Hello and Welcome Back, Neural Squad.

Grab your favorite caffeinated beverage (or brace yourself for a pricier sip) because this today’s lineup is a wild ride.

a math-obsessed chatbot that charges three times your latte habit (thanks, OpenAI), Microsoft’s new “future-proofing squad” of psychologists and economists sweating over robot-induced existential crises, and the U.S. government basically telling AI artists, “Nice robot, but you didn’t paint that.” Oh, and Google’s breeding superplants with algorithms because obviously farming needed more drama. 🌱

From hallucinating code monkeys to copyright chaos and crops that might outsmart us all—this newsletter’s got the tea (and the side-eyes). Buckle up, buttercup.

Here’s what you need to know about Todays Briefing:

• OpenAI Unleashes ‘o1’—The Math-Wizard AI That Thinks Out Loud (But Costs Your Entire Coffee Budget)

• Microsoft Bets Big on AI’s Future with New ‘Advanced Planning Unit’

• AI Art Gets Copyright Cold Shoulder: US Says ‘No Protection’ for Pure Bot Creations

• Google X’s New AI Crop Startup Aims to Supercharge Farming—Without GMOs

OpenAI Unleashes ‘o1’—The Math-Wizard AI That Thinks Out Loud (But Costs Your Entire Coffee Budget)

Key Points:

• OpenAI’s new o1 and o1-mini models crush complex puzzles, code, and math (like solving age riddles and acing Olympiad tests!).

• O1’s secret sauce? Reinforcement learning + “chain of thought” processing—mimicking human step-by-step reasoning (complete with “Hmm, let me think…” drama).

• Price shock: o1 costs 3x more than GPT-4o for developers ($15M per million input tokens—yikes!). Free users get o1-mini… eventually.

• Still hallucinates (aka “makes stuff up”), but less often. Also, can’t browse the web or handle images—so don’t ask it to meme.

The Summary: Microsoft is building new AI tools that can do things like write emails, answer questions, or help with homework. But they’re worried these smart robots might cause problems nobody expects. So, they made a special team (the APU) to think about questions like: Will AI take over jobs? Could it make people lonely? What if it invents something dangerous? This team isn’t just tech geeks — they’re hiring psychologists to study how humans react to AI and economists to figure out if it’ll wreck the economy. Microsoft’s spending tons of money ($22.6B last quarter!) on AI because they think it’s the future. But even they admit AI is changing so fast, it’s like cramming 30 years of tech progress into three years. Scary? Exciting? Both!

Why it matters: AI isn’t just about chatbots and self-driving cars anymore. Companies like Microsoft are racing to control how AI changes our lives — and who benefits. If AI starts replacing jobs or making big decisions (like who gets a loan), we need rules to keep things fair. Microsoft’s APU is basically a “future-proofing” squad: trying to predict AI’s messes before they happen. But with AI evolving faster than a TikTok trend, even the experts are sweating. The takeaway? Buckle up — the next few years will decide whether AI becomes humanity’s sidekick… or its supervillain.

Microsoft Bets Big on AI’s Future with New ‘Advanced Planning Unit’

Key Points:

• Microsoft launches Advanced Planning Unit (APU) to study AI’s societal, health, and workplace impacts.

• APU will advise product teams, publish reports, and host events to shape Microsoft’s AI strategy.

• Hiring spree targets economists, psychologists, and quantum/nuclear experts to “imagine AI’s future.”

• Follows Microsoft’s $22.6B Q4 AI/cloud spending surge and rival OpenAI’s similar economic research push.

The Summary: magine if a robot could do your homework, but also maybe take your job someday. That’s why companies like Microsoft are scrambling to figure out AI’s risks and rewards. Microsoft just made a team called APU to act like AI fortune-tellers. They’ll guess how AI might change schools, hospitals, or offices. Microsoft is spending tons of money ($22.6 billion last quarter!) to build more AI tools like Copilot (think a super-smart helper for writing emails or coding). The APU team will work in London and Silicon Valley, mixing scientists, writers, and even event planners. Other companies, like OpenAI (which made ChatGPT), are also hiring experts to study AI’s effects. A recent study warned AI could change jobs for 30% of workers.

