🌟 AI Stars of the Week: Newsletter (August 12, 2025)
OpenAI Goes Nuclear, Google's Reality Engine, Meta's $300M Brain Drain
OpenAI Launches GPT-5: The Developer-First Revolution
August 7 - OpenAI released GPT-5, their most advanced model yet for coding and agentic tasks. GPT-5 scores 74.9% on SWE-bench Verified, beats o3 at frontend development 70% of the time, and excels at complex workflows - debugging code, building apps, and handling multi-step technical tasks.
The model is available across free, paid, and enterprise tiers, with different capabilities for each.
Sources: OpenAI.com, TechCrunch, CNBC
OpenAI Drops First Open-Source Models: gpt-oss Changes Everything
August 5 - Two days before GPT-5, OpenAI released gpt-oss-120b and gpt-oss-20b - reasoning models you can run locally. The 120B outperforms o3-mini, the 20B runs on 16GB memory. Apache 2.0 licensed.
After DeepSeek dominated open-source reasoning, OpenAI finally admitted they were "on the wrong side of history." This is their answer.
Sources: OpenAI.com, Hugging Face, Fortune
Google's Genie 3: The Reality Engine
August 5 - Google dropped Genie 3 - type a prompt, get a playable 3D world at 720p, 24fps. Real-time navigation, visual consistency, modify worlds with text prompts.
DeepMind is testing it with SIMA for complex tasks. Game companies should consider this
Sources: Google DeepMind, TechCrunch
Meta's $300 Million Talent War: Zuckerberg Goes Full Mercenary
Ongoing - Meta is offering individual AI researchers up to $300 million over four years. Ruoming Pang (ex-Apple) got $200+ million. They snagged Scale AI's CEO with a $14.3 billion deal.
Strategy: if you can't out-innovate competitors, buy their innovators 😉
Sources: Fortune, CNBC, WSJ
What you might have missed:
Here is a still up to date guide on how to instruct your GPT how to work for you:
🛤️ Implementation Trail: The 9-Minute ChatGPT Setup That Actually Helps
The difference between getting $20 worth of value and $5,000 worth of value isn't the model you're using. It's the 10 minutes you never invested in configuration.
PS: This was the first time OpenAI has not outperformed their competitors. Really excited to see Grok and Gemini coming out