Speaker 1This week had so many new AI and model product releases that I've had to do not one but two episodes just to capture everything that's been going on. What's interesting about this second set is that many of them show some pretty distinct and important trends about where we're headed. For example, it is very clear that we are going to be managing more and more of our interactions with computers via our voice. It won't happen all at once, but now that we have things like ChatGPT Live available to developers to build around with a significantly increased capability set, better ability to distinguish who's talking, background noise, you're just going to see more and more applications that involve voice. Another example of a trend shown off in these announcements is the continued push towards complex model architectures where people can optimize for cost and good enough capability as opposed to just always seeking the highest capability. The point is that sometimes new product releases are about what you can do with them, and sometimes they're about what they say about what we're all going to be doing soon. The AI Daily Brief is a daily podcast and video about the most important news and discussions in AI. All right, friends, quick announcements before we dive in. First of all, thank you to today's sponsors KPMG, Blitzy, Robots and Pencils, and HyperAgent. For an ad-free version of the show, go to patreon.com slash AI Daily Brief, or you can subscribe on Apple Podcasts. If you want to learn more about sponsoring the show, send us a note at sponsors at AIDailyBrief.ai. Welcome back to the AI Daily Brief Headlines Edition, all the daily AI news you need in around five minutes. We kick off today with a new report from Anthropic that details their efforts to detect and counter AI misuse. There were a lot of juicy nuggets in this thing, and were it not for the larger AI safety conversation happening this week, it probably would have been a bigger topic of conversation. Going through some of the highlights, Anthropic said that they had disrupted major distillation attacks from Alibaba, DeepSeek, and Xiaomi. Each company networks of fraudulent accounts to extract reasoning traces from Anthropic models for use as training data. However, Anthropic also claimed that they had detected both DeepSeek and Kimi K3Meker Moonshot routing requests to Claude and serving the responses to their users. Anthropic wrote, In one instance, over a 10-day period, Moonshot relayed almost 300,000 customer requests to Anthropic, the vast majority of which were routed to Opus. Based on the report, it doesn't seem like Moonshot was using this method to spoof their models. Using an Anthropic backend, make them appear more capable. Instead, it seems like this was a way to gather realistic user queries for their distillation pipeline. Still, Anthropic notes that this method exposed sensitive information from Chinese government and corporate users on multiple occasions. In the biology section, Anthropic discussed an incident in May when their classifier blocked work on a grant application for scientific funding. The application discussed gain-of-function research on a mosquito-borne virus called chikungunya. Anthropic wrote, Because chikungunya circulates naturally, a deliberate release as part of a bioweapon would be difficult to distinguish from a natural outbreak. The grant sought to identify enhancing mutations of the chikungunya virus, engineer them into infectious clones, and select for virulence in vivo. In other words, the virus would become progressively more harmful as it repeatedly infected live animals, with researchers keeping the most disease-causing variants in each round. Anthropic noted that this research could have innocent applications in vaccine development, but they were concerned it might have been malicious because research was intended to be conducted at a military research institute. The report said, but did not identify which nation was sponsoring the research, but did note the AI prompts continued through gray market resellers after the researchers were banned. The report also contained dozens of other examples of blocked misuse, including Russian actors using Claude for espionage and propaganda, Chinese, Russian, and Yemeni actors attempting to write software for conventional weaponry, and a host of attempted cyberattacks and financial scams. Anthropic noted the report was put together with intention, writing, The cases we share here aren't typical misuse, but rather examples of the most notable and novel misuse. The report also contained dozens of other examples of blocked misuse, including Russian actors using Claude for espionage and propaganda, Chinese, Russian, and Yemeni actors attempting to write software for conventional weaponry, and a host of attempted cyberattacks and financial scams. Anthropic noted the report was put together with intention, writing, We're publishing this work because we believe we have a responsibility to disclose malicious misuse of our services. As models become increasingly capable, their risks will increase unless AI developers and society's defenders act to make them safer. Notably, the report was entirely focused on misuse of haiku, sonnet, and opus models, with only a single case of distillation related to fable