😺Microsoft vs Google showdown

PLUS: OpenAI might be hiding GPT-5?!

Welcome, humans.

Here’s a wild theory to start your weekend: apparently, Alberto Romero at The Algorithmic Bridge thinks OpenAI may have already built GPT-5, but is keeping it internal, using it to improve smaller public models.

Romero’s theory goes like this: instead of serving expensive large models to consumers directly, OpenAI and Anthropic could be keeping them secret and using them as “teachers” to improve the smaller, cheaper public models.

This could potentially explain the surprising advances in models like o3. And it kinda explains some wild posts OpenAI people have been sharing lately. For example:

You know the timeline’s getting weird when OpenAI’s safety researchers are tweeting about “enslaved god” as the only good future…

Here’s what you need to know about AI today:

Microsoft and Google forced AI into their office suites.
Apple paused AI notifications over errors.
There’s a new AGI lab called Ndea.
Google + Sakana AI outlined two new potential successors to today’s AI.

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Microsoft and Google are duking it out for control over your workspace

If you're part of the 95.7% of office workers who use Microsoft 365 or Google Workspace, you just got AI… whether you wanted it or not.

Remember that scene in Apple's 1984 commercial where the runner throws the hammer through the screen? Well, Microsoft and Google just threw an AI hammer through basically every office computer in existence.

Both tech giants just announced they're bundling AI into their office suites—with a catch. Two catches, actually: you'll have to pay more, and in Google's case, you can't opt out.

Microsoft's playing nice cop. They're adding Copilot to Microsoft 365 for an extra $3 monthly, but with some thoughtful touches: new subscribers pay the higher price now, while existing ones keep their current rates until renewal.

Plus, if you really want to stay old school, you can switch to their new “Classic” plans.

Google, meanwhile, is going full steam ahead with what we'll call the “resistance is futile” approach. They're rolling out Gemini to all Workspace Business customers immediately—Enterprise folks, you're next month. You get:

Gemini woven into everything from Gmail to Google Meet.
Access to their Gemini Advanced chat platform.
NotebookLM Plus for research superpowers.

Even though they’re raising the price $2 for Workspace plans, the previous Gemini add-on pushed costs to $32/month; now, it's all bundled for $14/month.

But unlike Microsoft, there's no opt-out button in sight. New customers start with AI today, existing ones join the party by March 17, 2025 (small businesses get a temporary reprieve… but that's about it).

Our take: We're witnessing the largest forced AI adoption in history. The real question isn't whether you'll use AI at work anymore—it's which flavor you'll get: Microsoft's GPT-powered Copilot (with its fancy new pay-as-you-go agents and enterprise controls) or Google's homegrown Gemini.

Unless, of course, you're one of those rebellious developers using up all Claude’s bandwidth via Cursor (who, by the way, just casually mentioned they're processing over a billion characters a day). We’re not mad, we’re just desperate for more Claude…

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Perplexity Prompt Tip of the Day

And if you need more sources than that, try Google Deep Research!

Treats To Try.

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News Minimalist helps you read only the most important global news stories by ranking 10,000+ daily news articles on a 0-10 significance scale.
Clemta helps you run your entire US business from formation to accounting to taxes (paid service FYI).
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Persana AI finds and automatically emails your ideal potential customers from their 700M+ contact list (free to try up to 25 leads—neat tool!).
Roundups generates product comparison guides from Amazon that you can use to earn affiliate commissions when readers buy through your links.
Wayfarer-12B is an AI DM for your next dungeon and dragons campaign that’s actually quite mean (as in, prepare for pain…).
Luma Ray2 is Luma Labs’ new video generator that creates highly realistic cinematic videos…there are some bonkers demos on their page.
Software devs are out of pocket…apparently you can play both Tetris AND Doom entirely within a PDF… enjoy!

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Around the Horn.

Great tips in this thread if you use Claude!

Gemini retained ~60% of its paid users six months after sign-up, which is better than Perplexity but worse than ChatGPT + Claude.
Apple paused its AI notification summaries after they generated inaccurate alerts (it’ll be disabled until Apple works out the kinks).
VCs invested $74B+ in U.S. startups in Q4 2024, but ~$32B of that went to a handful of mega deals.
Mira Murati, the ex-CTO of OpenAI, is like, really good at stealing researchers (10+ ppl) from her former boss + other AI startups.

Under the Hood

Check out this deep dive that covers the core concepts, tools, planning abilities, and evaluation methods of agents.
Here’s a curated list of resources for understanding how AI agents can take actions on your computer or phone.
Here’s a list of ready-made “agent recipes” inspired by this article from Anthropic on when (and when not) to use an agent.
Check out this 2025 AI engineer reading list, a collection of 50 essential papers across 10 key areas in AI engineering for practical study.
HuggingFace has a free agent course that teaches you how to build AI agents, and they recently released SmolAgents, their own minimalist framework for creating agents with just a few lines of code.

Intelligent Insights

Google Research Unveils "Transformers 2.0" aka TITANS

Here’s the link to the “Titan” paper from Google that Matt’s talking about in the above video—he also created a great break down of Sakana AI’s Transformer ² (paper here), another “transformer successor” as he calls it.
Prominent AI researcher François Chollet launched a new AI lab called Ndea focused on developing AGI through program synthesis, allowing AI to generalize from few examples.
Quantum computing startup SEEQC raised $30M to develop chips that can efficiently manage quantum processors while making them compatible with data centers.
Professor Dariusz Jemielniak thinks we should add a fourth law to Asimov's Laws of Robotics that’s focused on preventing AI deception and impersonation of humans.
Maxwell Tabarrok argues AGI won’t make human labor worthless because labor has maintained a steady share of 50-60% of GDP over the last 200+ years of automation.
If you think AI isn’t progressing as hard as it usually does lately, think again—here’s a sobering report that shows progress is actually becoming invisible.