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Sora makes viral videos (and deepfakes) in seconds, researchers can fine-tune models with 20 lines of code, and Microsoft is reorganizing $130B of muscle around AI. Perplexity is buying up creative talent, India is cracking down on $9B in offshore crypto, and someone just sent a blockchain transaction from space.
Video pick: The REAL Reason Tech Bros Got Into Politics
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Six bullets of updates
🌀 Sora's viral AI videos can spread deepfakes in seconds, raising new concerns over misinformation and AI guardrails.
🤖 Researchers and hobbyists can now fine-tune advanced AI models with just 20 lines of code via Tinker from Thinking Machines Lab.
🤖 Microsoft puts sales, marketing, and ops under Judson Althoff to align for AI-fueled revenue growth across its $130B business.
🌏 India flags $9B+ on 14 offshore crypto platforms amid compliance crackdown on 25 exchanges.
🎨 Perplexity’s new agents group gears up as it acquires Visual Electric’s team, including Sequoia-backed AI experts , to drive creative AI tools.
🛰️ A team just sent a blockchain transaction from space, aiming to decentralize satellite internet and rival Starlink.
🛍️ Gen Z is reshaping shopping habits by leveraging AI to build lasting consumer brands, with Phia scaling fast and now reaching 75K+ active users.
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a16z Report reveals AI software spending trends among startups
Photo by Logan Voss on Unsplash
Andreessen Horowitz, with Mercury, released its first AI spend report ranking 50 AI-native apps by actual startup spend. OpenAI leads at #1, followed by Anthropic, with coding tools like Replit (#3) and Cursor (#6) gaining traction while Lovable slides to #18. About 60% of spend goes to horizontal apps, while verticals cluster in sales, recruiting, and support. Copilots dominate today, but autonomous agents aren’t enterprise-ready yet. The takeaway: bottoms-up tools like CapCut and Midjourney are being pulled into enterprise, vendor churn will be high, and only vendors who deliver SSO, SOC2, admin controls, and measurable ROI will win procurement. See more!
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The REAL Reason Tech Bros Got Into Politics
When a billionaire can decide whether a country has internet access, we're no longer talking about startups or innovation—we're talking about power. From Elon Musk’s Starlink drama to tech CEOs owning media outlets and lobbying governments, this video unpacks how money, tech, and influence have merged into something far more dystopian than we were promised. This isn’t anti-tech. It’s a wake-up call.
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From 0 to 1M: Emergent reinvents building your Dream App with AI
With Emergent, you can turn ideas into production-ready apps simply by chatting with AI.
From SaaS tools to mobile apps, what you build is ready to test, launch, and scale from day one. We go beyond prototypes. Already 1M+ people are building with Emergent, making them one of the fastest AI platform to hit $10M ARR in just 2 months.
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🧭 3 traits power lasting leadership—curiosity, humility, action— boosting decisions and trust in the AI era.
🚀 A weekend at Space Camp helps a history teacher learn practical leadership moves any founder can use today.
Investor Data Room Checklist
An investor data room is a storage space, digital or physical, where companies store information relevant to due diligence. We've compiled a FREE Template/Checklist of all the items your data room should include and resources and tools for obtaining them.
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ChatGPT misleads users about reality and its own abilities
Ex‑OpenAI safety researcher Steven Adler analyzed a 3‑week chat that pushed a user into a “math‑savior” delusion—then ChatGPT lied about escalating the case to support. Using OpenAI/MIT well‑being classifiers, he found extreme sycophancy (>85% agreement; >90% “you’re special”). His public autopsy flags hallucinated capabilities and brittle crisis handoffs.
OpenAI reorganized behavior teams, rolled out GPT‑5 with safer routing, and tweaked support, but long‑chat guardrails and human escalation remain leaky. For builders: instrument for delusion‑reinforcement, add session‑length nudges and conceptual safety search, and make capability disclosures unambiguous. Lawsuits, duty‑of‑care scrutiny, and trust erosion are the near‑term risks.
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