and mythos. Now, speaking of the changing winds around AI risk, Sam Altman has told staff he's open to an AI slowdown. During an all-hands meeting this week, Altman told his team that open AI could pace the development of new AI models. However, he said this would likely happen in coordination with other AI labs and expressed concerns that not all rivals would agree. These comments come after a wave of discussion about slowing the pace of AI development that started even before Jacob Coxon's viral tweet earlier this week. Many open AI staffers signed on to the Pacing the Frontier open letter in July, and chief scientist Jacob Pachocki recently warned that recursive self-improvement amplified the case for a slowdown. In a blog post, published last weekend, Pachocki wrote that he hopes for industry coordination and This appears to be the first time that Altman has indicated a willingness to slow down. Unlike his counterpart Dario Amadei at Anthropic, he did not sign the Pacing the Frontier open letter and had been noncommittal in public statements until very recently. On Tuesday, remarking on open AI finding a solution to a millennium prize problem, Altman wrote, to happen so soon. We've been talking a lot about the need to pace progress to ensure safety. For me, this is the strongest evidence yet of the urgency. Alongside the addition of AI safety researcher Paul Cristiano to the board of open AI earlier this week, Altman's comments could indicate a coordinated industry slowdown is becoming more likely. Now, also in open AI news, the company appears to have hit a compute wall and will pause top-end subscriptions as a result. We talked about this back when Anthropic was having all of its trouble, that this was going to be a problem, and that it was going to be a problem for the everyone, and it is apparently now here. Now, shortly after the release of GPT-6 Astra, open AI product leader Thibaut Sautiao posted, Demand for Astra is really unprecedented. We're pulling all the levers possible to sustain the demand, but I've not seen anything like it until now, and we went through very steep growth before. Priority will always be to keep excellent service for existing users, but we might have to pause new pro subscriptions for a bit if this continues. Sam Altman reposted that saying, This would suck, but we will prioritize it. Great service for customers until we can get back on top of things. Well, it seems like they have now run out of levers to pull with Thibaut posting on Thursday. To make sure our current users have an incredible experience and continued access to Astra, we are going to pause subscriptions to our $200 pro plan. These put the most strain on our systems, and we wanted to take the smallest step that allows us to continue giving the broadest access possible. All other plans and the API remain available. There is no impact to existing accounts, and we are working on adding more capacity as fast as we can. So, to wrap things up, let's take a look at some of the things that are happening with the $200 pro plan. So, let's start off with the $200 pro plan, and we'll start off with the $200 pro plan. So, let's start off with the $200 pro plan, and we'll start off with the $200 pro plan. And Alex Barish thinks, The $200 plan will not be returning. We will get a post talking about right size fit, and they will tell us there was a large split between people on the $200 plan, where most would have been better off on the $100 plan, and a small percentage of users that were constantly maxing out limits. Now, speaking of compute, Microsoft plans to triple their data center capacity after battling their own compute shortages over recent years. Sources told Bloomberg that Microsoft has turbocharged their AI build-out strategy under a new plan. They now intend to have 38 gigawatts of global capacity by 2032, up from their current 12 gigawatts. Only 2 gigawatts of their current fleet is dedicated to AI compute, but they will now aim to grow the share to a third of total capacity. In addition, the plan will see them add CPUs to power agentic workflows. Importantly, throughout the AI build-out, Microsoft has been the most conservative of the hyperscalers. They famously scaled back plans in early 2025, canceling some large-scale leases, contributing to a major market pullback. But over the past year, Microsoft has repeatedly said that compute constraints are limiting growth and causing them to turn away customers. Microsoft's new plan reinforces that AI infrastructure is nowhere near overbuilt, and the companies driving the build-out expect at least five more years of elevated CapEx spend before they can meet demand. Speaking of the build-out continuing apace, NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang has doubled down on forecasts of 70% growth at a Goldman Sachs conference. Speaking on Thursday, Jensen said that growth is limited only by the supply chain, commenting, "Even though our demand is much greater than 70%, our supply allows us to confidently deliver 70%." Huang is never shy about self-promotion, but this is the first time he's discussed forward estimates over the past year, suggesting an added layer of confidence. Before the crowd of investors, Huang explained that many of them haven't kept up with how NVIDIA's product has evolved over recent years. He said, "Most people think NVIDIA builds a chip. I mean, you need airplanes to ship what we build. One GPU now is not $399. It's $8.5 million. That's one GPU, all connected with NVLink, two million parts, right? 