Musk tries to buy OpenAI

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Welcome back, Superhuman. We admit it: We didn’t see this one coming. On top of suing OpenAI, Elon Musk is now offering to buy the startup outright for an eye-watering $97.4B. And Sam Altman wasted no time in responding to the offer.

Today’s Insights

• AI talent wars, custom chips, and NotebookLM’s expanded features

• Frontier: Elon Musk’s bid to buy OpenAI

• Tutorial: How to generate sound effects for videos

• 5 new AI tools to boost your productivity

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

TODAY IN AI

1. DeepSeek hunts for the best and brightest AI developers: The Chinese startup isn’t stopping at its bombshell reasoning model R1. Over the weekend, it listed six new jobs, each with a special focus on AGI. That hints that it’s going after AI’s top prize — a model that can match or surpass human intelligence. The company has already scooped up at least four Microsoft researchers and is tapping into a growing pool of engineers from China’s top universities.

2. OpenAI is steps closer to having its own chip: The ChatGPT maker wants to become less reliant on Nvidia, and it’s going to great lengths to make that happen by designing its own semiconductors from scratch. It plans to send its custom architecture off to TSMC, the world’s largest chip foundry, within the next few months. At that rate, the chips could go into mass production as soon as 2026 — an impressive feat, considering most tech companies need years to design their own semiconductors.

3. Google opens up access to NotebookLM premium features: Google Labs has been steadily rolling out new features for NotebookLM, its LLM-powered research assistant, including 5x higher usage limits and the ability to customize the style and tone of your notebooks. Now, those features are coming to Google One AI Premium, meaning individuals, not just workplace subscribers, can try them out. It could be a game-changer for US-based students, who can subscribe for 50% off ($9.99/month) their first year.

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FROM THE FRONTIER

Elon Musk’s next big purchase: OpenAI?

AI’s biggest rivalry just took quite the turn. Elon Musk is putting his money where his mouth is — literally — and offering to buy OpenAI for a staggering $97.4B. Sam Altman quickly shrugged off the proposal, writing “No thank you but we will buy Twitter for $9.74B if you want.” But the offer could turn out to be a huge thorn in Altman’s side as he tries to steer what’s arguably the world’s leading AI company toward AGI.

The details:

• Musk and Altman are both OpenAI co-founders, but Musk left in 2018

• Musk has accused OpenAI of abandoning its non-profit roots and keeping its source code hidden away; he’s currently suing the startup to try to prevent it from going fully for-profit

• While Musk is leading the charge, Valor Equity Partners, Baron Capital, and even Musk’s own AI startup xAI are in on the deal, too

• Critics point out Musk isn’t exactly a neutral observer: If the deal goes through, xAI could merge with OpenAI, potentially giving Musk a major financial boost

What it means: It’s now up to OpenAI’s board of directors to look over the bid and figure out what to do next. In the short-term, it could throw a wrench in the startup’s upcoming $40B funding round as well as Project Stargate, its $500B infrastructure plan. Considering that OpenAI could soon be valued at around $300B, Musk gave a relatively lowball offer. But in the unlikely event that the board is willing to hand over the reins, it’d be safe to call it one of the biggest shakeups in the industry’s entire history.

THE AI ACADEMY

How to generate custom sound effects for videos

• Go to Eleven Labs and sign up to get your credits.

• Now select ‘Sound Effects’ from the panel on the left side.

• Enter your prompt explaining the sound effect that you want to generate.

• Click the ‘Generate Sound Effect’ button and wait a few seconds.

• You will get four different sound effects to choose from.

• You can download them and add them to your videos.

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AI & TECH NEWS

Everything else you need to know today

💡 Bright Idea: Apple engineers built an AI-powered, “Pixar-like” lamp that can intuitively respond to users’ hand movements and commands. It could be a precursor to the company’s upcoming smart home device, which is rumored to have a robotic arm.

🎞️ Set Into Motion: Luma’s AI’s latest Dream Machine update lets users seamlessly turn images into videos, “delivering natural motion, realistic physics, and coherence like never before.”

🌐 Address Antics: The mysterious owner of the domain AI.com, first registered in 1993, has been sneakily redirecting its visitors to different chatbots, from ChatGPT to DeepSeek’s R1, over the past few months.

🫀 Heart Smarts: A new Nature Medicine study found that AI can detect dangerous heart abnormalities with 98.6% accuracy, compared to just 80.3% for human technicians.

🛫 Mach Mastery: Boom Supersonic, which is developing the world’s fastest airliner, revealed that it had used a quirk of physics to break the sound barrier without creating an audible sonic boom — a breakthrough it’s calling Boomless Cruise.

💰 Funding: Anthropic is now expected to raise more than $2B in its next funding round, with VCs General Catalyst and MGX vying for a slot. And Canadian investment firm Brookfield will put $20.7B into new AI data centers in France. That’s part of a larger plan totaling $112.5B to attract more AI startups to the country.

PRODUCTIVITY

5 AI Tools to Supercharge Your Productivity

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✅ Remy: Unlike traditional video search engines that provide a list of full-length videos, this AI platform finds the exact moments within these videos that answer your questions.

✅ CreateMyBanner: Transform your ideas into professional banners with AI, perfect for content creators who want to save time while maintaining consistent branding.

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PROMPT OF THE DAY

YT video scripts

Prompt: Write a script for a YouTube video covering [topic/product] for my channel, [channel name]. The video should be [duration] long, and I want it to emphasize [list areas of focus]. The setting of the video will be [describe setting], and the available props are [list props]. The purpose of the video is to [generate engagement/educate/etc]. [Add the product/topic name, type, and key features]

_{Source: narrato}

SOCIAL SIGNALS

What’s trending on socials today

🧠 Words of Wisdom: How does a software startup survive in the age of AI? Paul Graham thinks the key is truly “understanding users’ problems” and letting the rest follow from there.

🇫🇷 Turning Heads: To promote France’s AI summit this week, Emmanuel Macron shared a deepfake montage of himself as movie characters and social media influencers, racking up more than 11M views.

📝 Cheat Sheet: Y Combinator posted a useful video about how to get ideas for new AI startups. And if you don’t have 45 minutes to spare, entrepreneur Greg Isenberg shared a helpful roundup of the video’s key points.

🤖 Agent Upgrade: Cursor announced its agent feature just got several improvements, including “support for custom tools, better semantic search, and the ability to fix lints.”

AI-GENERATED IMAGES

Soccer x History

Midjourney Prompt: a small modern medieval oval soccer stadium renovated with stone, glass, and steel with a velarium cloth canopy roof.

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Until next time!

Zain & the Superhuman AI team