SoftBank Dumps Nvidia to Go All-In on OpenAI

Welcome back apprentices! 👋

There are weeks when tech news hums quietly in the background…

and then there are weeks when it feels like your AI got a PR team, a legal team, and maybe a therapist. 

Between billionaires dumping chip stocks, bots developing personalities, and 20 million private chats being dragged into court, OpenAI has officially entered its messy middle era. 

What’s happening beneath the headlines is bigger than drama — it’s reshaping how we use AI, what we trust it with, and who’s really in control.

In today's email

• GPT-5.1 gets a personality, but skips the stats

• SoftBank ditches chips, backs OpenAI big

• 20M ChatGPT chats head to court

• What it all means for your AI tools today

• + New AI Tool

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Quick News 

🌍 From Chat to 3D Chess. LLMs may be great talkers, but they still can't cross the street. Dr. Fei-Fei Li just dropped an essay arguing that the next big AI leap won’t come from fancier wordplay — it’ll come from spatial smarts. Think AI that can understand motion, predict physics, and build real-ish 3D worlds — the kind that could one day design buildings, test molecules, or babysit your robot dog.

🤖 AI Everywhere, But Nowhere All at Once. McKinsey’s State of AI 2025 shows nearly every company is playing with AI (88%!), but most are stuck in pilot mode, not profit mode. Only a third are scaling, and just 6% report serious gains — mostly from rethinking workflows and fueling innovation, not just cutting costs or automating busywork.

🎨 From Tools to Teammates. Adobe just dropped its all-in-one AI strategy at MAX 2025 — and it's not just about better tools, it's about AI that works with you. Firefly is now a full creative studio, blending Adobe’s own models with OpenAI, Google, and more, while new AI agents in Photoshop and Express do the grunt work so you can stay in flow. Think: you chat, it edits. You imagine, it builds. Adobe’s big bet? Creativity gets supercharged when human vision meets machine execution.

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OpenAI 
Superbots, SoftBank & Secret Chats

OpenAI has been having... a main character moment. 

In the same week, it predicted AI will make real scientific discoveries by 2028, quietly dropped GPT-5.1 with mood swings and emoji settings, got dragged into a 20-million-chat privacy lawsuit, and scored billions from SoftBank after Masayoshi Son rage-quit Nvidia. 

It’s giving “future of everything,” and also “AI legal drama, season two.” 

Behind the noise? 

Big shifts in personalization, privacy, and power — all shaping how AI will work with (or for?) us in the next five years..

Key Points You Should Actually Know

• 🤖 AI = Almost a Researcher?
  OpenAI says current models are already “80% of the way” to becoming full-blown AI researchers — and expects them to make real discoveries by 2026, with breakthroughs by 2028. Because who needs a PhD when your model cost drops 40x per year?
  

• 🎭 GPT-5.1 Gets a Personality Pack
  The latest model isn’t about brainpower — it’s about vibe. GPT-5.1 comes with 8 tone presets (like Friendly, Nerdy, or Cynical), lets you toggle emojis, warmth, and verbosity, and quietly improves reasoning speed. No benchmarks, no big splash — possibly because Gemini 3 is looming.
  

• 🕵️‍♂️ NYT vs. OpenAI
  The New York Times wants 20 million anonymized ChatGPT chats to sniff out copyright violations. OpenAI says it’s an “invasion of privacy” and a “fishing expedition.” The judge... says hand them over. Welcome to the legal mess of the AI age.
  

• 💸 SoftBank Sells the Chips to Buy the Brain
  Masayoshi Son sold $5.8B of Nvidia stock to go “all in” on OpenAI — even though OpenAI will still buy Nvidia chips to run its models. It’s a power move wrapped in circular logic. But Son thinks OpenAI could become “the most valuable company in the world,” so he’s putting his chips on... not chips.
  

• 🛡️ Safety First (Hopefully)
  OpenAI’s long-term play? Global coordination. It’s calling for governments and labs to team up on safety standards, AI risk resilience, and oversight before we accidentally speedrun our way into a Skynet situation.

GPT-5.1: Now With More Sass (and Less Stats)

GPT-5.1 didn’t get a hype video or press blitz — it got personality sliders. 

