AI in a Nutshell - Week 49 - OpenAI Declares "Code Red", Mistral Drops New Models, and Anthropic Interviews Its Own Users
OpenAI declares “Code Red” as Google threatens to take over, Mistral unveils open-source Mistral 3 models, Anthropic plans to use AI to interview its own users and HSBC partners with Mistral.
Fellow human, it’s week 49. 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.
Summary for extra-lazy people: OpenAI declares “Code Red” as Google threatens to take over, Mistral unveils open-source Mistral 3 models, Anthropic plans to use AI to interview its own users, and HSBC partners with Mistral.
What You Must Know
Anthropic Said Their Engineers Now Use Claude for 60% of Tasks → They claimed that internally, employees self-report using Claude in 60% of their work and achieving a 50% productivity boost. In my last article, I asked a question relating to this. You should check it out.
OpenAI Declares “Code Red” for ChatGPT → OpenAI CEO Sam Altman sent an internal memo declaring “Code Red”, i.e, halting non-essential projects to focus on improving ChatGPT. Why? Google’s Gemini 3 has been hot on the charts, beating ChatGPT on several benchmark tests. I remember years ago when Google declared its own “Code Red” upon ChatGPT's launch. It’s a battle for the fittest 😎
Mistral Unveils New AI Models → Mistral announced Mistral 3, their most capable model yet, with 41B active and 675B total parameters. I’ve actually never gotten to retry Mistral since their initial launch, and the only thing I remember is that I liked their brand colour 😃. I guess it’s worth checking out now.
Anthropic Will Use AI to Interview Its Own Users → In a week-long pilot, an AI system will interview users about how they use AI and what they worry about, with each session lasting 10-15 minutes. I find it interesting… using AI to understand how people feel about AI 😎
HSBC Signs Multi-Year Deal with Mistral AI → HSBC (my favourite bank, actually 🙂) announced a multi-year partnership with Mistral to integrate AI tools across the bank’s operations. I’m guessing they chose Mistral due to the European data-seriousness culture and Mistral’s open-source advantage.
What’s Good to Know
Runway Unveils Gen-4.5 Text-to-Video Model → They claim it has “unprecedented” accuracy for physics, motion, and visual detail. To put that in non-alien words, it can produce more realistic and consistent clips from prompts.
Google Releases Deep Think for Gemini → This allows the model to spend more time reasoning through complex problems before responding. Similar to OpenAI’s o1 reasoning models. According to Reddit people, it performs well on difficult tasks that require multi-step thinking.
OpenAI Partners with Cursor’s Agent to Improve Codex Models → Cursor has become one of the most popular AI coding assistants, and I believe this partnership means OpenAI will get better data on how developers actually use AI for code.
NotebookLM Expands Character Limit for Chat Customization → From 500 to 10,000 characters. This means you can give much more detailed instructions on how you want the AI to behave when analyzing your documents.
Money Moves This Week
💰 Lumoo raised €6.5 million in angel funding to develop its AI retail and e-commerce platform.
💰 Imper.ai raised $28 million in equity funding to advance its cybersecurity solutions.
💰 Lumia Security Inc. raised $18 million in seed funding to build its AI-powered cybersecurity platform.
💰 Hyperpilot raised £2 million in pre-seed funding to develop its AI automation technology.
💰 Guide Labs raised $9 million in seed funding to build its AI platform.
Kaizen Corner → Unpopular Opinion: Notion’s AI is Underwhelming
I’ve been using Notion every day for years, and when they added AI features, I was excited.
But actually, it’s just... meh.
When it summarises, it’s basic. If you need it to generate a database, it hallucinates. And above all, it’s just TOO EXPENSIVE.
Don’t get me wrong, it works. The problem isn’t that it’s bad. It’s just okay in a world where “okay” doesn’t cut it anymore.
Maybe I’m being too harsh. Maybe the integration is the value, having AI right there in your notes without switching tabs. But honestly? I can achieve the same with ChatGPT Atlas and other AI browsers. Regardless, AI tools should genuinely be better at their jobs, not just conveniently located.
I hope it gets better; it doesn’t necessarily affect my Notion usage. In fact, I’m writing this in Notion :)
Meme of the Week
That’s your week in AI.
If you learned something new, 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.
Quick Note: I’m not an expert, I’m just a curious normie navigating the world of AI (like you). Every Sunday morning, I wake up super early (before the kid wakes up), go online, and read about AI, like my dad used to read newspapers back in the day. Then I write down everything new I discovered and turn it into this newsletter for anyone else who’s curious enough to read it. Why? Because I learn faster and understand deeper when I have to put it in writing. I’m welcome.