Curb Your AI Enthusiasm

Hello, and happy Sunday! You might still be recovering from Thanksgiving dinner, but OpenAI is already counting down to Christmas—or, Shipmas. More on that, as well as everything we published this week (including a new content format) and the latest tech and business news, below. Also ICYMI, paid Every subscribers are invited to attend a workshop on December 10 by Sublime founder Sari Azout about building your knowledge library for creative work. Sign up to secure your spot.—Kate Lee

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Knowledge base

“The Religion of Ramp” by Evan Armstrong/Napkin Math: Boring business software doesn’t usually inspire devotion, but Ramp became one of the fastest-growing startups ever by preaching the most unsexy gospel in tech: helping companies spend less money. CEO Eric Glyman built a $7.6 billion expense management software company not by maximizing customer spending and growth hacks, but by turning "save time and money" into a corporate mantra that permeates every decision. Read this if you want to understand how mission-driven companies actually work. 📑 This is an Extendable Article—read it on our website to chat with the source material.

“Introducing Extendable Articles” by Dan Shipper: Great stories make you want to go deeper—to explore the interviews, dig into the research, and find the gems that didn't make the final cut. Now you can: We've built a new way to read that lets you chat directly with the source material behind the story. Extendable Articles unlock our research—interview transcripts, videos, and background reading—so you can dive into what interests you most. Read this to see how we're expanding what an article can be, and check out our first Extendable Article, Evan’s deep dive on Ramp. 

“AI Isn’t Your God—But It Might Be Your Intern” by Rhea Purohit/Learning Curve: We may all be guilty of expecting miracles with AI technology, but your chatbot is more like an enthusiastic intern than an omniscient being. Weaving together anecdotes—such as NASA's "plucky" Mars helicopter and the title character of Jonathan Swift's Gulliver’s Travels—and technical lore like the Turing Test and Chinese room argument, Rhea explains why we keep overestimating AI's abilities while underestimating how much guidance it needs. Read this if you want to stop feeling disappointed by AI tools and start getting the most out of them. 

🎧 “Do 60-Minute Coding Tasks in 60 Seconds—With AI” by Dan Shipper/AI & I: Remember when building an app with AI took an hour? Those were the dark ages of…January. In this episode of AI & I, Steve Krouse, founder of developer cloud platform Val Town, demos Townie, an AI assistant that can build functional apps in less than a minute. Steve shares his take on why Val Town is focusing on being the backend infrastructure that sophisticated developers need, rather than chasing the no-code AI hype. Watch this for a live demo of building disposable software, fast, and to explore where developer tools are headed next. 🎧🖥 Watch on X or YouTube, or listen on Spotify or Apple Podcasts.

🔏 "Build a Six-Figure Side Hustle in One Weekend Using AI" by Rhea Purohit/AI & I: Claire Vo launched ChatPRD—now used by more than 20,000 product managers—during a single holiday weekend while her kids watched Disney movies. As a chief product officer, she proves you don't need to quit your day job to build something big. In the screenshares from this episode of AI & I, Claire demos how she uses AI to write product specs in real time, shares her exact tech stack, and shows how she turned user feedback into a product roadmap. Read this for a practical lesson in building an AI business that works around your life, not the other way around.—Aleena Vigoda  

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Now, next, nixed

The current state of no-code website builders.

Source: Every illustration.

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Fine tuning

OpenAI and Anduril teamed up on anti-drone military systems, the latest in a series of advancements in AI and defense tech. Last month, Meta gave access to Llama, its open-source AI model, to federal agencies and defense contractors (previously, its acceptable use policies prohibited military applications). Anthropic, Palantir, and AWS also announced a partnership to build secure AI for U.S. defense intelligence.

Meta is planning to build a $10 billion, 25,000-mile underwater cable, which will be the company’s first fully owned fiber-optic network—Google is the sole owner of several global cable routes. Meta accounts for 22 percent of mobile usage worldwide; operating a private network reduces reliance on traditional telecoms and geopolitical bottlenecks. 

