😺The Neuron acquired 🚨

PLUS: Grok 3, explained.

Welcome, humans.

Some exciting news from Noah: The Neuron has been acquired by TechnologyAdvice!

This feels absolutely surreal to write. Two years ago, when ChatGPT launched, we dropped everything to go all-in on a simple mission: make people smarter on AI.

Fast forward to today:

500K+ of you read our newsletter every morning.
Our content has reached over 60M views across newsletter and web.
20K+ students have learned AI through our courses.

But here's what matters most: The Neuron you know and love isn't going anywhere. Same honest takes, same cat memes, same commitment to helping you navigate AI without the hype or jargon.

In fact, it's about to get even better. With TechnologyAdvice's support, The Neuron will expand to bring you:

More in-depth newsletter content on AI tools and trends.
New web tutorials and product reviews.
And yeah... that podcast you've been asking about might just make a comeback. 👀

If you’re interested, you can check out the full acquisition news here. Thank you to each and every one of you for being part of this journey. The next chapter is going to be amazing!

P.S. If you're an IT, cybersecurity, networking, or AI enthusiast (if you're not, we've clearly failed you), check out our new sister publications like TechRepublic, eWeek, eSecurity Planet, and TechnologyAdvice.com – and be sure to check out the TechRepublic newsletters for developers, security professionals, project managers, data nerds, gadget geeks, and more.

P.P.S. If you're part of a B2B marketing team that wants to reach IT leaders and business decision-makers across even more newsletters and tech media sites, check out TechnologyAdvice's Marketing Solutions to learn about their advertising, lead generation, and custom content creation services for B2B tech companies.

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

Everything you nee to know about Grok 3.
HP bought Humane assets for $116M.
Ilya could raise $1B at $30B valuation and Mira Murati unveiled her startup.
OpenAI created a coding benchmark SWE-Lancer.

Advertise in The Neuron here.

Let’s talk about Grok—the world’s new top AI?

On Monday, Elon livestreamed the announcement of Grok 3, xAI’s latest chatbot. And according to all the “early” benchmarks, the thing is a beast:

xAI says it outperforms Gemini-2 Pro, DeepSeek V3, Claude 3.5 Sonnet, and GPT 4o.
Has a “Think Mode” for reasoning and “Big Brain Mode” for harder problems.
Includes DeepSearch—Grok’s version of “Deep Research.”
There’s a mini version, API coming later, and eventually, it’ll get open-sourced.

It turns out that the mystery chatbot in the LLM Arena named Chocolate was in fact “Early Grok-3”. And according to “early voting”, it’s now ranked #1 in the arena.

Here’s some early takes (mostly from X users):

Grok 3 isn’t as consistent as o3-mini and Claude 3.5 Sonnet at coding (part 2).
Grok 3 IS good at video games—here’s Portal 2, and here’s Mario lite.
Andrej Karpathy thinks it's equal to ChatGPT o1 Pro (which costs $200 a month).

Many people think Grok 3 is particularly impressive (thanks to Elon’s Colossus supercomputer) considering how late in the game xAI started.

Also… to whoever made this… you’re out of control.

Now here’s the problem: Many people don’t trust Elon. We were shocked to find a lot of people don’t even trust Google (call it “the Spite Coefficient”). So even if xAI released the best performing AI model of all time (as it claims to be), the likelihood of mass adoption would be somewhat curbed (by the spite).

Not only that: right now, to use Grok 3, you have to be an X Premium+ subscriber (for $40 a month, or $32.92 if billed annually). That might be $160 a month less than o1 Pro, but it’s still a lot.

Here’s why “open source” matters: DeepSeek as a competitor to OpenAI can be seen as also deeply untrustworthy; it’s failed multiple safety tests, its app has an overly invasive privacy policy (it’ll take whatever data you give it), and it’s a Chinese model that launched in the middle of an AI turf war between China and the US.

All that doesn’t matter for DeepSeek R1’s adoption—because it's open source. Anyone can take the code, run it on their machine, and even if it doesn’t perform as well as the cloud-hosted version, can still safely host it locally and offline.

If Elon delivers on his promise that Grok 3 will eventually be open-source, then Grok might have a chance. But if people still don’t use Gemini because they can’t trust Google… It's gonna be an uphill battle.

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Hightouch creates personalized marketing campaigns from your data, testing thousands of variations to find what each customer responds to (raised $80M).
Luminance helps you generate, negotiate, and analyze your legal contract work from directly inside Microsoft Word (raised $75M).
Webdraw empowers you to customize and launch AI apps in seconds by remixing from thousands of ready-made templates.
AndSend combines your LinkedIn, email and CRM messages to help you write better follow-ups and close more deals from your network.
Tanka remembers your team's entire conversation history across all channels to help you write smarter replies, track tasks, and prevent knowledge loss.

See our top 51 AI Tools for Business here!

*This is sponsored content. Advertise in The Neuron here.

Around the Horn.

HP will acquire the AI Pin startup Humane for $116M—the software, the IP, and most of the team… but not the Pin.
Safe SuperIntelligence, Inc could be about to raise $1B at a $30B valuation—that’s the startup of Ex-OpenAI Chief Scientist Ilya Sutskever.
Ex-OpenAI CTO Mira Murati went public with her new startup, Thinking Machines Lab, which will focus on three things: AI customization, AI infrastructure, and open research.
OpenAI introduced SWE-Lancer, a $1M benchmark testing AI models on 1,400+ real freelance coding tasks—current AI models failed most tests (paper).
Investors in South Korea will invest $10B in a new AI data center with up to 3GW of power, and could scale the investment to reach $35B.

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