Are We Becoming AIs?

TLDR;

Another week, another extensive list of exciting news, models, and products. This week, we take a deep dive into agents based on news from OpenAI or TML. We also take a look at Grok 4’s excellent game development capabilities, as well as an interesting study that shows how humans are becoming like their AIs.

Finally, we examine a fascinating new study that challenges the way we build our AI models from the ground up, offering compelling results to support their claims.

Enjoy!

PREMIUM CONTENT

Things You Have Missed…

On Tuesday, we examined a shocking research result on AI productivity, a roundup of finance news (including the weirdest M&A drama), new cool products, and the realization that China has made significant progress.

AGENTS

OpenAI Releases ChatGPT Agent

I was about to send this newsletter earlier today, until Sam Altman suddenly announced the release of their first agent product, a new option in the ChatGPT app, called ‘Agent’ that combines deep research and Operator (executing actions on the Internet) into one single system that can perform a variety of long-horizon tasks that, according to its creator, is very powerful.

The tool has access to virtualized environments independent of your computer; it spins up on the fly and executes what you asked for.

TheWhiteBox’s takeaway:

This is a very interesting release that will likely be quite successful, considering OpenAI’s extensive distribution. The product in itself is not that revolutionary, though; products like Manus or Genspark have already introduced this product to large audiences.

Personally, I’m noticing a trend. If coding IDEs and agentic coders have been all the rage for quite some time as the prime Generative AI products, it seems it’s the turn of “productivity-everything” app agents.

Genspark, Context, Shortcut… these are only a few of the AI products along these lines (automating Excel, Word, PowerPoint, and other white-collar apps) we have been talking about for the last weeks, and it seems that the big AI Labs have noticed the trend too and will release similar products.

If they deliver on the promise, we could soon see knowledge work being entirely transformed by AI agents, a promise made to us by AI incumbents a while back.

Moreover, it gives credence to my view about what AI startups should be building; despite the strong revenue products like Genspark are seeing, there’s absolutely zero chance they can compete with the big guys and products like OpenAI’s new Agent.

As all build essentially the same product, capital and distribution matter most, and those are the two things companies like OpenAI or Google have that you most likely don’t.

Being more specific, I believe any AI startup building logic (enhancing the ‘smartness’ of AI models as a business value proposition) will have a very short run that may appear highly successful at first, but will eventually be cannibalized by the model-layer companies.

A perfect example is Claude Code and Cursor. Both rely heavily on Anthropic models, but owning the model as Anthropic gives them a…

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