📖 OpenAI returns to its roots

Read time: under 4 minutes

Welcome back, Superhuman. OpenAI wants to prove it’s still in touch with its roots, even after securing one of the largest private funding rounds in history. Sam Altman says a new model with “open weights” is on the way, but the fine print could make all the difference.

Today’s Insights

• Runway’s Gen-4, AI drug discovery, Apple’s health push, and Amazon’s agents

• OpenAI gears up for its first open-source release in years

• Tutorial: How to create mind maps with NotebookLM

• 5 new AI tools to boost your productivity

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

TODAY IN AI

1. Runway drops chart-topping video model: The startup claims Gen-4 has some of the highest fidelity of any VLM, plus “best-in-class” world understanding. That means it can keep characters, styles, and settings consistent across scenes — solving a major problem that’s made it difficult for creators to generate long-form content. Runway also shared five impressive short films made with Gen-4, which you can check out here.

2. Google spin-off raises $600M for AI drug discovery: Isomorphic Labs is best known for AlphaFold, which uses AI to predict the shape of proteins, DNA, and RNA, earning its creators a Nobel Prize last year. The startup just got a $600M injection to develop a next-gen model that can design drugs for pharmaceutical giants like Eli Lilly, with the ultimate goal of “one day solving all disease with the help of AI.”

3. Apple will reportedly bring ‘AI doctors’ to its devices next year: The iPhone maker is developing an agentic health coach that uses data from your devices to deliver personalized diet, sleep, and exercise recommendations. Physicians on Apple’s staff are already training the new model, which could roll out as soon as spring 2026.

4. Amazon is catching up quick: The e-commerce giant just released a new model called Nova Act that can browse the web and tackle multi-step tasks on its own, similar to OpenAI’s Operator. Although it’s aimed at developers, you can try a stripped-down version here. The AI-powered Alexa Plus just started rolling out in early access, too.

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FROM THE FRONTIER

OpenAI gears up for its first open-source release in years

OpenAI’s Sam Altman revealed that his company plans to release a “powerful new open-weight language model with reasoning” within the next few months. It’d be the startup’s first open LLM since 2019’s GPT-2, which was only capable of basic text generation.

But there’s a lot that’s still up in the air: “Open” can mean several different things, so the startup could still keep some information, including specific details about how its LLMs make decisions, under lock and key. We do know it’ll supposedly be efficient enough to run on “your own hardware” though.

Striking a balance: OpenAI probably can’t reveal too much, as that would risk it losing its competitive edge. But to stay relevant, the model will have to at least be powerful enough to compete with the likes of DeepSeek, whose upcoming R2 could soon be named the best-performing LLM yet, let alone the best open-source one.

What it means: Time and time again, OpenAI has faced criticism for not being so “open” after all. This gesture is its most direct attempt in years to prove that it’s serious about giving developers full access to its models. And you can have a say in what it eventually releases, since the startup is currently collecting feedback via this form. Plus, OpenAI shared even more big news – read on to find out.

THE AI ACADEMY

How to create MindMaps with NotebookLM

• Go to NotebookLM and sign up.

• Click on ‘Create New’ and add sources.

• You can add PDFs, markdown, audio, text, website, and YouTube links, Google Docs, and slides from Google Drive.

• 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

📊 Connect the Dots: Microsoft is bringing AI agents to Fabric, a data analytics platform used by three-quarters of Fortune 500 companies. The tool can find relevant stats for data scientists, then “reason over and understand the data” to generate personalized insights.

🥽 Immersive Intelligence: Apple is finally bringing Apple Intelligence to its Vision Pro headset, letting users rewrite text, generate emojis, and perform natural-language searches in the Photos app with AI.

💰 Funding:

• It’s official: OpenAI has secured a record-breaking $40 billion funding round – the most ever raised by a private tech company – led by SoftBank ($30 billion), valuing the ChatGPT maker at $300 billion. This positions OpenAI among the world's most valuable private companies as it plans to expand AI research and infrastructure.

• Also: Chip giant AMD closed a $4.9B deal to acquire ZT Systems, a New Jersey-based company that designs equipment for AI data centers. Seattle’s Temporal, which helps companies run cloud applications, raised $146M as it expands into hosting AI agents.

PRODUCTIVITY

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PROMPT OF THE DAY

Meeting Preparation

Prompt: Help me prepare for an upcoming meeting on [topic] with [attendees]. The goal of this meeting is to [objective, e.g., make a decision, brainstorm ideas, align on strategy]. Provide a structured agenda, key talking points, and potential questions to ask. Also, suggest strategies to keep the discussion engaging, handle difficult conversations if they arise, and ensure clear action items are assigned by the end. Bonus: Recommend an icebreaker or an engaging way to start the meeting to set a positive tone.

SOCIAL SIGNALS

What’s trending on socials today

🖼️ Reverse Psychology: OpenAI CEO Sam Altman is now begging users to stop generating images on ChatGPT because the feature is in “biblical demand.” “We added 1M users in the last hour,” he added in a separate post.

🏬 Mall Makeover: Real estate expert Don Tepman, known as StripMallGuy online, explains why native image generation could upend his field — and shares how it’s already saved him “months of back-and-forth, and many thousands of dollars.”

⚔️ LLM Matchup: Roblox product manager Peter Yang shares an updated version of his AI model capabilities table, which gives a quick snapshot of which leading models have which features.

📰 Presidential Brief: X user iliane_5 shows how he used Gemini to build his own “personal intelligence agency,” which scrapes hundreds of news sources to write a daily digest about the topics he’s interested in. You can check out the briefs here.

🩻 Ad Anatomy: X user apollonator3000 shared a prompt that can help you extract a “brand profile” JSON (essentially, a file with design elements, images, metadata, and text) from any ad to inspire your own marketing campaigns.

AI-GENERATED IMAGES

Realistic Images

ChatGPT Prompt: woman taking a selfie at [enter location], wearing sweater looking at camera. Photo is taken with low quality phone camera
aspect ratio 9:16 

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Until next time!

Zain & the Superhuman AI team