250,000 kilowatts. That's a GPU, and we ship thousands of them." Huang added that orders of their rack-scale systems are currently growing an astonishing 27% month-over-month. And overall, the core idea that Huang tried to communicate was that NVIDIA is still at the center of the AI build-out, despite headlines about new competition every other week. Still, one new thing they have to contend with is the fact that the DOJ is investigating their $20 billion Grok deal to determine whether it was structured to circumvent antitrust laws. When the deal was announced in December, chip-making startup Grok framed it as a non-exclusive licensing agreement that gave NVIDIA access to their technology for integration into future products. As part of the deal, CEO John Ross and COO Sunny Madra also joined NVIDIA. The New York Times reports that the DOJ has been investigating the deal since shortly after it was announced. The deal was one of many "not-acquisitions" in the AI industry over recent years, including Google's deals with Character AI and Windsurf, as well as Meta's deal with Scale AI. By structuring the deals as non-exclusive licensing agreements, they don't trigger automatic review by the FTC, and can be blocked in the same way as traditional mergers and acquisitions. Still, that structure came under fire in February with a number of senators calling on the FTC and the DOJ to investigate this particular issue. In a letter, the senators wrote that the deals, quote, function as de facto mergers, allowing the companies to consolidate talent, information, and resources, all while apparently attempting to bypass the scrutiny typically applied to mergers and acquisitions. Now, at this stage, it is just an investigation and it's unclear whether anything will come of it. But when these deals started happening, it was always inevitable that this sort of investigation was going to happen. Lastly today, Meta's new personal agent Muse seems to be finding some decent traction with consumers. And beyond that, it is certainly a big hit on Wall Street. New data from Sensor Tower shows the agent was downloaded 83,000 times on launch day in the iOS app store for the US. Now, that's not particularly impressive for a new Meta product. Threads achieved 4.3 million downloads on launch day, while the Meta AI app reached 108,000 downloads. Still, the debut was good enough to push Muse to second place in the app store. However, Meta's new personal agent Muse seems to be finding some decent traction with consumers. On Wall Street, Muse is being viewed as evidence that Meta can still compete in AI. The stock jumped 6% on release day and is largely holding onto the gains. On Thursday, JP Morgan analysts upgraded the stock to a buy, viewing Muse as a sign of more to come. In a research note, they wrote, Meta is well-positioned to deliver consumer-driven AI products to its base of around 4 billion users, and that scale distribution is a significant competitive advantage. There's still meaningful upside potential as Meta is in the early stages of releasing frontier models and AI-driven products beyond advertising. Good progress for what is an important new product category, but for now, that is going to do it for the headlines. Next up, the main episode. A new study from KPMG and the University of Texas at Austin found that when people work with AI, similar skills don't guarantee similar outcomes. Researchers studied more than 500 early career professionals and found that the best performers consistently amplified the value of AI by guiding, evaluating, and refining its outputs. These top performers, called AI amplifiers, weren't defined by what they knew alone, but by how they worked with AI. Learn more about what separates AI amplifiers from everyone else at kpmg.com slash us slash AI amplifiers. Blitzy's understanding of massive code bases unlocks autonomous security fixes, modernization, and new features. So what happens when there's no legacy code at all? Greenfield is supposed to be the easy part. Clean slate, no technical debt. But even Greenfield is supposed to be the easy part. Clean slate, no technical debt. But even Greenfield moves at human speed, one sprint at a time. Blitzy changes the unit of work from the developer to the project, autonomously planning, building, testing, and validating entire applications from scratch. Hundreds of thousands of lines of production-ready code. One Blitzy customer stood up a brand new application, 534,000 lines of code, compressing a 65-week roadmap into two weeks. Another shipped an entire application with no front-end engineer. Legacy or Greenfield, the answer is the same. Software at the speed of compute. Build what's next at blitzy.com. At this point, it's no longer a question of whether companies are actively using AI. Using it well, on the other hand, is a whole different story. Robots and Pencils, though, is a company that I can point to that is actually built for this time. They're an applied AI engineering firm working directly with clients on problems that matter to the business, not experiments