AI in a Nutshell - Week 40 - $500B Valuations, AI Browsers, and Bots That Buy Things
OpenAI hits a $500B valuation, Sora 2 drops with some crazy-real video physics, ChatGPT starts shopping for you, Claude beats humans at cyber defense, Perplexity makes its AI browser free, and Grok ke
Fellow human, it’s week 40. AI hasn’t taken over the world yet. And here’s your lazy-man version of what went down in the AI world in the past week.
Speed-read: OpenAI hits a $500B valuation, Sora 2 drops with some crazy-real video physics, ChatGPT starts shopping for you, Claude beats humans at cyber defense, Perplexity makes its AI browser free, and Grok keeps climbing coding charts while Elon swears it fixed X’s algorithm.
What You Must Know
Note: You can click the title to read more on the subject.
OpenAI hits $500B valuation → OpenAI just became the world’s most valuable private company, $500 billion after a $6.6B secondary sale to investors like SoftBank and Thrive Capital. Ehmm… they’re not profitable yet though.
Grok might have fixed X/Twitter’s Algorithm → Elon credits Grok for X’s new vibes: fewer bots, more relatable posts, and a better feed overall. I didn’t think much of it until I saw his post… then realized my timeline has been better lately. I’m actually seeing stuff I care about again. Nice one, Grok.
OpenAI drops Sora 2: video magic gets real → The new Sora nails realistic motion, physics, and synced audio. There’s even a Cameo app for remixing yourself into videos. For now, it’s invite-only, and I’m yet to get my hands on one.
ChatGPT now handles your shopping spree → ChatGPT’s new Instant Checkout lets you buy products. I’ve not tried it personally, but I hope it actually solves some of the shortcomings I mentioned in this article → Unpopular Opinion → AI Agents for Everyday Use is “Not There” Yet.
Claude beats humans at cyber defense → Claude crushed cybersecurity competitions, finding code bugs faster than human teams. Sonnet 4.5 is doing most of the heavy lifting; it’s cheap, fast, and unnervingly good at spotting problems before hackers do. But guess what? Hackers have AI too :(
Meta will use AI chats to personalize ads → Meta says starting Dec 16, it’ll use your Meta AI conversations to improve Facebook and Instagram’s recommendations and ads. So yes, your small talk with Meta AI might soon sell you sneakers.
What’s Good to Know
Note: You can click the title to read more on the subject.
Perplexity’s AI browser, Comet, goes global and free → After a long waitlist, Comet is now available to everyone, free. I’ve tried it, but I didn’t find a really strong use case for it. Maybe you will.
AI startup spending report: who’s getting the money → Data from 200,000+ startups shows OpenAI and Freepik dominate 60% of AI tool spend. Vertical tools like Cognition (AI “employees”) and Replit (AI dev tools) are growing fast. To be honest, I didn’t expect to see Freepik on that list.
Claude joins the Slack squad → Claude now lives inside Slack. It can read channel history, summarise threads, draft messages, and prep meeting notes. They claimed it’s available for paid Slack plans, which is fine, because unpaid users probably don’t attend meetings anyway.
Grok Code crushes the coding charts → Grok Code now owns 57% of coding traffic on OpenRouter, beating every rival combined. “Fast 1” is the most used, and Elon is bragging that developers can’t stop using it.
Study: AI isn’t killing jobs in the U.S. (yet) → A U.S. study found no evidence that generative AI is reducing total employment, at least for now. The bigger story: it’s changing what people do at work more than taking jobs away.
AI Tools Worth Knowing
Comet API → All AI Models in One API.
Snapdeck → AI-powered slide generation.
Crustdata → Find reliable company and people data for AI applications.
Genstore → Build your own mini store with AI.
Latitude → Build an agent with an agent.
Kaizen Corner - How To Explain MCP (Model Context Protocol) To An Absolute Idiot
MCP is a way for AI tools, apps, and models to communicate with each other in one standard language instead of having their own weird integration methods.
I wrote a full explainer about it last week. Find it here → How To Explain MCP (Model Context Protocol) To An Absolute Idiot
Meme of the Week
That’s your week in AI.
If you learned something, tell a friend. And if you didn’t, blame yourself.
Until next Sunday,
Kay - your fellow human
P.S. If this email lands in spam, that’s your inbox trying to stop you from staying plugged in. Fix it.