You can now adjust your assistant to sound Professional, Cynical, Nerdy, Efficient and more. Plus, toggle how much emoji it uses and how “warm” it sounds. It’s like the Spotify Wrapped of tone control.

But here’s the kicker: no public performance data. 

OpenAI only shared one vague chart about time spent on “easy” and “hard” tasks — no actual accuracy tests or comparisons. That silence speaks volumes. Either they’re avoiding comparison with Claude or Gemini 3, or they’re leaning into smaller, faster, personality-forward updates.

Stat to know: OpenAI claims personalization improves user satisfaction and trust — but hasn’t quantified accuracy gains (if any) from 5.1.

From Chips to Hopes and Dreams

Masayoshi Son is back on the big-bet rollercoaster. 

He once walked away from a $10B OpenAI deal. Now he’s making up for it — selling SoftBank’s $5.8B Nvidia stake and reportedly planning $33.2B in OpenAI-linked AI infrastructure investments.

It’s wild because OpenAI still needs Nvidia chips. So Son basically left the casino to buy the poker champion’s drinks. 

His logic?

Intelligence will matter more than infrastructure — and OpenAI will be the “most valuable company in the world.”

Track record check:

• Alibaba: $20M → $150B

• WeWork: -$11.5B

• Nvidia: Up +3,600% since SoftBank’s last exit in 2019

Son’s strategy = bet big, go long.

He’s not just chasing returns. He’s betting on who writes the next platform layer.

Who Owns What You Typed at 2AM?

The New York Times is suing OpenAI and wants millions of chat logs to prove their content was used in model training. 

After negotiating down from 1.4 billion logs, a judge approved a sample of 20 million anonymized chats.

OpenAI’s response? “99.99% of these have no relevance.” 

Also: “This violates user trust.” 

The problem? Even anonymized logs can reveal patterns — and OpenAI previously trained on publicly available content without consent. 

This isn’t just a copyright case. It’s a test case for what counts as training data — and who owns it.

Reality check: Most users don’t know if their chats are used for training. And many free-tier tools do, by default.

This case is a preview of a future where your ideas might be part of someone else’s lawsuit.

What’s the Deal for You?

Whether you're a student using ChatGPT to polish essays, a founder exploring AI workflows, or a marketer worried about content rights — this week’s OpenAI chaos matters. 

It’s shaping the rules, risks, and realities of how AI will evolve (and be policed). 

The AI you're using today could soon be making scientific discoveries… or defending its own in court.

Next time you're about to type something sensitive into ChatGPT, ask yourself:

“Would I want this read aloud in a courtroom... or in a product demo?”

If the answer is “hell no,” hit that privacy toggle — or take the convo offline.

Help Your Friends Level Up! 🔥

Hey, you didn’t get all this info for nothing — share it! If you know someone who’s diving into AI, help them stay in the loop with this week’s updates.

Sharing is a win-win! Send this to a friend who’s all about tech, and you’ll win a little surprise 👀

Today’s Toolbox

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🧪 Test the Prompt

A playground for your imagination (and low-key prompt skills).

Each send, we give you a customizable DALL·E prompt inspired by a real-world use case — something that could help you in your business or job if you wanted to use it that way. But it’s also just a fun creative experiment.

You tweak it, run it, and send us your favorite. We pick one winner to feature in the next issue.

Bonus: you’re secretly getting better at prompt design. 🤫

👑 The winner is…

Last week, we challenged you to test GPT-4o’s visual generation skills with this prompt.

Here’s the WINNER:

Congrats to David for his creation!🥳

Want to be featured next? Keep those generations coming!

🎨 Prompt: The Launch Corridor

Create a high-tech tunnel used to prepare groundbreaking innovations before their first public reveal. The corridor stretches far into the distance, lined with robotic arms performing final assembly on a prototype of [your bold idea, project, or invention]. The walls are covered in data streams, light panels, and inspection drones. At the end of the corridor, a large circular door begins to open, flooding the tunnel with white light.
Style: ultra-detailed cinematic realism, wide-angle perspective, tunnel vanishing point, high-gloss materials, glowing interface lights, clean composition.

We’ll be featuring the best generations in our next edition!

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