Why it matters: AI isn’t just chatbots or cool apps—it could reshape how we live. If Microsoft guesses right, they’ll make AI that helps people without causing chaos. But if they miss? Jobs could vanish, or AI might make unfair decisions. By studying AI’s path now, Microsoft wants to avoid disasters and stay ahead of rivals like Google or Amazon. Plus, with shareholders nervous about Microsoft’s giant AI bills, the APU needs to prove this tech is worth the gamble.

AI Art Gets Copyright Cold Shoulder: US Says ‘No Protection’ for Pure Bot Creations

Key Points:

• Zero copyright for pure AI art: The US Copyright Office ruled works made entirely by AI (like text-to-image prompts) can’t be copyrighted, even with detailed instructions.

• Human + AI hybrids get partial protection: Works blending AI elements with human creativity (e.g., editing AI images, writing comics with AI art) can be copyrighted as a whole.

• Prompts ≠ authorship: Typing prompts isn’t enough control to claim ownership—AI’s unpredictable output (like adding a random human hand to a cat image) voids user authorship.

• Policy in flux: The office plans more AI copyright rules, including whether training AI on copyrighted data is legal.

The Summary: Copyright is like a shield that stops people from copying your drawings, stories, or songs without permission. But AI is tricky: if you tell a robot to “draw a cat reading a newspaper,” who made the art—you or the robot? The Copyright Office says the robot did, because you can’t control exactly what it creates. Even if you write a super-detailed prompt, the AI might ignore parts (like drawing a cat with a weird human hand!). But if you change the AI’s work yourself—like coloring it, adding words, or mixing it with your own drawings—the human parts can be protected. Think of it like building a LEGO set: the instructions aren’t yours, but how you snap the bricks together can be.

Why it matters: Artists and companies using AI just got a reality check: pure AI art is free for anyone to copy, remix, or sell. But mixing AI with human creativity keeps your work safe(r). This ruling pushes creators to add their own flair to AI outputs—like editing, arranging, or writing stories around them—to earn copyright protection. It also warns tech firms: if your AI tool can’t let users control outputs precisely, their work stays in the “public domain” wild west. As AI gets smarter, these rules might change… but for now, humans still rule the copyright kingdom. 🔥

Google X’s New AI Crop Startup Aims to Supercharge Farming—Without GMOs

Key Points:

• Heritable Agriculture, spun out of Google’s X lab, uses AI to analyze plant genomes and boost crop yields, cut water use, and store more carbon in soil.

• Focuses on traditional breeding (no gene editing/GMOs for now), targeting climate-friendly traits.

• Tested AI models in growth chambers and fields across California, Nebraska, and Wisconsin.

• Backed by Google, FTW Ventures, and others in a seed round; commercialization plans under wraps.

The Summary: Plants are like superheroes: they use sunlight and water to grow, feed us, and clean the air. But farming them hurts the planet. Growing crops creates 25% of all pollution that heats Earth. It also uses most of the world’s groundwater and spreads chemicals that can poison soil and water. Heritable Agriculture wants to fix this. Their idea? Use computers to study thousands of plants and figure out which ones grow faster, need less water, or suck up more pollution. Then, they tell farmers how to breed those “superplants” the old-school way—by mixing mom and dad plants, not changing their genes. Google’s secret lab, X (where they invent crazy ideas like self-driving cars), built this startup.

Why it matters:

More people = more food needed, but farming can’t keep wrecking the planet. Heritable’s AI could help grow tougher crops as climate change causes droughts and floods. If it works, farmers might grow more food with less water and pollution. Plus, avoiding GMOs means fewer rules and faster adoption. But it’s a race: Can smart plants save us before soil turns to dust?

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Until next time!

Erfan and The Neural Brief team :)