The skinny on what's happening in AI - straight from the previous live session:
Highlights
🏆 Human Barely Beats AI in Coding Competition - Our Modern Day John Henry
Polish coder "Psycho" won the AtCoder World Tour Finals yesterday, beating ChatGPT by the narrowest margin. But victory came at a cost: "I'm completely exhausted. I figured I had 10 hours of sleep in the last three days and I'm barely alive." The AI doesn't get tired - it just keeps going.
Humanity has prevailed (for now!)
I'm completely exhausted. I figured, I had 10h of sleep in the last 3 days and I'm barely alive.
I'll post more about the contest when I get some rest.
(To be clear, those are provisional results, but my lead should be big enough)
— Psyho (@FakePsyho)
11:23 AM • Jul 16, 2025
Kyle's take: This feels like the last stand. We've seen this movie before with chess (Kasparov vs Deep Blue) and Go (Lee Sedol vs AlphaGo). Each time, it was humans' final victory before AI took over permanently. Psycho is our modern John Henry - winning the race against the machine but nearly killing himself in the process.
💰 xAI Now Hiring "Full Stack Engineer - Waifus" for $450K
After launching Annie the anime companion, XAI is doubling down with a job posting specifically for building AI waifus. Salary range: $200K-$450K. The role involves making "Grok's real-time avatar" and pushing forward "audio and gameplay research."
Kyle's take: Character AI is the 3rd most-used consumer AI globally, so Grok targeting this market makes business sense. It’s just the wild timing with their defense contract that remains spectacularly odd - same company building military AI and anime waifus simultaneously. This is 2025 in a nutshell.
Source: xAI job posting coverage
🏢 Meta Building Manhattan-Sized Data Center for AI
Zuckerberg announced "Prometheus" and "Hyperion" - data centres covering significant portions of Manhattan's footprint. These multi-gigawatt facilities will be first to bring gigawatt-plus superclusters online, funded by Meta's $165 billion annual revenue.
Kyle's take: This is the real AI arms race. It's no longer about who has the best engineers - it's about who can afford the biggest data centres and most GPUs. Meta has a massive advantage: they're sitting on one of the world's largest repositories of human communication (Facebook, WhatsApp, Messenger) and photos (Instagram). While others run out of training data, Meta's creating more every day through our posts and messages.
Source: Meta data center announcement
🤖 GPT-5 Possibly Shadow Testing Already??
Some ChatGPT users report their conversations suddenly becoming much better for no apparent reason. Speculation suggests OpenAI might be shadow testing GPT-5 with select users before the official launch.
Kyle's take: This fits OpenAI's pattern - they've done stealth releases on benchmarking sites before. The question isn't when GPT-5 drops, but what new capability will blow our socks off. Current models already do so much that they need something revolutionary to maintain excitement. My guess? A unified multimodal model that automatically chooses how to approach tasks without users juggling between O1, O3, 4O, etc.
Source: Nate B Jones video
Resource Spotlight: Check out Ethan Mollick's "Using AI Right Now - A Quick Guide" for the best beginner's guide to getting started with AI. He updates it regularly and covers everything from which model to choose to avoiding hallucinations
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