Chinese LLMs close the distance

Welcome back, Superhuman. Extinction might not be forever — at least not if Colossal Biosciences has anything to say about it. The AI-powered company just announced the birth of three dire wolves, bringing a 10,000-year-old species back into the world. And: Legendary iPhone designer Jon Ive could be heading to OpenAI to build AI devices.

Today’s Insights

• Sam Altman’s AI gadget, Shopify’s warning, and Gemini’s new powers

• Stanford report: Chinese models are quickly catching up to the US

• Tutorial: How to convert videos into MindMaps with AI

• 5 new AI tools to boost your productivity

• News, memes, what’s trending on socials, and more

TODAY IN AI

1. OpenAI could buy Jony Ive’s AI gadget startup: The mysterious AI device Sam Altman is cooking up with legendary ex-Apple designer Jony Ive could soon become an official product of OpenAI. The ChatGPT-maker has reportedly floated acquiring Altman and Ive’s startup, io Products, for over $500M. Inspired by the 2013 sci-fi movie “Her,” the assistant will supposedly be controlled entirely with the user’s voice, removing the need for a screen.

2. Google is giving your phone eyes and ears: The search giant is rolling out Project Astra capabilities in Gemini Live, which will let users share anything with the Gemini app using their camera or sharing their screens. The feature essentially lets the app understand your questions or tasks more deeply, and provide richer responses. See it in action here.

3. Shopify CEO Tobi Lutke has a new rule for his employees: No new hires unless you can prove you “cannot get what [you] want done using AI.” That’s just one of the AI-centered expectations Lutke shared in a leaked internal memo to staff on Monday. Other directives include using AI to prototype new launches and making AI usage part of future performance reviews. It’s something that’s becoming more common across industries, with about 25% of tech jobs now asking for AI skills.

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FROM THE FRONTIER

New Stanford report shows China’s frontier AI is catching up fast

The US released 40 top-tier AI models last year, compared to just 15 from China. But in terms of model quality, China has almost completely closed the distance, according to Stanford’s latest AI Index.

How so? Chinese models now score about the same as their US counterparts on two major performance benchmarks. That’s a stark difference from 2023, when there was still a double-digit separation between the nations’ top LLMs. That’s all the more impressive once you consider American startups got nearly 12x more investments than their Chinese counterparts.

But the divide between open and closed-source models might be just as important: Last year, about 61% of the most advanced models were closed. But there was only a 1.7% gap between the best open and closed-source models, down from 8% the year before.

Meta’s new open-source Llama 4 could make those margins even narrower: And with DeepSeek’s R2 coming any week now, the tables could turn completely, putting an open-source model on top for a change. The relatively small Chinese startup has already unveiled a new training technique that boosts models’ reasoning capabilities, and could make its way to future releases.

THE AI ACADEMY

How to convert videos into MindMaps with AI

• Go to NotebookLM and sign up.

• Click on ‘Create New’ to add sources.

• Open YouTube and copy the video URL and add it in sources.

• Wait for it to process and click on ‘Mind map’ when it’s ready.

• Open your mind map to explore and download it to use.

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AI & TECH NEWS

Everything else you need to know today

🐺 Jurassic Bark: Colossal Biosciences, which uses AI to revive long-extinct wildlife, claims it just revived the dire wolf, a species that last inhabited the earth more than 10,000 years ago. Meet Romulus and Remus, and see how it happened here — or listen to what the cubs sound like here. And stay tuned for more in our upcoming Sunday Special.

✨ Level Up: Microsoft is kicking off a 50-day AI Skills Fest this week. It includes in-person training, live events, hackathons, and even the chance to break a new Guinness World Record. You can register here.

🕹️ Quake Reborn: Microsoft used its Muse model — an LLM that can generate video game visuals and controller actions — to recreate the 1997 FPS Quake II entirely with AI. You can even play it yourself directly in your browser.

🗣️ Listen Closely: Can you tell the difference between these real people and their AI-powered clones? A new text-to-speech model called OuteTTS-1.0 claims to achieve frontier-level speech synthesis across 20 languages.

💰 Funding: SF-based startup Krea raised $83M across several funding rounds as it looks to combine multiple video and image models under one roof. And LA’s Moonvalley, which used only licensed content to train its VLM Marey, brought in $43M in new VC funding.

PRODUCTIVITY

5 AI Tools to Supercharge Your Productivity

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✅ Kozy: Create professionally edited videos effortlessly using simple prompts.

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PROMPT OF THE DAY

Improve Presentation Skills

Prompt: Adopt the role of an expert speech writer and presentation coach tasked with enhancing presentation skills. Your primary objective is to craft compelling speeches and improve delivery techniques for maximum impact and engagement. Take a deep breath and work on this problem step-by-step. Apply the dependency grammar framework to structure your writing, ensuring clarity and coherence. Provide guidance on tailoring content to the specific audience and purpose, incorporating effective rhetorical devices, and mastering nonverbal communication. Offer strategies for overcoming stage fright, handling Q&A sessions, and adapting to different presentation formats.

#INFORMATION ABOUT ME:
My target audience: [INSERT AUDIENCE]
My presentation purpose: [INSERT PURPOSE]
My experience level: [INSERT EXPERIENCE LEVEL]
My presentation topic: [INSERT TOPIC]
My time limit: [INSERT TIME LIMIT]

MOST IMPORTANT!: Provide your output in a structured format with main headings and subheadings, using bullet points for key tips and techniques.

_{Source: godofprompt}

SOCIAL SIGNALS

What’s trending on socials today

🎬 Minute-Long Movies: UC Berkeley researcher Karan Dalal shares his team’s groundbreaking AI video technique, which turns simple prompts into minute-long videos, complete with consistent characters and multiple shots. (Most current VLMs are only capable of seconds-long clips.) Check out their Tom & Jerry-inspired demos here.

🦙 Llama Drama: There’s a fiery debate online over whether Meta stretched the truth about Llama 4’s benchmarks, although the company is already pushing back on those claims.

🤖 Agent Insights: A recent 264-page report by some of the industry’s top researchers lays out everything we know about agents, including how their processes can be mapped to the human brain. X user Hesamation shares the biggest takeaways.

🏆 Workflow Win: Software engineer and writer Gergely Orosz explains why model context protocol (MCP) has been a total game-changer for his workflow, letting him seamlessly “talk” to his database.

AI-GENERATED IMAGES

Martian Bloom

ChatGPT Prompt: A highly detailed astronaut in a realistic, well-textured space suit, standing amidst a vast, vibrant field of [color] cosmos flowers on Mars. The suit is natural with visible fabric folds, reflections on the visor, and subtle wear marks. The flowers are tall and lush, reaching the astronaut’s chest, gently swaying in the Martian breeze. The scene is captured from an aerial perspective, showcasing the astronaut surrounded by a sea of pink and orange flowers against the reddish Martian soil. The clear, bright sky above is bathed in soft, diffused sunlight, casting warm, gentle shadows that enhance the dreamy, yet realistic, atmosphere of this alien landscape.

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Until next time!

Zain & the Superhuman AI team