Welcome, humans.

In honor of Casual Friday, may we present you with a delightful little dollop of AI slop called Dunder Babies? Enjoy.

Here’s what you need to know about AI today:

• Claude, OpenAI, and Gemini all got new features.

• Perplexity could raise $1B at $18B valuation.

• AI cloud company CoreWeave started its IPO roadshow.

• Apple sued over Apple Intelligence.

Claude can now surf the web, OpenAI got a voice upgrade, and Gemini got a Canvas.

The three most popular AI in school just got some new features that were seriously overdue.

First up: Claude can do web searches now.

• Claude can now look up real-time information like ChatGPT Search or Perplexity.

• All sources are cited so you can verify what it finds.

• Limited to paid US users for now, but wider rollout coming soon.

To turn it on, toggle the “Web Search” feature on in settings.

This is a big deal because Claude has been hamstrung by not having search. Ethan Mollick says it’s useful, but has the same flaws as other AI search tools.

Next, OpenAI launched three new audio models. The new lineup includes:

1. Two speech-to-text (TTS) models that outperform Whisper.

2. A new text-to-speech model that responds to stylistic instructions.

3. Audio support in their Agents SDK for turning text agents into voice agents.

To try it yourself, check out OpenAI.fm—an interactive demo where you pick a voice, pick a “vibe” (OpenAI’s new favorite word), edit the script (or leave it), and hit “Play.”

Below the preset vibes, you'll find an editable text area where you can tweak the prompt to change the voice, tone, speech mannerisms, pronunciation, and tempo of the AI.

Just adjust the prompt to your liking, then hit play to see how it changes the reading.

Even bigger deal? The pricing: At just $0.015 per minute, OpenAI's TTS is ~85% cheaper than ElevenLabs—meaning you could get ~11K minutes of audio for ~$165 instead of paying ElevenLabs ~$1K+ for the same amount.

ElevenLabs is far and away the #1 voice AI to beat, and offers hundreds of licensed voices from real people. So OpenAI's new emotional control features, AND dramatically lower pricing, could definitely reshape this market.

Finally, Gemini has a Canvas. By turning on Canvas, you get an interactive workspace for writing and coding for testing fun side projects like physics simulators.

The point: Everybody’s copying everybody rn. OpenAI copied Deep Research from Google, now Gemini copied ChatGPT’s Canvas, which OpenAI originally copied from Claude Artifacts. How long until Claude adds its own Deep Research?

Here's why they're all playing musical chairs with each other's features: the costs to run AI are in freefall (dropping 900x a year for some tasks), and these companies know their current pricing models are unsustainable. NVIDIA said costs will drop 97% in only a few years.

When AI becomes “too cheap to meter”, the only companies still in the game will be those who've successfully locked users into their platforms with must-have features and workflows. And nobody wants to be left without a seat when the music stops.

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Prompt Tip of the Day

Need a prompt to save the context from one long chat and move it to another? Here you go (source)—just copy and paste the response you get into the new chat window.

Treats To Try.

1. *Wondering how AI PCs actually improve productivity? This new Dell + NVIDIA podcast shows exactly how they're reshaping workflows across multiple industries (including yours!). Listen here.

2. NotebookLM (Google’s other major AI tool) can now make Mind Maps that visually summarize your sources as a branching diagram.

3. Orpheus-3B, Kokoro TTS, and Sesame CSM are a few speech AI competitors to OpenAI and ElevenLabs.

4. Prezent transforms your ideas into branded presentations—free to try.

5. Record.ai remembers stuff for you through WhatsApp, and Epiphany saves your voice memos and transfers them to apps like Slack, Notion, and Asana.

6. timeOS creates meeting summaries without intrusive bots, supports 60+ languages, and embeds playback directly into notes so you can instantly revisit key moments (mac only rn)—free for 10 AI meetings (90 min each) then $19/mo.

7. Fathom is one of the most popular meeting AIs (if you don’t mind the bots)—it captures your meetings, giving you instant transcripts and summaries.

See our top 51 AI Tools for Business here!

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Around the Horn.

• Perplexity could raise $1B at an $18B valuation now that its ARR has reached $100M—this new round would double its previous valuation.

• CoreWeave, an AI cloud provider, began its IPO roadshow (which takes 1-2 weeks before going public)—it’ll try to raise $2.7B at a ~$32B valuation.

  • Related: OpenAI took over a $12B CoreWeave contract from Microsoft.

• Google will give Gmail a smarter, AI-powered search that prioritizes emails from contacts you engage with the most.

• Apple was sued for false advertising over its failure to launch Apple Intelligence.

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Intelligent Insights

1. Could the post-pandemic productivity boom actually be because of AI? Austan Goolsbee of the Fed Bank of Chicago thinks its at least one of four possibilities.

2. Here’s why it actually does matter that Apple is behind in AI.

3. This Stratechery interview with Sam Altman is worth a read.

4. This is a fascinating ~40min video about the Superintelligence Strategy doc that proposes a three-part framework for managing AI risks and security.

5. Meta’s AI lead Yann LeCun believes scaling up large language models alone will never achieve human-level AI.

6. Check out these takes from AI leaders who are bearish on today’s technology achieving AGI.

7. This paper analyzes the three types of intelligence explosions—software improvements, chip technology advances, and automated chip production.

A Cat's Commentary.