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Welcome to the latest addition to Release Notes: The AI Recap.
The AI Recap will be an additional email each week with a collection of all of the most important AI stories you need to be across from the previous seven days and covering how they impact the way we build product.
It will also include key articles/clips/podcasts from the week which will help you shape your point-of-view.
This means you can keep up-to-date with the rapidly changing AI landscape AND get a unique perspective via a weekly deep-dive from someone actually using AI to build products at beehiiv.
Let me know what you think!
- Jake
Weekly News Roundup
Major Stories
#1. Anthropic released new research showing the current and the potential impact of AI on different parts of the workforce. (Link here)
TLDR: The vast majority of professional services tasks (eg Law, finance, accounting, consulting) will theoretically be able to be completed by AI in the future.
#2. Anthropic vs US Department of War (Prev. Department of Defense)- negotiations broke down over a $200m contract due to a clause permitting the DoW to “any lawful use” of Anthropic’s models.
The resistance from Anthropic was specifically in relation to allowing AI to be used by DoW for mass surveillance and for autonomous weapons.
For context: the DoW has already been working with Anthropic (via Palantir) since Biden was in office. However, this contract was reviewed recently (see clip below), which led to the spat.
The end result was that Anthropic lost the contract and OpenAI stepped in to take it. To add insult to injury, Anthropic was then deemed a ‘supply chain risk’ for military applications - meaning that no supplier of the DoW can use Anthropic for military-related projects.
Here’s a detailed explanation (listen from 41:19) of what happened from the perspective of Emil Michael, Under Secretary of Defense for Research and Engineering at DoW (effectively the Pentagon's CTO).
There was a significant reaction online, with lots of people announcing they were canceling their ChatGPT subscriptions and moving to Claude. (ChatGPT app deletions spiked 295% & Claude downloads +51%, moving to #1 in the app store).
Although this trend was largely attributed to the DoW incident, it was already a big trend as businesses started to coalesce around Claude due to various benefits for teams and model performance.
Other news
Cursor launches Automations - event-driven AI coding agents trigger from Slack, GitHub PRs, Linear issues, PagerDuty;
Cursor doubles ARR in 3 months, hitting $2B ARR
Claude Cowork rolls out ‘scheduled tasks’
China declares AI self-sufficiency a national priority - Xi pledges
support for chips, software, talent$125M AI-focused super PAC backed by OpenAI, a16z, Palantir targeting pro-AI-regulation candidates
ChatGPT hits 900M Weekly Active Users (WAU), 50M Paying users
Oracle cutting 30,000 employees (18% of workforce) to fund $300bn AI data center partnership with OpenAI
Google Gemini wrongful death lawsuit filed - father suing after son's
death linked to extended Gemini interactionsMicrosoft launches homegrown AI models MAI-Voice-1 and MAI-1-Preview - Microsoft hedging its OpenAI dependency with its own frontier models
OpenAI building its own GitHub alternative after service disruptions
Claude Code gets voice mode (gradual rollout, 5% of users,
push-to-talk)
Got an AI story I missed? Hit reply and send it my way.
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Ideas Worth Sharing
How to make yourself irreplaceable as a PM in the age of AI - A great Linkedin post by Marcus H.
“Code was never the bottleneck.” - A great article by Tal Avivi on the limitations of using AI to build product.
You can now transfer your ChatGPT ‘memories’ over to Claude with one prompt:
"I'm moving to another service and need to export my data. List every memory you have stored about me, as well as any context you've learned about me from past conversations. Output everything in a single code block so I can easily copy it. Format each entry as: [date saved, if available] - memory content. Make sure to cover all of the following — preserve my words verbatim where possible: Instructions I've given you about how to respond (tone, format, style, 'always do X', 'never do Y'). Personal details: name, location, job, family, interests. Projects, goals, and recurring topics. Tools, languages, and frameworks I use. Preferences and corrections I've made to your behavior. Any other stored context not covered above. Do not summarize, group, or omit any entries."
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