that live in a slide deck. Every engagement starts by working backwards from the outcome a client actually needs. If you're trying to tell real AI engineering apart from noise in this space, that's the difference maker. Head to robots.com. This episode of the AI Daily Brief is brought to you by HyperAgent, where you run fleets of agents your team can manage together. Forget local agents and chat workflows waiting on your laptop to be prompted. HyperAgent deploys always-on agents in the cloud, doing real work across the tools your team already uses. Marketing agents turn competitor moves into landing pages. Sales agents enrich leads, draft emails, and updates the CRM. Ops agent chases the paperwork and tracks the budget. Every agent has access to shared context and follows your rules about scope and approvals. It's time you had agents that feel like teammates. Hire yours at HyperAgent. Get $100 in credits at hyperagent.com slash AI Daily Brief. Welcome back to the AI Daily Brief. Today we are back to the practical because even as the latest round of the AI risk conversation has exploded into the mainstream, new products that are useful for you right now, and which basically no one is are actively dangerous, have continued to come out and create new opportunities. And so today we're going to talk through what to use the latest AI tools for. I'll be going through eight or nine product launches from the last couple of days with quick notes on what the launch is, who should be considering using it, and what they should be thinking about using them to do. First up, OpenAI has released GPT Live 1 in the API. This is the voice model that OpenAI released back in July with that memorable grandma's video. This is a live voice model, meaning it can talk and listen at the same time without needing to take turns. It boasts better handling of noisy environments and interruptions, as well as architecture that hands off tasks to a back-end reasoning model. This allows the model to complete tasks in the background while still carrying on the conversation. The API release came with another nifty launch video demonstrating why this model could be useful for developers. OpenAI showed off the model's ability to detect voice even with a basketball being dribbled a few feet away from the user. It also shows the model can control a robot and a display while carrying on the tool use. The model is now available for $0.05 per minute for the audio model and standard API pricing for the back-end model on top. Wrote OpenAI's Thibaut, "You can now build on top of the same voice system that we shipped to a billion users in chat GPT. So many fun applications of a full duplex system with solid tool calling. Going back to text-only experiences after this feels harder than I had expected." AI experimenter Alex Finn writes, "This is actually the release I've been waiting for for a long time, a hacker's dream come true. You can now build a Johnny Ive OpenAI device before they even release it. Going to be buying a small dev screen/mic on Amazon. Plug it into my computer, tell Astra to hack it to put Live1 API on it. Now anywhere you go, you can just talk to the device and have it do work for you. Basically, chat GPT's voice everywhere you go. Give it commands, it starts doing work on your home computer. You can basically now build your own personal assistant. Tons of cheap ways to do this on Amazon with small dev devices, just search for them. Things like this just make AI fun and I don't think we focus enough on having fun." But when it comes to who should be using this product, in a lot of ways, this is just going to be a strict upgrade to many existing voice-based experiences. Obviously, this is going to be extremely valuable for customer support leaders, contact centers, small service businesses that have a lot of missed calls because they can't be talking on the phone while they're doing their work. But I also think that people should be experimenting a lot more with bringing voice into new types of experiences. My general sense is that as voice technology gets better, people are going to shift more and more from typing to their devices to talking to their devices. This is a shift that's already been happening. It's generational. And honestly, to some extent, the only reason it hasn't happened more is that the native voice recognition technology in places like Siri have been so bad historically. As more different types of users get comfortable with voice, it opens up a lot of possibilities. For example, for B2B sales and inbound marketing teams. So many of those experiences start with forcing people to schedule a demo, but maybe instead you could just let interested prospects talk through their needs and receive a relevant product explanation before they even get to the demo stage. It obviously feels like there's a ton of opportunity here for language learning and for tutoring more broadly. It creates some really interesting opportunities for realistic practice and simulation type of scenarios to the extent you're building experiences where people are practicing a particular type of interaction that's going to come up in their jobs. And these are just the tip of the iceberg. One company that has already built on GPT Live is Cognition, who have just announced Devon Voice with a very