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As AI races toward a $200B gold rush, the industry is learning a crucial lesson: you can’t automate your way to authenticity. Startups like Turing are paying people—yes, real humans—to strap on GoPros and film themselves cooking, cleaning, and making art. It’s not a dystopian reality show; it’s data collection. Keep reding for more!
Video pick: Idea to Exit (and the Most Common Mistakes Founders Make)
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Catch the stand-up comment of today’s issue here:
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Six bullets of updates
🤖 As AI turns into a $200B gold rush, experts warn platforms could fall into the same traps that broke social media.
🛡️ Next year, parents can monitor and block teens’ AI chats on Meta, including fully disabling AI characters.
📵 Messaging limits now cap how many times you can send without a reply to fight spammers on the platform.
💻 Next-gen laptops will feature touchscreens as soon as late 2026, marking the first time this tech hits MacBook Pros.
🚗 Ousted Luminar CEO aims to regain control, floating a buyout plan via his new AI venture after a boardroom shakeup just months ago.
🚐 Stellantis and Pony.ai will pilot electric vans equipped for autonomous service in European cities starting in 2026.
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Why AI startups are paying humans to wear GoPros and do chores
Photo by Daniel Ferrandiz Mont on Unsplash
AI startups are moving away from scraping data online and are instead paying workers to create high-quality, original datasets. At Turing, for example, artists, chefs, and construction workers wear GoPro cameras to record their daily activities, providing real-world footage to train vision models that learn how humans perform physical tasks. The emphasis is on capturing diverse, detailed, and authentic data directly from the source.
This shift reflects a growing belief across the industry that data quality matters more than quantity. Companies like Fyxer have found that smaller, carefully curated datasets outperform massive, generic ones. As synthetic data becomes more common, maintaining high-quality original data is crucial to prevent compounding errors — and collecting it in-house has become a powerful competitive moat that sets leading AI companies apart.
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Idea to Exit (and the Most Common Mistakes Founders Make)
Most startup timelines are fiction. We broke down the real founder journey, from team-building to M&A, with lessons from real founders who went through the process.
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⚠️ Bad advice can sink your startup—VCs meet 100 to fund 1; skip 'quit after 10' and 'spend big now' to extend runway.
🧮 Leaders bet on one do-it-all data engineer; split platform and analytics—55% of work is maintenance, not dashboards.
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Tesla board compensation controversies and Elon Musk pay disputes
Photo by Jonas Leupe on Unsplash
The Delaware Supreme Court is reviewing Elon Musk’s massive Tesla pay package, originally approved in 2018 and potentially worth over $100 billion. A shareholder lawsuit claims the deal was excessive and driven by Musk’s influence over Tesla’s board. Delaware’s Chancery Court voided the package, but Tesla appealed, arguing shareholders approved it fairly. The outcome will determine whether the deal reflects legitimate business judgment or a breach of fiduciary duty. Meanwhile, Tesla has offered Musk a smaller interim award and proposed a new plan that could make him a trillionaire, as the company shifts its legal base to Texas.