Murati’s co-founders return to OpenAI

Good morning, AI enthusiasts. OpenAI used to say it was “nothing without its people” — and now it’s getting just a few big ones back in dramatic fashion.

Former CTO Mira Murati’s Pondering Machines just fired co-founder and CTO Barret Zolph over alleged misconduct, just for him and a number of other others to land back at OAI within the industry’s latest AI talent shakeup.

Reminder: Our next workshop is today at 4 PM EST — join and learn tips on how to leverage Projects and Deep Research in your workflows to upgrade working with AI. RSVP here.

In today’s AI rundown:

• Pondering Machines loses co-founders to OAI

• Cursor builds browser with AI agents

• Run parallel media tasks with Claude Cowork

• OpenAI invests in Altman’s Neuralink rival

• 4 latest AI tools, community workflows, and more

LATEST DEVELOPMENTS

THINKING MACHINES & OPENAI

🚨 Pondering Machines loses co-founders to OAI

The Rundown: Mira Murati’s Pondering Machines Lab just parted ways with co-founder and CTO Barret Zoph amid misconduct allegations (H/T to Kylie Robison for breaking the news), with Zoph and a number of other other former staffers returning to OAI just hours later.

The small print:

• Murati announced the split at an all-hands meeting and on X, with Zoph reportedly accused of sharing proprietary information with competitors.

• OAI applications CEO Fidji Simo welcomed the trio back in a post on X, revealing the corporate had been in discussions with Zoph for weeks.

• Murati elevated longtime Meta AI researcher and PyTorch framework creator Soumith Chintala as Pondering Machines’ latest CTO.

• The departures mark Pondering Machines’ third co-founder exit in under a 12 months, following Andrew Tulloch’s move to Meta in October.

Why it matters: In 2024, Murati’s OAI departure was a shock to the AI world, and now her own co-founders are boomeranging back to her former employer under ugly circumstances. OAI is “nothing without its people,” because the old saying goes, and now it’s getting just a few big ones back (and potentially more) — albeit in a dramatic fashion.

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CURSOR

🤖 Cursor builds browser with AI agents

The Rundown: Cursor published a brand new blog revealing it ran a whole bunch of AI coding agents autonomously for weeks on end — with one experiment producing a 3M+ line web browser built entirely from the bottom up using GPT 5.2.

The small print:

• Cursor organized agents into planners, staff, and judges (just like the viral Ralph Wiggum technique), allowing a whole bunch to run and collaborate together.

• The browser was inbuilt under every week by the agents from scratch, with the ultimate output actually loading easy web sites accurately.

• Other experiments included a Windows 7 emulator, an Excel clone, and an internal migration of Cursor’s codebase, each spanning one million+ lines of code.

• The team also noted that GPT-5.2 handled long autonomous runs significantly higher than Claude Opus 4.5, which tended to take shortcuts.

Why it matters: The present frontier generation of coding agents has broken through an invisible capability wall, and we’re seeing it all over the place from viral Claude Code use cases to AI agent swarms crushing 1M line projects over weeks. With increased agent coordination and durations of labor, the whole economics of development begin to shift.

AI TRAINING

🤓 Run parallel media tasks with Claude Cowork

The Rundown: On this tutorial, you’ll learn tips on how to use Claude Cowork to process images and videos in parallel — compressing files, extracting audio, and handling media-heavy tasks routinely in your computer.

Step-by-step:

1. Update your Claude desktop app (requires a Claude Max subscription at $100/month) and open the brand new Cowork tab

2. Put one or two images and videos in a brand new folder, then click “Work in a folder” and choose that folder

3. Give Claude this prompt: “Save copies of the photographs on this folder, then reduce the file size of every by at the very least 50%”

4. Before it finishes, add one other prompt: “Extract the audio from the small steps video and put it aside as an MP3” — Claude will power through each tasks in parallel

Pro tip: Add Context7 extension to offer Cowork access to open source documentation.

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MERGE LABS & OPENAI

🧠 OpenAI invests in Altman’s Neuralink rival

The Rundown: OpenAI announced a brand new seed investment into Merge Labs, a brain-computer interface startup co-founded by Sam Altman that emerged from stealth alongside its $252M raise, with the AI giant becoming the corporate’s largest backer.

The small print:

• Merge is aiming to spice up BCI bandwidth using ultrasound and engineered proteins, skipping the surgical brain implants required by rivals like Neuralink.

• The founding team includes World/Tools for Humanity’s Alex Blania and Sandro Herbig, plus researchers from Caltech and the nonprofit Forest Neurotech.

• OAI will work on AI models and tools to assist Merge read brain signals and ramp R&D, saying BCIs might be “natural, human-centered way” to interact with AI.

Why it matters: OAI’s investment continues the circular merry-go-round of dealmaking, this time on a more personal level for Altman. But the larger story would be the turf he’s encroaching on, bringing his feud with Elon Musk into the brain-computer interface sector — and certain making for a complete latest round of drama in the method.

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• 🗣️Speechmatics – Construct voice-enabled apps with Speechmatics’ Startup Program and rise up to $50k in credits to deploy to production*

• 💬 ChatGPT Translate – Translate text, voice, or images across 50+ languages

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• 💼 Claude Cowork – Bring Claude Code’s agentic capabilities to on a regular basis tasks

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📰 Every thing else in AI today 

ByteDance released SeedFold, a brand new open-source protein structure prediction model that outperforms Google’s AlphaFold3 across several benchmarks.

Elon Musk revealed that Grok 4.20 will lag behind Claude in coding, saying Anthropic has “done something special” but that cutting off xAI was “not good for his or her karma”.

Replit launched mobile app creation, letting users construct, test via QR code, and publish on to the App Store from a single platform.

Airbnb appointed Ahmad Al-Dahle as Chief Technology Officer, bringing in Meta’s former head of generative AI and the leader behind the Llama model family.

AI creative platform Higgsfield announced a brand new $130M funding round at a $1.3B valuation, with the corporate claiming to be the fastest scaling AI company in history.

COMMUNITY

🤝 Community AI workflows

Every newsletter, we showcase how a reader is using AI to work smarter, save time, or make life easier.

Today’s workflow comes from reader John D. in Daytona Beach, FL:

“Because the IT guy, I enjoy showing coworkers what AI can do. For our accounting team, I fed a CSV file of our annual Business Prime account activity into Claude, and it created a colourful summary with charts & graphs and broke down spending by month, who spent what, product categories we spent most on, and where we are able to get monetary savings.”

How do you utilize AI? Tell us here.

🎓 Highlights: News, Guides & Events

• Read our last AI newsletter: Gemini’s ‘Personal Intelligence’ upgrade

• Read our last Tech newsletter: A moon hotel is taking reservations

• Read our last Robotics newsletter: 1X now has a world model

• Today’s AI tool guide: Run parallel media tasks with Claude Cowork

• RSVP to next workshop @ 4PM EST today: AI foundations Bootcamp pt.2

See you soon,

Rowan, Joey, Zach, Shubham, and Jennifer — the humans behind The Rundown