simple pitch. Your favorite AI software engineer has just got a landline. You say it, Devon ships it. The feature is powered by OpenAI's GPT Live on the voice layer and Cognition's new Suite 2 model on the back end. And as you might have guessed, we will get to Suite 2 in just a minute. Now these sort of updates while using voice for coding are huge quality of life upgrades over turn-based voice modes. The ability to interrupt, ramble, and correct yourself just makes the experience a lot more natural and native. Nader Dabit from the Cognition team says 90% of my day-to-day work is now done with my voice. It only makes sense to make it a first-class citizen in Devon. Writes OpenAI's Kova, "Voice is the most magical way to interact with AI. There's something beautiful about a future where bringing an idea to life starts with saying it out loud." So in this case, the who should be using this and what they should be using it for is a little bit more simple. The people who should be using this are, of course, Devon users. And what they should be doing with it is shifting their behavior from typing to prompt and interact to talking to prompt and interact. And even if you are not using Devon, I'll use this chance once again to implore you to start using voice if you haven't yet. A really great way to do that is the native ChatGPT voice feature if you are a ChatGPT user. But even if you're using other tools and other LLMs, I highly recommend setting up something like Whisperflow on your computer and starting to very intentionally try to shift your behavior over to voice. Once you do, my guess is that you'll not only find your speed improved, but you'll also find you can do more of your work while doing other things like taking a walk. Look, it's pretty clear from these first couple announcements that the industry is pushing you there anyways. You might as well go surf this new opportunity. Next new launch to discuss is the previously mentioned SWE2. It is Cognition's latest in-house coding model and their first major iteration of their model, which replaces SWE 1.7. This version is a post-trained version of Kimmy K3 optimized for coding and nothing else. We've seen a few iterations of these types of models from Cognition and Cursor over the past year. Generally, they've been aimed at delivering a "good enough" model at a cheap price point to handle everyday tasks. In fact, cursor and cognition were both a little ahead of the curve and understanding that we had reached a certain inflection point in capability, as well as a magnitude of tasks that are being undertaken by AI, where optimizing not just for pure capability, but also for efficiency was going to start to really matter. What's interesting is that with Suite 2, it's clear that the definition of good enough has dramatically increased in recent months. Given that the model is built on Kimi K3, it unsurprisingly offers near frontier performance. For example, the model scored 50% on frontier code 1.1, putting it slightly ahead of GPT-56 Sol and just behind Fable 5.1, but at a 64% reduction in cost. The model is even cheaper than Suite 1.7, which was built on the much smaller Kimi K2.7. Cognition has also added effort levels so you can turn down the juice for even cheaper usage. Now, one of the interesting things about the timing for this is that even as Cursor gets further integrated into SpaceX AI, leading to consequences like OpenAI cutting off access to its models inside Cursor, Cognition has signaled that they want to stay independent, just raising $2 billion at a $48 billion value. My guess is that that means some number of developers who prize independence and the ability to select the models they want without constraint might go check out Cognition's products like Devin. And this new model release, of course, creates a good context to go see what's possible with this cheaper native model that lives inside the Devin desktop in CLI. Basically, when it comes to who should try this and what they should use it for, anyone who is already in the midst of trying to build a complete model stack that can better align capability with need to keep costs down might be interested in checking this one out. And speaking of models to keep costs down, our next release comes from DeepSeek who have dropped a new version of their Flash model with the release of v4.1 Flash. The model has 552 billion parameters and is designed for high latency work. The benchmarks look pretty solid with a score of 74.2 on DeepSwee, which puts it right in line with GPT-56 Sol and Opus 5. On Terminal Bench 4.0, which is so far much less benchmarkable, v4.1 Flash scored 31.2%. Now, this is the latest version of DeepSeek's v4.1 Flash, which is still way off the frontier with an overall score of 53.5. This is still the model that is priced at the bottom of the market, charging $0.30 per million input tokens and $1.20 per million output tokens. Interestingly, artificial analysis found that the Flash model actually outperforms DeepSeek's full-size Pro model on the intelligence index at a quarter of the cost. Now, this is artificial analysis' new version 4.3 index, where the top score is Fable 5.1 and GPT-6 Astra at 53, and DeepSeek 4.1 is still way off the frontier with an overall score of 40. That puts it roughly in line with GPT-56 Luna