A single Bitcoin rose to $100,000 for the first time, as President-elect Donald Trump’s pro-crypto stance and Wall Street’s bitcoin ETFs (which enable day traders to hold crypto like they would stocks) drive institutional and consumer adoption of the asset. The milestone comes just two years after FTX's collapse sent Bitcoin below $17,000.

Trump appointed venture capitalist David Sacks as “White House AI & Crypto Czar,” a new role he’s creating to steward U.S. dominance across both industries. Sacks, also a part of Silicon Valley’s PayPal mafia, was a chief supporter of Trump’s campaign. In his additional role as a “special government employee,” he’ll ostensibly work closely with Elon Musk on Trump’s market deregulation measures. 

The European Union ordered TikTok to preserve data related to Romania’s election after Romanian intelligence exposed a Moscow-backed operation that propelled an unknown pro-Russia candidate to front-runner status. TikTok also lost its bid to overturn its sell-or-ban law, which requires the app to either be sold to a U.S. company or banned. Its next move is a Supreme Court appeal.

Japan budgeted an additional $9.9 billion toward chip manufacturing as part of the country’s $67 billion commitment to chips and AI development through 2030. As China and the U.S. lead a global race in semiconductor investment, Japan—already home to major chip materials and equipment makers—is moving to secure domestic market share. 

Eighty telecommunication companies and internet service providers worldwide have been affected by China’s ongoing cyberattack, including Verizon, AT&T, and T-Mobile. Intelligence officials say that Salt Typhoon, a hacker group affiliated with the Chinese government, targeted specific companies to access key government and corporate targets across dozens of countries.

OpenAI kicked off its “12 days of Shipmas” with the official launch of its previously-in-research-mode o1 model, as well as ChatGPT Pro—a $200 monthly subscription tier with access to o1, GPT-4o, and Advanced Voice Mode. Day 2 was focused on developers: Users can fine-tune o1 on their own datasets through reinforcement fine-tuning. 

The Browser Company teased Dia, its new web browser focused on integrating AI tools for everyday use. In October, TBC announced that it was pivoting away from Arc, its beloved indie browser and flagship app, to much dissent from users. Dia is meant to be a pivot into mainstream adoption and casual consumers.  

ChatGPT can now say "David Mayer." Last weekend, a content filter error caused the chatbot to crash whenever users asked it to include the name, sparking wild theories that it was blocking references to either David Mayer de Rothschild—the British adventurer and environmentalist who is heir to the banking family’s fortune–or a professor whose name matched a security watchlist. 

Perplexity expanded its publishing platform to include the Los Angeles Times, Adweek, and a dozen other news outlets, offering revenue sharing and performance metrics for publishers who let the AI startup scrape and summarize their content. The deals come as the New York Times and Dow Jones sue Perplexity for "content kleptocracy," alleging that the company profits from unauthorized use of their paywalled articles.

Threads officially entered the fediverse, a decentralized network of social platforms across which users can interact, rolling out limited access to networks like Mastodon and WordPress. The fully decentralized network Bluesky recently hit 24 million users, but whether Threads’s move toward decentralization helps or hurts adoption is yet to be seen. Mark Zuckerberg’s announcement was met with mixed signals and apprehension from users.—AV

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Alignment 

Blame the ROI. According to a recent Atlantic piece, 82 percent of today's students prioritize financial success over intellectual exploration—a complete reversal from 1971, when most saw college as a place to wrestle with life's big questions through literature and philosophy. But the same generation that supposedly "can't focus" will spend hours mastering Python or analyzing market trends online. They haven't lost the ability to read—they're just terrified of wasting time on anything without immediate, measurable returns. But the most radical act you can take is picking up a book. Not for productivity or for career growth, but because something about string theory or ancient myths or the birth of jazz sets your mind on fire. The most valuable things we learn are the ones we didn't plan to find. That’s not waste—that’s wisdom.—Ashwin Sharma  

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Hallucination

Uggs should make headphones.

Source: X/Lucas Crespo.

That’s all for this week! Be sure to follow Every on X at @every and on LinkedIn. 

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