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Good morning, {{ first_name | AI enthusiasts }}. What started as a stunning lawsuit announcement against Apple quickly spiraled into 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 only 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 on your computer
Perplexity’s $34B offer to buy Chrome
4 new AI tools, community workflows, and more
LATEST DEVELOPMENTS
OPENAI
🥊 Musk threatens Apple, feuds with Altman on X
Image source: …
The Rundown: Elon Musk announced on X that xAI is taking legal action against Apple over pushing OpenAI’s products in the App Store and suppressing rivals like Grok, with the conversation spiraling after Sam Altman accused X of similar tactics.
The details:
Musk’s claim that it’s “impossible for any company besides OAI to reach #1 in 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 right” 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 fix Grok’s reliance on legacy media.
Why it matters: This reads more like a middle-school lunch fight than a conversation between two of the most powerful people in the world, and it’s truly hard to imagine that the duo once worked together. But the reality TV show that their relationship has become always makes for an interesting window into Silicon Valley’s biggest rivalry.
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SAM ALTMAN & OPENAI
🧠 OpenAI set to back Neuralink competitor
Image source: Ideogram / The Rundown
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 details:
Alex Blania, who leads Altman’s iris-scanning World, will oversee the initiative, while Altman will serve as co-founder but not take an operational role.
OpenAI's venture arm plans to lead 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 over X (see above), the news of Elon’s former company investing heavily in a Neuralink competitor can’t sit very well. But as we’ve seen with both OpenAI and Altman’s investments in hardware, energy, and other sectors, the ambitions are grander than just AI assistants.
AI TRAINING
🤖 Run advanced AI models on your computer
The Rundown: In this tutorial, you will learn how to run OpenAI's new open-source models directly on your computer to gain the benefits of privacy, offline access, and zero costs while maintaining impressive performance levels.
Step-by-step:
Choose your method: Ollama for a command-line interface or LMStudio for a ChatGPT-like GUI
Ollama method: Install and run ollama run gpt-oss:20b in terminal (13GB download, then works offline)
LM Studio method: Download the app, find "GPT-OSS-20B" in the Discover section, then chat via a familiar interface
Visit the GPT-OSS Playground if your computer can't handle local installation
Pro tip: Adjust reasoning levels based on task complexity, use low for simple questions, and high for complex problem-solving.
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Learn how Lockheed Martin leveraged watsonx to:
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Overcome data silos to create a single accessible, connected data environment
PERPLEXITY
💰 Perplexity’s $34B offer to buy Chrome
Image source: Ideogram / The Rundown
The Rundown: AI startup Perplexity just reportedly made an (unsolicited) $34.5B bid for Google's Chrome browser, according to a report from the WSJ — coming amid the search giant’s current antitrust battle that could force it to divest from the platform.
The details:
Perplexity pitched the acquisition directly to Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai, positioning itself as an independent operator that could satisfy DOJ remedies.
The bid exceeds Perplexity's own $18B valuation by nearly 2x, but the company claims venture investors have committed to fully fund the transaction.
Chrome commands over 60% of the global browser market with 3.5B users, with Perplexity recently launching its own AI-first competitor called Comet.
Federal Judge Amit Mehta will decide this month whether a forced sale is necessary after ruling Google illegally monopolized search markets last year.
Why it matters: Perplexity knows how 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 strong start as one of the early movers in the AI browsing space, but Google likely has its own plans to infuse Gemini even 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 - New 4B open-source model for web search and deep research
⚙️ v0 - Vercel’s AI assistant to design, iterate, and scale full-stack web apps
📰 Everything else in AI today
Tenable unveiled Tenable AI Exposure, a 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) capable of generating minutes of playable interactive video at 25FPS.
Anthropic announced that it is offering access to its Claude assistant to “all three branches” of the federal government for just $1, matching a similar move from OpenAI.
OpenAI clarified that GPT-5 thinking’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 creative 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 fully optimized Health Protocol Framework that I am beginning to implement into my daily life. I was able 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.
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Rowan, Joey, Zach, Shubham, and Jennifer—the humans behind The Rundown
