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Hi AI Futurists,
Andrej Karpathy helped start OpenAI in 2015. He left, taught millions on YouTube how GPT actually works, and built an AI school. This week he closed the school and walked into Anthropic. Let's take a look.
Our agenda:
Top AI news
Karpathy goes back to the lab
3 AI tools to boost your workflow
AI in the wild
AI Investment Report
Best,
Lex Sokolin
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Top AI news
⚡ Google launches Gemini 3.5 Flash and Gemini Omni at I/O 2026 (9to5Google). Flash is four times faster than rival frontier models. Omni does editable text-to-video. Apple has three weeks to counter.
🏭 NextEra to acquire Dominion for $67B to chase AI data center power (Fortune). The combined utility's pipeline hits 130 GW, enough for 100 million homes. The grid is the new AI story.
🏛 KPMG signs a global Claude alliance for its 276,000 employees (Yahoo Finance). Anthropic is now KPMG's preferred AI partner for private equity. The Big Four are picking sides.
🔧 Anthropic acquires Stainless, the SDK company OpenAI and Google rely on (Benzinga). Deal pegged above $300M, hosted SDK shutting down. Anthropic just walked off with rivals' developer plumbing.
💰 OpenAI launches ChatGPT for personal finance with Plaid bank connections (TechCrunch). US Pro users can plug in Schwab, Fidelity, Chase, and 12,000 more accounts. Mint is officially dead.
🤖 xAI launches Grok Build, a coding agent for $300 a month (Engadget). CLI tool aimed straight at Claude Code and Cursor. SuperGrok Heavy is now Elon's developer tier.
🚀 Recursive Superintelligence exits stealth with $650M at a $4.65B valuation (The Next Web). Richard Socher and Peter Norvig are leading a dozen frontier-lab alums to build AI that rewrites itself. Nvidia and AMD on the cap table.
📱 OpenAI brings Codex to the ChatGPT mobile app (TechCrunch). Ship code from iOS or Android on every paid plan. Developer workflows just went commute-friendly.
🛍 Nectar Social raises $30M Series A for an agentic marketing OS (TechCrunch). Two ex-Meta product leads already running 10M brand conversations a week. Menlo led. Anthropic backed it through Anthology Fund.
🛠️ SAP unveils its Autonomous Suite with 50+ Joule Assistants powered by Claude (SAP News). Joule Studio lets enterprise teams build agents with no code or pro code. ERP is finally where the agents work.
Karpathy goes back to the lab
Andrej Karpathy co-founded OpenAI in 2015 with Sam Altman, Elon Musk, and Ilya Sutskever. He left in 2017 to run AI at Tesla through the Autopilot years, returned to OpenAI in 2023, then left again in 2024 to start Eureka Labs, an AI school he called the most important thing he could be doing. Along the way he became one of the most-watched AI educators on the internet, the person whose YouTube series taught millions how to build GPT from scratch. This week he started on Anthropic's pretraining team, reporting to team lead Nick Joseph, on a new effort that uses Claude to design the next Claude. Eureka Labs is on pause. The hire lands the same moment Anthropic is closing a $30 billion round at a $900 billion valuation.
Karpathy spent two years saying that teaching humans about neural networks was more important than building bigger ones. He has now reversed that call and picked Anthropic over the company he helped start. The hire lands the same week Anthropic acquired Stainless, the dev tools company that powered every official OpenAI and Google SDK, and the same week KPMG signed Claude across its 276,000 employees. Anthropic put four wins on the board in five days, and one of them was the field's most public researcher.
For anyone building on top of Claude, this is confirmation the model is about to get better, fast. Karpathy has the kind of public following that pulls other senior researchers behind him, and labs winning the talent war set the roadmap for everyone who builds on the API. If Claude is already your primary model, expect a step-change in quality across the next six months. If your product runs on OpenAI, the question is whether your switching cost stays smaller than the gap Anthropic is opening up. Investors holding either side should watch the talent flow. When an OpenAI co-founder picks a different lab, that lab is winning that round.
Takeaways at a Glance:
Andrej Karpathy joined Anthropic's pretraining team this week, reporting to team lead Nick Joseph
He co-founded OpenAI in 2015 with Sam Altman, Elon Musk, and Ilya Sutskever, ran AI at Tesla through the Autopilot years, then founded Eureka Labs in 2024 to teach the next generation about large language models
He is also one of the most-watched AI educators on the internet, best known for his YouTube series teaching the world to build GPT from scratch
He will help build a new team that uses Claude to accelerate Claude's own pretraining research
The hire landed the same week Anthropic acquired Stainless for a reported price above $300M, signed a global Claude alliance with KPMG, and moved to close a $30 billion round at a $900 billion valuation
What We Think About It:
Anthropic has decided the moat is people, and Karpathy is the most public hire it could have made. He brings OpenAI co-founder credibility, a YouTube following, and a track record of explaining AI better than anyone in the field. The $900 billion valuation is the deposit on a thesis that talent compounds faster than model size.
For OpenAI this is a problem in public. Karpathy was a co-founder and the face of its research culture for years. Senior researchers are now voting with their feet, and the votes are landing on Anthropic.
What You Can Do Right Now:
If ChatGPT is your default, give Claude an honest try this week. The OpenAI co-founder who knows both just picked Claude. That is real evidence about where the field is heading
Run the same prompt through Claude and ChatGPT this week. The model that wins your trust is the one to stick with. You will know within an hour
Watch what people around you start using. Friends, coworkers, your favorite creators. Defaults shift fast, and the AI everyone uses six months from now will look obvious in hindsight
If you pay for any AI subscription, keep your prompts saved somewhere outside the tool itself. Whatever AI wins, you want to bring your library with you
Stop reading "OpenAI vs Anthropic" hot takes for the next few weeks. The real story is in the hires. Watch which names move between labs
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AI In The Wild
AI Investment Report
This 158-page research report provides the first comprehensive taxonomy of public companies, private ventures, and tokenized protocols building the infrastructure for autonomous AI systems. Compiled by Lex Sokolin, former Chief Economist at ConsenSys, fintech strategist at Autonomous Research, and current Managing Partner at Generative Ventures, this report delivers institutional-grade analysis of 100+ companies across 14 critical infrastructure layers. Learn more here.
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