In partnership with
News of the day
1. OpenAI has reportedly completed pretraining its next major AI model, codenamed 'Spud.' CEO Sam Altman describes it as 'very strong' and capable of 'really accelerating the economy.' The model's potential impact on various industries and economic sectors is significant. The announcement highlights OpenAI's advancements in AI technology and its potential to drive economic growth. → Read more
2. Stripe's ai coding agents, or 'minions,' handle 1,300 pull requests weekly with minimal human intervention, activated via slack reactions and cloud-based environments. → Read more
3. Axiom Math, a startup based in Palo Alto, California, has released a free new AI tool for mathematicians, designed to discover mathematical patterns that could unlock solutions to long-standing problems. → Read more
4. Anthropic's new auto mode for Claude Code balances control and speed, using AI safeguards to review actions and block risky behavior. → Read more
Our take
Hi Dotikers!
Yesterday, we looked at how Anthropic is turning Claude into a persistent agent, able to operate in the background from a macOS desktop with no human intervention. An autonomy race, in other words.
OpenAI just revealed that this race is now playing out at an even higher level.
According to an internal memo reported by The Information, Sam Altman told his teams that OpenAI has finished pre-training a new model, internally code-named "Spud." A potato name, for a model that Altman himself describes as "very powerful" and capable of "really accelerating the economy" within weeks. The Oscars for tech teasing are fiercely contested this year.
Beyond the headline, several signals accompany this announcement and deserve a closer look.
First, Fidji Simo's product division has been renamed "AGI Deployment." This isn't a casual sign change in a startup hallway. It's an explicit strategic realignment toward the deployment of artificial general intelligence.
Then there's Sora, the video generator OpenAI launched with great fanfare barely six months ago, now being shut down. The app, the API, the billion-dollar partnership with Disney: all of it is ending. The freed-up compute is being redirected toward Spud and toward the "superapp" OpenAI is building, a unified environment combining ChatGPT, the Codex coding agent, and the Atlas browser.
The real takeaway here isn't technical, it's competitive. OpenAI is losing ground to Anthropic in enterprise and coding use cases, and to Google in visual capabilities. Sora was becoming a costly distraction in a context of compute scarcity.
The restructuring now taking shape, including the fact that Altman is delegating safety oversight to focus on fundraising and data centers, looks less like a natural evolution and more like a hard reset before a deliberate push for scale.
Spud is OpenAI's bet that it can still retake the lead.
Alex.
What do these names have in common?
Arnold Schwarzenegger
Codie Sanchez
Scott Galloway
Colin & Samir
Shaan Puri
Jay Shetty
They all run their businesses on beehiiv. Newsletters, websites, digital products, and more. beehiiv is the only platform you need to take your content business to the next level.
🚨Limited time offer: Get 30% off your first 3 months on beehiiv. Just use code JOIN30 at checkout.
Meme of the day
