OpenAI's potentially life-extending model

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Since 1995, life expectancy in the US hasn’t budged by more than a few years. But OpenAI is betting its first biology-focused model could finally change the game. The ultimate goal: Boosting the human lifespan by as much as a decade.

Today’s Insights

• Today in AI: Murati’s next venture, AI legal assistants, and battle of the chatbots

• Tutorial: How to use ChatGPT to schedule tasks

• OpenAI’s latest model aims to extend human life

• Everything else you should know today

• 5 new AI tools to boost your productivity

TODAY IN AI

1. Ex-OpenAI CTO’s next venture takes shape: Mira Murati just made what might be her biggest hire yet — and it’s a familiar face. Jonathan Lachman, OpenAI’s former head of special projects, joins around 10 AI researchers scooped up from the likes of Character AI and DeepMind. While Murati’s startup might not have a product or a name yet, it’s already raised as much as $100M behind the scenes with plans to, you guessed it, reach AGI before anyone else.

2. Harvey builds the case for AI-powered legal assistants: The SF-based startup just landed $300M in a new funding round, doubling its valuation to $3B. Its AI-powered “copilot” helps lawyers sift through documents and answer complex legal questions, with some of the world’s largest law firms already onboard. In general, AI is making major inroads in technical fields, like finance, where a third of companies already use it.

3. The gloves are off in race to 500M users: Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai reportedly told colleagues he thinks Gemini can reach that benchmark this year. But it has a lot of ground to make up. The chatbot was recently ranked 54 on the iPhone, while ChatGPT, with its 300M weekly users, was sitting pretty at No. 4. Alphabet isn’t the only jealous one: Leaked documents show Meta execs have openly talked about losing ground to GPT-4 — while scheming about how to catch up.

4. TikTok’s back, alright: After a few hours of darkness and error messages, TikTok services came back online Sunday for US users. President-elect Trump promised to restore the app's US access when he takes office today and suggested the US could own 50% of the company. Meanwhile, Perplexity AI officially submitted a bid to ByteDance to create a merged entity combining Perplexity, TikTok US, and new capital partners.

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THE AI ACADEMY

How to use ChatGPT to schedule tasks

• Go to ChatGPT and sign in with your account.

• Click on ‘model name’ at the top and select ‘ChatGPT-4o with scheduled tasks’ from the dropdown.

• Now enter your prompt to schedule any task and press enter.

• For the prompt below, turn on the ‘Search web’ option at the bottom of the prompt box to get the best results.

Sample Prompt: ‘Send me a list of key AI news stories and events every Sunday at 10 AM. Highlight their significance for robotics.’

• You can add multiple tasks and see the scheduled task list by clicking on ‘View all tasks’.

• ChatGPT will schedule your tasks and will remind you through notifications at the scheduled time.

FROM THE FRONTIER

OpenAI’s next mission: Extending our lifespan

Whatever you say about OpenAI, you sure can’t argue it’s lacking ambition. The startup just revealed its first model fine-tuned for biological research, GPT-4b micro. It’s already getting to work on a very specific task — using special proteins to transform human skin cells back into youthful-looking stem cells.

The idea:

• If we can master doing this with relatively simplistic skin cells, we can then move on to cells responsible for aging

• To make it happen, OpenAI teamed up with Retro Biosciences — a startup that Sam Altman personally handed $180M to several years ago

• It believes it can extend the human lifespan by 10 years with some AI help

Quick progress: The model allegedly suggested two protein redesigns that were 50 times more effective than what researchers had come up with. This gets us closer to AI that can outperform top scientists at their own game, a key step toward AGI.

How it’s landing on those ideas is a different matter: “We are still figuring out what it does,” Retro CEO Joe Betts-Lacroix told the MIT Tech Review. But he said one thing’s clear: “This is only scratching the surface.”

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AI & TECH NEWS

Everything else you need to know today

✨ It’s Official: OpenAI confirmed you can now give ChatGPT “custom instructions,” including telling it what to call you and even shaping its personality traits.

⏪ Reverse Course: Apple temporarily paused its AI-generated news alerts — one of Apple Intelligence’s biggest features — after the service spread fake headlines for several high-profile news stories.

🖼️ Style Sync: Black Forest Labs’ Flux will now let users create their own fine-tuned model trained on up to 20 images — a feature that’s useful for things like generating consistent marketing materials for a brand.

🎒 Gen-GPT: According to a new Pew Research poll, 26% of US teens say they used ChatGPT for help with schoolwork in 2024, twice as many as the year before.

🦾 Bionic Breakthrough: Researchers at the University of Chicago developed a bionic hand that uses a brain-computer interface to help people living with paralysis regain their sense of touch.

📈 Market: On Friday, Intel shares jumped a whopping 9.25% after a rumor circulated that it could be acquired by an unnamed tech giant. Nvidia also finished the week out strong, closing up 3.10% on some positive analyst reports. Meta rose 0.24% and Alphabet 1.62% over news that both companies could benefit from the TikTok shutdown.

💰 Funding: Leading AI coding assistant Cursor raised $105M in a Series B, with backing from Thrive Capital, a16z, and other major VCs. San Diego’s Shield AI, which builds AI-powered military drones and aircraft, brought in $200M in a round that doubles its valuation to $5B. And AI search platform Perplexity acquired Read.cv, a career-oriented social platform that competes with LinkedIn.

PRODUCTIVITY

5 AI Tools to Supercharge Your Productivity

✅ Prompt Panda: An AI-powered prompt manager and organizer that lets you use saved prompts directly in the models you prefer — no copy-pasting required.

✅ Browser Use: A tool that combines advanced AI capabilities with robust browser automation to make web interactions seamless for AI agents.

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✅ Pentory AI: An intelligent media platform that uses AI to provide real-time daily summaries of content from curated channels worldwide.

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PROMPT OF THE DAY

Summarize emails to clean up your inbox

Here are two good approaches to prioritize and reduce the overwhelm:

1. Use Copilot to Summarize Emails: Copilot in Outlook or Teams can help you quickly get the gist of lengthy emails by summarizing the content, making it easier to decide which ones to prioritize. You can use prompts like:

Prompt: “Summarize unread emails from this week.”

“Highlight emails with action items or deadlines in my inbox.”

2. Use ChatGPT to go through your inbox: In Gmail, begin by searching for the name of an important client, project, or long thread you want to parse through. Then, export and combine it all into a PDF. You can then upload that PDF into ChatGPT and use prompts like:

Prompt: "Create a brief and effective summary of the following emails. Capture the main points and key takeaways to ensure recipients grasp the essential information quickly.”

_{Source: OpenAI/Copilot/SendBoard}

AI-GENERATED IMAGES

3D Designs

Midjourney Prompt: image of a world: there is summer, hot weather, nature, office space, people trying set a job on a mobile app on a giant iPhone. minimalistic. style of technological 3D design and architectural 3D modeling.

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Zain & the Superhuman AI team