Howdy, wizards.

Another week flew by, notably with new technical advancements (Hi, Operator) and a lot of cash being committed to accelerating AI’s capabilities.

PS this edition is highly OpenAI-focused as they’ve simply had the most substantial announcements this week. That said, if you want a daily view of everything going on in the space, I recommend giving TLDR’s AI edition a try.

Here’s what’s brewing in AI.

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1. OpenAI launches Operator — its first AI agent

After much talk, OpenAI finally launched an agent — an AI system that can do work for you on its own. It’s called Operator and uses a remote web browser in the cloud to do (or more accurately, tries to do) the tasks that you give it.

Under the hood, Operator is using a specialised AI model, Computer-Using Agent (CUA), based on GPT-4o.

I’ve gone down a bit of a rabbit hole on X to find the most impressive things people are doing with Operator:

The coolest thing about most of these demos isn’t necessarily the end result, but observing the way Operator actually works, especially when it faces obstacles (like being banned from certain websites and finding creative workarounds).

I know you’re all eager to test Operator out—but unfortunately for most— they’ve only made it available on ChatGPT Pro in the US to start with (yes, that’s the $200/month subscription). However, the plan is to expand access to more countries as well as ChatGPT Plus soon; Sam Altman also committed to launching their next agent with availability on Plus tier.

‎ Why it matters‎ ‎ Operator is far from perfect, but it’s a big step forward for AI and one that takes it beyond mere knowledge—it now understands pixels on the screen and can use a virtual keyboard and a mouse to do things with that understanding.

Right now, the use cases flourishing on the web are centred around small, daily tasks (reserving a table, booking a flight, buying groceries). These can definitely provide small efficiency gains for daily life, but make no mistake. This is an intelligent agent that can do WORK for humans on the WEB. I think at the end of this year we’ll have a lot of people automating repetitive, boring tasks they previously had to do as part of their job with this and similar tools.

Essentially, every website is now available to capture information from, even though it doesn’t have an API. And Operator-like agents could soon start writing their own API for repeating tasks.

A significant obstacle these agents face, though, is that they’re (understandably) getting banned by website owners e.g. YouTube and Reddit. It’ll be interesting to see if the AI companies will find ways to bypass these security measures or have to start paying for access.

2025 was predicted to be “the year of AI agents”, and with Operator now out in the wild, that statement seems pretty likely. The other leading AI companies are going to follow suit.

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2. ADS4GPTs is the first ad network built specifically for custom GPTs and AI apps

Dario: I just tested ADS4GPTs with my Custom GPT and wrote an in-depth review about it. It's an impressive platform that lets you monetize your AI apps without compromising the user experience. Think of it as Google Ads but made specifically for conversational AI.

Here's the details:

Learn more about ADS4GPTs

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3. o3-mini is coming to ChatGPT Plus and free, too

The launch of o3-mini model is around the corner, and it just became clear that all ChatGPT users will get access to it. However, there’s going to be some limits to usage on the free tier, whereas plus will apparently get very generous limits.

ICYMI, o3 is OpenAI’s most powerful reasoning model to date, and the mini-version is the smaller, faster brother of the full model — launch date of which is still TBA.

PS as impressive as the new model seems (and probably is), OpenAI was caught red-handed funding the independent benchmark, FrontierMath, that they were bragging hard about in their launch video. They’d had a “verbal agreement” that the data wouldn’t be used for training. Yeahh, right.

‎ Why it matters‎ ‎ The tweet says it all. I’m excited to see if it lives up to the hype.

DARIO’S PICKS

4. Stargate: the world’s biggest bet on AI yet, led by OpenAI and SoftBank

Stargate is a new company with a goal to invest $500 billion—a gargantuan sum of money—into AI infrastructure for OpenAI in the US over the next 4 years. It comes on the back of Trump’s decision to repeal Biden’s AI safety regulations (the EO and AI Safety Institute), and aims to create “hundreds of thousands” of American jobs.

Initial funders include SoftBank, OpenAI, Oracle, and MGX; OpenAI will handle the operation sides of the project while SoftBank will do the financial side. The key technology partners will be Arm, Microsoft, NVIDIA, Oracle, and OpenAI.

The plan starts with an immediate $100 billion deployment and the building of data centers first one already underway in Texas, and they’re scouting for other locations across the country.

The initiative was immediately criticised by Elon Musk, questioning if the backing companies can actually follow through on their promises:

Microsoft’s CEO Satya Nadella quickly fired back in a CNBC interview:

‎ Why it matters‎ ‎ The $500 billion dollar question here is, of course, “will they actually get the money?” If you add up the cash of the backing companies, you don’t even come close. Finance experts are saying you should definitely not take this figure at face value. That being said, there’s going to a be a lot of money going into this project, so much that it has the potential to significantly shape the path of AI development.

Another thing I found interesting with this partnership, and Satya Nadella firing back at Musk, is that OpenAI and Microsoft seem to be buddies again. There was so much talk about their strained relationship last year, at times seeming like they’d be going totally separate ways, but this shows they still have very close ties.

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Side notes

Here are the other essential updates on AI you shouldn’t miss this week, that I didn’t have time to cover in-depth.

THAT’S ALL FOLKS!

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