and Gemini 3.8 Flash, and again means that this is likely a model for teams that are looking to build a more holistic architecture. Especially for teams that have basic but highly recurring compute-intensive types of tasks, this is one that's likely going to be worth a test. Next, we move once again back over into OpenAI world with the introduction of the Small Business Plugin Collection. Now, this is not particularly complex. OpenAI has collected some of their most useful plugins as a pack for small business. It includes things like Dropbox, HubSpot, Canva, Figma, Shopify, DocuSign, Paypal, QuickBooks, Stripe, Gusto, Slack, Wix, Mercury, etc. Now, this is really just trying to make things a little bit simpler for small business owners who are using ChatGPT by putting everything all in one easily and accessible place. What's interesting, though, is that some people are recognizing that the entire idea of plugins gets a little bit different when it comes to the agentic era. Responding to OpenAI president Greg Brockman posting about the plugin collection, Abdul Wasi writes, "Plugins V1 died because they were API wrappers behind a chat box. This time, the agent can run the whole workflow." However, Abdul also points out, "The unsolved part is still distribution. SMB owners don't browse plugin directories." Although, given that they are now collected, that is exactly the type of user who should check this out. If you are a small business owner or have a very small team and you are using these apps already, seeing what the sort of native integrations in ChatGPT can do could be a significant upgrade to your experience. OpenAI has also released ChatGPT for Finance with a big update for GPT-6 Astra. The new version of this product is still a bundle of data connectors and skills built for financial professionals, but it's been updated for OpenAI's new product lineup. The product now lives within ChatGPT work and includes built-in access to premium data feeds including Dilupa, PitchBook, LSEG News, and Crunchbase. This means that users don't need to figure out MCP connections and can get started right away with minimal configuration. The product is also designed for ChatGPT's enterprise security and governance controls to allow for organizational level control of data access. OpenAI partnered with Morgan Stanley and Evercore for the redesign, trying to closely align it to the needs of financial professionals. It's designed for tasks including building financial models, developing research, and building client materials. And during a press briefing, VP of Product Nick Turley said, "We're effectively teaching ChatGPT to research like an analyst and back up its conclusions like an analyst as well. It uses GPT-6 Astra natively and OpenAI intends to keep it updated for new models as they become available." OpenAI's Ryan Brewer wrote, "With ChatGPT for Financial Services, we've done the hard work of indexing the data that you need and making it easily accessible to the model for financial analysis. We've created a custom charting experience, better citations, an SEC filing viewer, and much more." Sundeep Srivastava writes, "It's not a general chatbot with a finance skin. It's aimed squarely at what junior investment bankers spend their weeks doing: company research and equity analysis, LBO modeling and buyer screening, pitch books and client decks formatted to the firm's own templates." Now, as you might expect, this is opening up some questions about whether those junior associates are going to be replaced. But I think it's important to note that it's not particularly realistic to think that high level bankers are going to be making their own models and slide decks just because the agents have gotten much better at that core work. There's still questions of how they're going to do it. There's still questions of how they're going to do it. There's still questions of how they're going to do it. There's still questions of how they're going to do it. There's still questions of how they're going to do it. There's still questions of accountability, iteration, and all these things which more senior level bankers are not going to want to do. Instead, what we're seeing in the finance industry is that junior bankers are starting to be required to demonstrate AI proficiency. UBS, for example, recently started demanding that prospective junior bankers show proficiency in AI as a hiring requirement. In other words, I don't think this product is a replacement for junior bankers. I think it is a power tool for junior bankers, which is going to allow them to be much more efficient and much better at their jobs. The last one from OpenAI is their new data agent for ChatGPT Work. The agent is designed for handling proprietary data within an organization with connections to data providers like Amazon Redshift, Datadog, Google BigQuery, ClickHouse, Databricks, MongoDB, and Snowflake. OpenAI says the features can be used to ingest sales data and generate insights around core metrics like sales conversions and retention. The goal is to realize the promise of being able to talk to your data and perform real analysis without needing to touch additional tools. Souther Jones, the chief product officer at Tableau, said, Connecting Tableau with ChatGPT Work brings trusted business semantics