ Recall: Summarize any online content and save it to your knowledge base where it’s automatically organized.

✅ AI Text Improver: An AI-powered chrome extension to enhance your emails and other texts.

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AI-GENERATED IMAGES

Fractal facades

Midjourney Prompt: fractal face escher 
--chaos 100 --ar 16:9 --personalize f11qr4z --stylize 1000 --weird 5 --v 6.1

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Thanks for reading.

Until next time!

Zain & the Superhuman AI team

Masterworks — Advertiser’s disclosures:

The content is not intended to provide legal, tax, or investment advice.

No money is being solicited or will be accepted until the offering statement for a particular offering has been qualified by the SEC. Offers may be revoked at any time. Contacting Masterworks involves no commitment or obligation.

“Net Annualized Return” refers to annualized internal rate of return net of all fees and expenses, calculated from the offering closing date to the date the sale is consummated. For additional information regarding the calculation of IRR for a particular investment in an artwork that has been sold, a reconciliation will be filed as an exhibit to Form 1-U and will be available on the SEC’s website.

Correlation Data based on repeat-sales index of historical Post-War & Contemporary Art market prices and S&P 500 annualized return (includes dividends reinvested) from 1995 to 2024, developed by Masterworks. There are significant limitations to comparative asset class data. Indices are unmanaged and a Masterworks investor cannot invest directly in an index.