OpenAI's subscription shakeup

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Welcome back, Superhuman. According to Zip Recruiter, the average salary of a PhD researcher is around $113,000. But OpenAI thinks companies might be willing to pay almost double for the AI equivalent. And: A college student claims he beat Amazon’s notoriously difficult technical interview with AI.

Today’s Insights

• Subscription shakeups, mysterious startups, and award winners

• How a student used AI to land Big Tech offers

• Tutorial: How to clone any website with AI

• 5 new AI tools to boost your productivity

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

TODAY IN AI

1. How much would you pay for a taste of AGI? OpenAI’s betting it’s a lot. The startup could soon charge up to $20,000/month for access to PhD-level research agents, and up to $2,000/month for pared-down versions. CEO Sam Altman also proposed remixing the more affordable Plus tier to give users credits they can spend on whichever features they’d like — instead of having certain tools walled off. In the meantime, all Plus users should now have access to OpenAI’s conversation-friendly frontier model, GPT-4.5.

2. Mysterious startup drops state-of-the-art agent: Out of nowhere, a little-known company called ManusAI says it has created the first “general AI agent” — beating out OpenAI’s Deep Research on the GAIA benchmark, a test used to measure AI’s problem-solving abilities. A demo shows the platform screening resumes, conducting property research, and even analyzing the stock market on its own. It remains to be seen whether it’s as powerful as promised, but you can sign up to try it here.

3. Reinforcement learning pioneers win Turing Award: In the 1980s, when computer scientists Andrew Barto and Rich Sutton started experimenting with the idea that machines could learn through trial and error just like animals, they got a lot of pushback. Decades later, their theory is now at the center of modern LLMs. They’ve just been awarded this year’s Turing Award, the field’s highest honor, but they’re split on what their research means: Bardo calls himself a “Luddite,” while Sutton thinks AGI is inevitable.

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FROM THE FRONTIER

Student uses AI to beat Big Tech coding tests

A Columbia University sophomore says he nabbed internship offers at Amazon, Meta, and TikTok by handing his technical interviews off to AI. It’s not that Roy Lee isn’t good at coding. In fact, he spent 600 hours gearing up for the tests. But he thinks technical interviews mostly come down to memorization these days — and that they don’t really reflect how good a candidate is at programming.

The details:

• Lee designed an AI program called Interview Coder that can pass those exams entirely on its own — then he shared it with other job seekers.

• Now, he’s in hot water with Columbia and is even thinking about leaving the school. But he says his experiment shows that the field of software engineering is changing — and fast.

• For its part, Alphabet says it already uses AI to generate about 25% of its code.

But that doesn’t mean the field is disappearing for good: Catalin Pit, a developer with six years of experience, recently admitted he’s starting to get outpaced by beginners who learned to code with Cursor and Claude. Y Combinator’s Garry Tan agrees: “This isn’t going away,” he said in a recent podcast episode. “This is actually the dominant way to code, and if you’re not doing it, you might just be left behind.”

THE AI ACADEMY

How to clone any website with Gamma AI

• Go to Gamma AI’s website and sign up.

• Now select ‘Create new AI’, go to ‘Import file or URL’ and click on ‘Import from URL’.

• Enter URL of the website you want to clone and click on ‘Import’.

• Choose to create a ’Webpage’ with this content and click on ‘Continue’.

• Now select a theme and wait a few seconds.

• You’ll get a fully cloned website with customizable elements and widgets.

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AI & TECH NEWS

Everything else you need to know today

🔍 Reasoned Results: Google is adding an experimental AI mode to its search bar. It’s like AI Overviews, but with “advanced reasoning, thinking, and multimodal capabilities.”

🥊 Packs a Punch: Alibaba dropped a new version of its Qwen reasoning model that it says outperforms DeepSeek’s R1, but with only 32B parameters.

📱 Digital Twin: South Korea’s Newnal AI unveiled a new AI gadget packed with several unconventional features, including a digital replica of yourself and an agent that knows all of your personal details.

🍔 AI Arches: McDonald’s is bringing new AI tools — including monitors that can predict when equipment needs maintenance and “virtual managers” that can automate shift scheduling — to its 43,000 locations around the world.

💰 Funding: Sweden’s EcoDataCenter, which builds sustainable data facilities, raised $478M in equity funding. Quantexa, a startup that uses AI to spot money laundering and fraud, raised $175M in a Series F round, bringing its valuation to $2.6B. And Nvidia-backed cloud provider CoreWeave, which just filed for an IPO, is in talks to acquire developer platform Weights & Biases for an estimated $1.7B.

PRODUCTIVITY

5 AI Tools to Supercharge Your Productivity

✅ PromptimizeAI: A browser extension designed to transform your AI interactions by enhancing and rewriting your prompts in real-time.

✅ Quadratic AI: Chat with your data, create interactive charts, and get insights in seconds right from your browser.

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✅ Gentle Invoice: A smart inbox assistant that uses AI to categorize and extract key details from your invoices.

✅ OpusClip Reframe: Use AI to resize any video in one click.

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PROMPT OF THE DAY

Schedule your tasks for the day

Prompt: I need assistance in organizing my tasks for the day to ensure that I stay on track and prioritize effectively. Your task is to create a detailed schedule outlining each task, its priority level, estimated time needed to complete, and any specific deadlines or time constraints. [insert tasks]

_{Source: PromptAdvance}

SOCIAL SIGNALS

What’s trending on socials today

📹 Rinse and Repeat: VFX artist Rufus Blackwell explains how his team used AI to create a commercial for Original Source shower gels — “all while keeping character continuity locked in through multiple AI-generated wardrobe changes.”

📊 Visual Learning: ML engineer Krish Shah designed an agent that can generate intricate 3Blue1Brown-style explainer videos about any subject.

🔬 MythBusters: Ethan Mollick’s generative AI lab at Wharton tested whether saying “please” alongside each of your prompts really leads to better outcomes. The result: It’s complicated.

🔥 Sick Burn: One of GPT-4.5’s many talents: Roasting industry giants on command.

AI-GENERATED IMAGES

Space Diarama

Midjourney Prompt: An artistic diarama display of aliens in a cloud of nebula, mysterious planets, black background, dramatic drop shadows --chaos 49 --ar 1:2 --style raw --quality 2 --stylize 990 --profile hlbkvpg

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Until next time!

Zain & the Superhuman AI team