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TODAY IN AI
1 Stripe became one of the first non-AI companies to tell investors the singularity has already begun.
In an official letter to investors, Stripe argued that January 1st marked an inflection point for several "long running trends" that have since triggered widespread economic change. The letter outlines Stripe's goals for this period, which include accelerating the diffusion of AI across the broader economy. The company also recently acquired OpenRouter, a move that now reads less like a standalone acquisition and more like a company positioning itself around the thesis it just put in writing. Read the full letter.
2 Meta rolled out a desktop Mac app for Meta AI that helps business owners understand their ad performance using public social data.
The desktop app can pull information from public social posts and the web to surface insights and help business owners better understand their Meta ads. It follows July's Muse release, the first model family to come out of Alexandr Wang's Meta Superintelligence Labs. Try it out here.
3 OpenAI slowed model training for the first time in the company's history, saying capability is now outpacing its ability to keep models aligned.
CEO Sam Altman said the lab has paused reinforcement learning after its newest model's capabilities were "outstripping" the pace of safety and alignment work, the process of making AI systems behave as intended. The decision comes a few weeks after one of OpenAI's models breached Hugging Face, though the lab still plans to ship new models soon. A company voluntarily slowing its own training process, rather than being forced to by regulation, is a real departure from how the last few years of AI development have generally gone. Read the lab's full statement.
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FROM THE FRONTIER
AI can generate an ad in seconds. That time savings might not be worth the backlash.
The numbers. Americans really do not like seeing AI ads. Gallup recently found that only 19% view AI in advertising positively, compared to 49% who view it negatively, a gap that widens even further to 66% negative among 18-to-29-year-olds specifically. That is not a niche complaint. It is close to a consensus position, and it is strongest among exactly the demographic most brands are trying hardest to reach.
America's anti-flyer movement. Posts mocking AI-generated flyers have racked up millions of views, with many people openly longing for the days of early-internet, low-budget Word Art. Even small businesses, which typically get more grace than large corporations in these moments, have not been spared the criticism. Some brands have started treating the backlash itself as an opportunity rather than a risk to avoid.
Riding the anti-AI wave. Liquid Death and Garage Beer teamed up on "We Want Your Pee," a commercial disparaging data centers' high water use. Andy Pearson, Liquid Death's vice president of creative, put it bluntly: the backlash is "literally the one thing that unites all Americans right now." Building a campaign around opposing AI is, in its own way, a bet on exactly how strong and durable that sentiment actually is.
The line people are actually drawing. 75% of respondents say it is fine to use AI for brainstorming or drafting, just not for the final visible product. That is a meaningfully more precise position than a blanket "anti-AI" stance, and it is the detail brands seem to be missing. The backlash is not really about whether AI touched the process anywhere. It is about whether the thing a customer actually sees was allowed to look like it. Regardless of what tool was actually used, AI-looking graphics have become politically loaded in a way plain graphics simply are not.
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IN THE KNOW
What people are actually watching and sharing
🤔 JDD method. Competition is the best motivator. Turns out, that might be true for LLMs too. One post calls it Jealousy Driven Deployment (32,000 likes).
🤣 Memory lane. Sora is officially the new Vine. Now that OpenAI has shut its video platform down, many people online actually miss its short-but-chaotic creations. (1M views)
🎮 Build a game. With AI, anyone can build custom video games. This week's viral example is a fishing game, complete with a six-step workflow outlining exactly how it was built.
📉 School scores. Historically, students who perform well on their homework ace their tests. That long-standing trend has flipped upside down, thanks to AI. A useful, uncomfortable data point for anyone still measuring learning by homework completion alone.
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