Silicon Valley’s messiest feud explodes

Good morning, AI enthusiasts. What began as a shocking lawsuit announcement against Apple quickly spiraled into essentially the most unhinged Musk-Altman showdown yet, complete with back-and-forth barbs and AIs betraying their creators.

With Silicon Valley’s biggest rivalry getting messier than ever, the one thing missing from this latest reality TV-level exchange is the popcorn.

In today’s AI rundown:

• Musk threatens Apple, feuds with Altman on X

• OpenAI set to back Neuralink competitor

• Run advanced AI models in your computer

• Perplexity’s $34B offer to purchase Chrome

• 4 recent AI tools, community workflows, and more

LATEST DEVELOPMENTS

OPENAI

🥊 Musk threatens Apple, feuds with Altman on X

The Rundown: Elon Musk announced on X that xAI is taking legal motion against Apple over pushing OpenAI’s products within the App Store and suppressing rivals like Grok, with the conversation spiraling after Sam Altman accused X of comparable tactics.

The small print:

• Musk’s claim that it’s “unattainable for any company besides OAI to succeed in #1 within the App Store” was refuted on X, with DeepSeek and Perplexity as examples.

• Musk then cited Altman’s own post receiving 3M views despite having 50x less followers, with Altman replying “skill issue” and “or bots”.

• Grok was then tagged in, stating “Sam Altman is correct” and noting Musk’s “documented history of directing algorithm changes to favor his interests.”

• Musk posted a screenshot of GPT-5 declaring him as more trustworthy than Altman, also noting that xAI was working to repair Grok’s reliance on legacy media.

Why it matters: This reads more like a middle-school lunch fight than a conversation between two of essentially the most powerful people on the planet, and it’s truly hard to assume that the duo once worked together. But the truth TV show that their relationship has turn out to be all the time makes for an interesting window into Silicon Valley’s biggest rivalry.

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SAM ALTMAN & OPENAI

🧠 OpenAI set to back Neuralink competitor

The Rundown: OpenAI is reportedly in talks to back Merge Labs, a brain-computer interface startup raising at an $850M valuation, with Sam Altman co-founding and the project aiming to compete directly with Elon Musk’s Neuralink.

The small print:

• Alex Blania, who leads Altman’s iris-scanning World, will oversee the initiative, while Altman will function co-founder but not take an operational role.

• OpenAI’s enterprise arm plans to steer the funding round, marking the ChatGPT maker’s first major bet on brain-computer interfaces.

• Musk recently projected Neuralink will implant 20,000 people annually by 2031, targeting $1B in yearly revenue from the technology.

• Altman has written about this tech before, including a blog from 2017, titled “The Merge,” discussing the trend towards brain-machine interfaces.

Why it matters: Given Musk and Altman’s feud already taking on X (see above), the news of Elon’s former company investing heavily in a Neuralink competitor can’t sit thoroughly. But as we’ve seen with each OpenAI and Altman’s investments in hardware, energy, and other sectors, the ambitions are grander than simply AI assistants.

AI TRAINING

🤖 Run advanced AI models in your computer

The Rundown: On this tutorial, you’ll learn methods to run OpenAI’s recent open-source models directly in your computer to achieve the advantages of privacy, offline access, and 0 costs while maintaining impressive performance levels.

Step-by-step:

1. Select your method: Ollama for a command-line interface or LMStudio for a ChatGPT-like GUI

2. Ollama method: Install and run ollama run gpt-oss:20b in terminal (13GB download, then works offline)

3. LM Studio method: Download the app, find “GPT-OSS-20B” within the Discover section, then chat via a well-recognized interface

4. Visit the GPT-OSS Playground in case your computer cannot handle local installation

Pro tip: Adjust reasoning levels based on task complexity, use low for easy questions, and high for complex problem-solving.

PRESENTED BY IBM

🚀 Lockheed Martin partners with IBM for AI

The Rundown: Lockheed Martin’s AI takeoff began with data cleanup — cutting its tools by 50% and replacing them with a single unified system that runs on IBM’s watsonx.data to drive faster, smarter engineering.

Learn the way Lockheed Martin leveraged watsonx to:

• Help 10,000 engineers construct scalable AI products in its AI Factory

• Reply to worker questions using AI, boosting accuracy by 20%

• Overcome data silos to create a single accessible, connected data environment

Read the complete story.

PERPLEXITY

💰 Perplexity’s $34B offer to purchase Chrome

The Rundown: AI startup Perplexity just reportedly made an (unsolicited) $34.5B bid for Google’s Chrome browser, in accordance with a report from the WSJ — coming amid the search giant’s current antitrust battle that would force it to divest from the platform.

The small print:

• Perplexity pitched the acquisition on to Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai, positioning itself as an independent operator that would satisfy DOJ remedies.

• The bid exceeds Perplexity’s own $18B valuation by nearly 2x, but the corporate claims enterprise investors have committed to totally fund the transaction.

• Chrome commands over 60% of the worldwide browser market with 3.5B users, with Perplexity recently launching its own AI-first competitor called Comet.

• Federal Judge Amit Mehta will resolve this month whether a forced sale is obligatory after ruling Google illegally monopolized search markets last yr.

Why it matters: Perplexity knows methods to make headlines, and this bid seems more like a viral strategy than a serious M&A (but we’re writing about it, so it’s working). Comet has had a robust start as one in every of the early movers within the AI browsing space, but Google likely has its own plans to infuse Gemini much more into its already dominant browser.

QUICK HITS

🛠️ Trending AI Tools

• 🌎 Matrix-Game 2.0 – Skywork’s open-source interactive world model

• 🤖 Claude 4 Sonnet – Now upgraded with a 1M context window for API use

• 🌐 Jan – Latest 4B open-source model for web search and deep research

• ⚙️ v0 – Vercel’s AI assistant to design, iterate, and scale full-stack web apps

📰 All the pieces else in AI today

Tenable unveiled Tenable AI Exposure, a brand new set of capabilities providing visibility into how teams use AI platforms and secure the AI built internally to limit risk to data, users, and defenses.*

Skywork introduced Matrix-Game 2.0, an open-source interactive world model (like Genie 3) able to generating minutes of playable interactive video at 25FPS.

Anthropic announced that it’s offering access to its Claude assistant to “all three branches” of the federal government for just $1, matching an identical move from OpenAI.

OpenAI clarified that GPT-5 pondering’s context window is 196k, with the previously reported 32k window that caused confusion applying to the non-reasoning model.

Mistral released Mistral Medium 3.1, an upgraded model that shows improvements in overall performance and inventive writing.

*Sponsored Listing

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 Caleb C in Indiana:

“Most recently, I used ChatGPT to create a totally optimized Health Protocol Framework that I’m starting to implement into my every day life. I used to be in a position to create a tiered framework that included non-negotiables, performance optimization, tools & tracking systems.”

How are you using AI in your work? Tell us here.

🎓 Highlights: News, Guides & Events

• Read our previous newsletter: Meta’s mind-reading movie AI

• Today’s AI tool guide: Construct your AI consultancy prep assistant

• RSVP to our workshop @ 2 PM EST today: AI agents for Customer Service

See you soon,

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