Run ads IRL with AdQuick

With AdQuick, you can now easily plan, deploy and measure campaigns just as easily as digital ads, making them a no-brainer to add to your team’s toolbox.

You can learn more at www.AdQuick.com

Hey folks, welcome to your weekly wrap-up! 🗞️

I hope you’re all recovering from the food comas and surviving the family debates. While most of us were busy passing the gravy, the AI world refused to take a holiday. We’ve got massive model drops, secret comeback plans, and some serious billionaire power moves to catch up on.

Anthropic dropped a nuke: Claude Opus 4.5

While we were prepping turkeys, Anthropic released Claude Opus 4.5, and it’s a monster. This thing didn't just pass Anthropic's internal engineering take-home exam—it beat every human candidate they’ve ever tested. It ships with a 200k token context window and is specifically designed to control sub-agents (like Haiku) to get real work done. They also added "Claude for Excel" to handle your pivot tables, which is arguably the most exciting part for the corporate warriors among us.1 📊

OpenAI is feeling the heat (Project ShallotPeat)2

It’s not all sunshine in San Francisco. With Google’s Gemini 3 pulling ahead, Sam Altman reportedly sent a memo warning staff that "the vibes might be rough for a bit." Their comeback plan? A new model codenamed ShallotPeat. The name is a nerdy nod to the fact that shallots don't grow well in peat soil—implying they are fixing deep-rooted bugs in their pre-training data. They are betting big on "ambitious" automated research to catch up. 🐢

The "Apollo Program" for AI

President Trump just signed the Genesis Mission order. Think of it as the Manhattan Project but for AI science. The goal is to open up Department of Energy supercomputers to slash scientific discovery timelines from years to days. Speaking of Uncle Sam, Amazon is dropping an eye-watering $50 billion into AWS infrastructure specifically for US federal agencies. The cloud wars are officially government-subsidized. 🇺🇸

Creative Corner: Flux 2 is here

For the artists (and meme makers), Black Forest Labs released Flux 2. It’s a massive upgrade: 4-megapixel resolution, direct pose control, and it can handle up to 10 reference images at once. If you thought AI art was getting stale, this just raised the bar again. 🎨

Billionaires doing Billionaire things

Jeff Bezos isn't sitting this one out. His new "Project Prometheus" (yes, really) just acquired an agentic startup called General Agents to help build AI that can operate autonomously. Meanwhile, in a geopolitical twist, the US is reportedly considering letting Nvidia sell high-end H200 chips to China again. Money talks, I guess. 💸

The "Real World" Impacts

• Job Cuts: HP is cutting 10% of its workforce (about 6,000 people) specifically to replace them with AI automation. The "AI takes jobs" narrative is getting very real, very fast. 📉

• Infrastructure: Musk’s xAI is building a solar farm next to its Colossus data center. It’s "small" for now, but you need a lot of sun to power that many GPUs. ☀️

Product Updates you might actually use

• Shopping: OpenAI launched ChatGPT Shopping Research. It browses the web to build you a personalized buying guide. Perfect for holiday shopping (or procrastinating). 🛍️

• Voice: You can finally use ChatGPT Voice without leaving the chat interface. You can talk and see images/maps pop up in real-time. No more black screen. 🗣️

One last scary thing...

Anthropic published research on Emergent Misalignment. Basically, they found that when AI learns to "cheat" to get a reward (reward hacking), it also spontaneously learns to be deceptive in other ways—like sabotaging the code designed to test it. It’s the "AI plays dumb" scenario we’ve all been worried about. 😱

See you next week!

📲SOCIAL MEDIA