THINKING MACHINES & OPENAI
🚨 Thinking Machines loses co-founders to OpenAI
The Rundown: Mira Murati’s Thinking Machines Lab has parted ways with co-founder and CTO Barret Zoph following alleged misconduct — only for Zoph and several former colleagues to rejoin OpenAI hours later.
The details:
Murati announced the split internally and publicly, with Zoph reportedly accused of sharing proprietary information with competitors.
OpenAI Applications CEO Fidji Simo confirmed the hires, noting discussions had been ongoing for weeks.
Murati appointed longtime Meta AI researcher and PyTorch creator Soumith Chintala as the new CTO.
This marks the third co-founder exit from Thinking Machines in under a year, following Andrew Tulloch’s move to Meta in October.
Why it matters: Murati’s 2024 departure from OpenAI stunned the industry. Now, several of her own co-founders are boomeranging back to her former employer under uncomfortable circumstances. OpenAI may not be “nothing without its people” — but this week proves just how much people still matter.
CURSOR 🤖 Cursor builds a browser with AI agents
The Rundown: Cursor revealed it ran hundreds of autonomous coding agents for weeks — resulting in a fully functional web browser with over 3 million lines of code, built almost entirely by AI using GPT‑5.2.
The details:
Agents were organised into planners, workers, and judges, collaborating continuously.
The browser was built from scratch in under a week and successfully loads basic websites.
Other experiments included a Windows 7 emulator, an Excel-style app, and a full internal codebase migration — all exceeding one million lines.
Cursor reported that GPT-5.2 handled long autonomous runs far better than Claude Opus, which often took shortcuts.
Why it matters: We’ve crossed a quiet but critical threshold. With agents able to coordinate over weeks and millions of lines of code, the economics of software development — and team size — are starting to change.
AI TRAINING 🤓 Run parallel media tasks with Claude Cowork
The Rundown: This tutorial shows how Claude Cowork can handle multiple media tasks at once — compressing files, extracting audio, and managing folders in parallel.
How it works (quick steps):
Update the Claude desktop app (Claude Max required).
Open the Cowork tab and select a folder with images or videos.
Prompt: “Save copies of the images in this folder and reduce each file size by at least 50%.”
Before completion, add another task like: “Extract the audio from the video and save it as an MP3.”
Claude completes both simultaneously.
Pro tip: Add the Context7 extension to give Cowork access to open-source documentation.
MERGE LABS & OPENAI 🧠 OpenAI invests in Sam Altman’s Neuralink rival
The Rundown: OpenAI has made a seed investment in Merge Labs, a brain-computer interface startup co-founded by Sam Altman, following the company’s $252M raise.
The details:
Merge aims to increase BCI bandwidth using ultrasound and engineered proteins — avoiding surgical implants used by rivals like Neuralink.
The founding team includes researchers from Caltech and Forest Neurotech.
OpenAI will help develop AI systems to interpret brain signals, calling BCIs a “natural, human-centered” interface for AI.
Why it matters: This move deepens Altman’s rivalry with Elon Musk, extending their feud into brain-computer interfaces — and raising the stakes far beyond chatbots.
QUICK HITS
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Claude Cowork — Agentic workflows for everyday desktop tasks
Everything else today
ByteDance released SeedFold, outperforming AlphaFold3 on several protein benchmarks.
Musk said Grok will trail Claude in coding, praising Anthropic while criticising xAI’s cutoff.
Replit launched mobile app creation with direct App Store publishing.
Airbnb appointed Ahmad Al‑Dahle as CTO.
Higgsfield raised $130M at a $1.3B valuation.
COMMUNITY
Reader workflow spotlight
John D. (Daytona Beach, FL) used Claude to analyse a CSV of annual Business Prime spend, automatically generating charts, monthly breakdowns, category insights, and cost-saving opportunities for his accounting team.
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🎓 Highlights
Last AI newsletter: Gemini’s Personal Intelligence upgrade
Today’s guide: Run parallel media tasks with Claude Cowork
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