I'll pay $10,000 per month for this AI worker

👋 Good morning/evening (wherever you are). It’s Thursday. And hopefully you read yesterday’s email…because if you didn’t, then the email subject line makes absolutely zero sense. To catch you up, OpenAI is apparently going to charge $10,000 per month for a software developer agent. Here’s the quick TechCrunch article because The Information is paywalled.

Here’s why $10K a month is a steal:

• What if you ask it to clone itself every single day?

• What if I make it take zero breaks and work 24/7/365? (should I feel bad?)

• Going back to the first bullet…what if I ask it to make all the clones work for free? (OK…I’m starting to feel bad now)

Besides that…there’s a lot of random AI related news. Don’t worry, I filtered it for you.

McDonald’s is giving its 43,000 restaurants a technology makeover, starting with internet-connected kitchen equipment, artificial intelligence-enabled drive-throughs and AI-powered tools for managers.

Also, does simply being involved with AI cause stock rallies? I guess it depends…but Broadcom has benefited from the historic boom in AI spending (they’re a chip supplier for Apple and other tech companies).

Even Home Depot wants to join the AI party. They’re expanding Magic Apron, its suite of generative AI tools that helps customers find the answers they need related to all their home improvement projects.

See, I told you it was random. But it’s still useful info right?

Here’s the quick hits:

• Google is expanding AI Overviews and introducing AI Mode

  The internet as we know it is changing. We’re watching it happen in real-time. Future generations will continue to expect faster forms of satisfaction (digital dopamine) from scrolling and browsing. Think of it this way…the emergence of AI may eventually lead to the TikTokification of mobile browsing. Do I like it? Not necessarily. I’m just calling it like I see it.

• Meta is targeting ‘hundreds of millions’ of businesses in agentic AI deployment

  Meta’s head of business AI, Clara Shih, tells CNBC’s Julia Boorstin in an interview for CNBC Changemakers that she expects AI to transform every job and every business, including the hundreds of millions of small businesses that use WhatsApp, Instagram and Facebook to connect with customers.

• AI Agents Can Help Businesses Be '10 Times More Productive,' According to a Nvidia VP

  Of course they would say that. But, keep in mind that Accenture, Datastax, and Oracle all use Nvidia's AI to build agents for their companies…it’s worth listening to them (to some degree).

• Turing Award Goes to 2 Pioneers of Artificial Intelligence

  Andrew Barto and Richard Sutton developed reinforcement learning, a technique vital to chatbots like ChatGPT. If you call yourself an “AI Exec”…you should know who they are.

• Codeium released Windsurf Wave 4

  It’s no secret that I love AI coding tools. Whether you’re technical or not…this is a trend you have to keep tabs on.

• Accelerating engineering cycles 20% with OpenAI

  Factory builds the Command Center for software development with OpenAI’s reasoning models. Recent blog post from good ole OpenAI.

The numbers:

• OpenAI Co-founder Ilya Sutskever’s Secretive Startup Is Now Worth $30 Billion

• a16z leads funding valuing Flock Safety at $7.5 Billion

• Quantexa nabs $175M at $2.6 Billion valuation to double down on data analytics for AI

• Turing Raises $111 Million to Accelerate the Future of AGI

• Freed Secures $30 Million Series A Led by Sequoia Capital to Free Clinicians from Administrative Burdens with AI Assistant

• Firsthand raises $26 Million for brand agents

Thought starters:

• Anthropic’s Recommendations to OSTP for the U.S. AI Action Plan

  In a policy paper published Wednesday, former Google CEO Eric Schmidt, Scale AI CEO Alexandr Wang, and Center for AI Safety Director Dan Hendrycks said that the U.S. should not pursue a Manhattan Project-style push to develop AI systems with “superhuman” intelligence, also known as AGI.

• 3 Questions: Visualizing research in the age of AI

  For over 30 years, science photographer Felice Frankel has helped MIT professors, researchers, and students communicate their work visually. Throughout that time, she has seen the development of various tools to support the creation of compelling images: some helpful, and some antithetical to the effort of producing a trustworthy and complete representation of the research. In a recent opinion piece published in Nature magazine, Frankel discusses the burgeoning use of generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) in images and the challenges and implications it has for communicating research. On a more personal note, she questions whether there will still be a place for a science photographer in the research community.

• What happens if you say “please” to AI?

  Here’s a teaser: Specifically, we find that sometimes being polite to the LLM helps performance, and sometimes it lowers performance.

Thanks for reading,

Eddie

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