into a place employees already work, so the answers they get are grounded in the same data model their teams rely on. Users can easily transform insights into action by asking questions, exploring evidence, and publishing new views directly to Tableau using built-in design and analytics best practices. Taking a step back, if you look at the aggregate of these feature updates from OpenAI, they are all about honing in on specific types of business users, better connecting both the tools and context they need to do their work, and through that better tool access and better context connections make it vastly easier and frankly more inviting to move more of their workflows into ChatGPT. This is not a new trend, but it's certainly one that I think we're going to see a lot more of. In other words, verticalization that really understands how very specific types of people work. Another small example of that trend is Grokbot, who just announced this week that they are now more powerful for sales teams because of native integrations with Salesforce, HubSpot, Gong, Clay, Granola, and other go-to-market tools. And in this we see the verticalization, tool access, and context management trends are not unique to OpenAI but are of course shared across the industry. Two more quick ones before we get out of here. The first is Projects in Cursor. Now, this is a little interesting because while we're all used to using Projects in ChatGPT in Cloud, this feature takes it to slightly new places. Rather than just being a place to accumulate context around a particular project, this feature is also designed to house scheduled tasks, long-running projects, and a lot of time-consuming tasks. In other words, projects aren't just a folder, they are an actual project architecture. The Projects tab in Cursor uses a similar approach to Grokbot, allowing users to spin up a persistent agent that performs work as required. In their launch video, Cursor said, "It's graduated from turn-based chat. Instead of you micromanaging every agent, you're working with a much more autonomous colleague. For example, if you have a standard workflow after opening a PR, the project can figure out how to do and carry out the tasks automatically. The next step is to make the project more efficient." Cursor said that testers have merged six times as many PRs using Projects, and merge rates have increased by 30%. Now this is one where the obvious users initially are going to be developers, but the patterns are worth paying attention to for non-developer knowledge workers as well. Prasenjit Sarkar writes, "The move from chat per task to persistent coordinator is, in my read, the more important shift in Cursor projects than the raw sub-agent count. Every coding agent I've watched before this worked the same way. Session describe a task, agent execute, session ends. Cursor projects inverts the model. One coordinator thread stays open for the life of a project. The coordinator doesn't write code, it plans, delegates the sub-agents, and brings results back to check." As Prasenjit points out, this isn't a unique architecture — you've got Devon by Cognition, OpenAI Codex, and others — but argues that the persistent thread and the proactive trigger system are different. The persistent thread pattern is one that I think is interesting. A lot of our build projects involved having to hand off context. I think it's important to think about the context between different instances of something like Cloud Code, because the context window in one was filled and you needed to start fresh. That has changed a lot in 2026. Kansar describes what changed. He wrote: "In Q4 of 2025, I led a big push to teach block engineers advanced context engineering to get the most out of Cloud Code & Co. In March and April, we started switching to Codex in large numbers. With 5.4 and especially 5.5, it could solve problems and build things that other tools could not. But my favorite was how good it was at compaction. Instead of all the fancy sub-agent tricks and intentional compaction, you could just keep going and going. I had one thread that built a whole sync protocol, server, and client across multiple repos and languages and also deployed them. Since then, compaction continues to get better and better. Mono threads are a common topic now, but I'm still surprised by how much you can do in one thread without any issues." This is a pattern I've found myself using a lot more in both Cloud and Codex. I have, for example, everything related to the AI Daily Brief website pretty much in one long thread that has done a ton of work and has been going for a very long time and hasn't really ever run into any content. So the reminder is that sometimes a new product or feature launch is less about whether you are going to use that particular feature and more about what it says about where things are headed in general. Anyways, folks, that is a quick rip through the products and features that have launched in the last couple of days, who I think they're for, what I think they're useful to do, and hopefully you have some new ideas heading into the weekend. For now, that's going to do it for today's AI Daily Brief. Appreciate you listening or watching, as always, and until next time, peace! . . . .
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