Musk turns up the heat on OpenAI

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Welcome back, Superhuman. Elon Musk isn’t done yet. He’s now offering to drop his $97B bid on OpenAI — but with some major strings attached. And: Anthropic has been awfully quiet lately, but we’re starting to hear some rumblings about what’s next for the Claude-maker.

Today’s Insights

• Claude 4, programmable biology, and math mysteries

• Frontier: Elon Musk turns up the heat on OpenAI

• Tutorial: How to generate video ads with AI

• 5 new AI tools to boost your productivity

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

TODAY IN AI

1. Anthropic’s Claude 4 could be weeks away: The dominoes are starting to fall. Just a day after Sam Altman and Elon Musk teased their startups’ next models, we have new details about what Anthropic’s brewing up. Like OpenAI’s upcoming GPT-5, Claude 4 will take a “hybrid” approach, letting users switch between traditional LLM outputs and more in-depth reasoning. Developers can even use a sliding scale to find their ideal blend of efficiency vs. performance.

2. Ex-DeepMind scientist’s next gig — ‘making biology programmable’: A 34-year-old researcher who helped build AlphaFold2 — the AI-powered protein predictor that won DeepMind scientists a Nobel Prize — is using that experience to start something new. With $50M in funding, Simon Kohl’s Latent Labs will build frontier models that can generate entirely novel proteins from scratch, including disease-fighting antibodies and enzymes. Alums from Microsoft and Stability AI have already signed on.

3. Researchers are using AI to solve million-step math problems: Rutgers’ Ali Shehper says some math problems are so tricky they’re like “trying to find your way through a maze the size of Earth.” So he and eight colleagues created an algorithm to escape that maze with AI. Unlike traditional LLMs, which hunt for the next logical step in patterns, their model goes against the grain, making unexpected and “rare” decisions to study unsolved theorems — including some that have eluded mathematicians for decades.

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FROM THE FRONTIER

Elon Musk cranks up the heat in feud with OpenAI

Elon Musk is twisting the knife. After offering to buy OpenAI for nearly $100B earlier this week, he’s now adjusting the terms of the deal. The new proposal: “We can forget any of this ever happened — but only if OpenAI promises to stay a non-profit.” It comes as Musk and OpenAI are already battling it out in court, with Musk accusing the ChatGPT-maker of abandoning its founding mission.

You might be thinking: Wait, Musk is suing OpenAI but also trying to buy it? How would that work? OpenAI is making that exact argument in its own court filings, submitted Wednesday. In the meantime, the startup’s board has until May 10 at the latest to decide whether or not to sell.

Even without the Musk feud in the mix, OpenAI finds itself at a major turning point: Sam Altman revealed that GPT-4.5 will be its “last non-chain-of-thought model” — suggesting it’s trying to quickly pivot now that scaling up alone is no longer leading to major gains. Meanwhile, the startup is also experimenting with a less sensitive version of ChatGPT that’s willing to answer more controversial questions.

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Arcads AI can help you create ads that look like they were created by real people, without having to hire a professional. Here's how:

• Go to Arcads' website and log in.

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• Copy and paste the script into Arcads.

• Choose an actor for your ad.

• Click ‘Generate Videos’.

• Download your video and share it on social media.

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AI & TECH NEWS

Everything else you need to know today

⏩ Shorts Shortcut: YouTube will now let creators use Veo 2 to add AI-generated clips to their Shorts.

🧠 Memory Boost: Gemini can now remember your past conversations and use them to craft more accurate and relevant responses.

🤝 Dream Team: Alibaba landed a major partnership with Apple to bring AI capabilities to the iPhone, giving both companies’ stocks a jolt. Meanwhile, Apple is saving a special announcement for Feb 19 — potentially a new iPhone SE.

🛩️ Propeller Prophet: GE Aerospace has started using AI to monitor the turbines inside narrow-body jet engines. The new workflow helps mechanics catch problems earlier, slashing inspection times in half.

🥗 Neural Nutritionist: Health app MyFitnessPal is launching a new AI food planner that offers meal suggestions based on your “goals, preferences, dietary habits, and routines.”

💰 Funding: Princeton University spinoff EnCharge, which develops analog AI chips for laptops, wearables, and other consumer tech, raised more than $100M in a Series B funding round. And humanoid robot maker Apptronik, which has partnered with Nvidia, DeepMind, and NASA, brought in $350M in a Series A.

PRODUCTIVITY

5 AI Tools to Supercharge Your Productivity

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PROMPT OF THE DAY

Personalized Cards

Prompt: I need to write a personalized [enter celebration here, e.g. Valentine's Day, birthday, holiday] card for my [relationship or group, e.g., family, coworkers]. [Include information about the person including interests, qualities you appreciate, or any specific memories you’d like to add] Please create a [tone, e.g., heartfelt, funny] message for the card.

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SOCIAL SIGNALS

What’s trending on socials today

💬 Conversation Calculator: High school senior Caden Li and three fellow coders created an app that “constantly looks five moves ahead to engineer any conversation” for you.

🪐 AI New Hope: Filmmaker Kavan Cardoza created an 11-minute Star Wars fan film using Veo 2 and other AI tools. Forbes even called it “the best Star Wars movie in years.”

📉 What Goes Up: Software developer job postings saw a major spike in 2022, but they’ve since returned to 2020 levels — and AI probably has something to do with it.

🎥 Moving Image: Visual artist Raven Kwok’s latest project uses AI to transform screenshots from his webcam into elaborate abstract portraits.

AI-GENERATED IMAGES

Lego Land & Sea

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2. lego, angry ice cream cone man, riding a triceratops, battle
3. lego, Yeti monster, riding a pterodactyl, snowing

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Zain & the Superhuman AI team