The IMF just raised its global growth forecast to 3.3%. It also explained why that number depends almost entirely on AI investment continuing, and what happens if the productivity gains never arrive. The fund's own model shows the upgrade could vanish twice over.
While OpenAI and Anthropic chase AGI, a wave of specialized AI tools hit the market solving problems the big labs ignored. Ten standouts from late 2025 reveal where the real value is being built: integrations, workflows, and trust.
Musk sues OpenAI for $134 billion on a $38 million donation. Trial starts April 27. Meanwhile, a solo developer built the AI memory layer that Big Tech keeps promising but never ships. Control vs. clarity. Both bets land this spring.
While OpenAI and Anthropic chase AGI, a wave of specialized AI tools hit the market solving problems the big labs ignored. Ten standouts from late 2025 reveal where the real value is being built: integrations, workflows, and trust.
The chatbot wars grabbed the headlines. But the real action happened somewhere else.
Starting last summer and running through New Year's, a different kind of AI tool started showing up. Not from OpenAI. Not from Anthropic. Not from any lab chasing AGI. These were workflow tools, automation engines, voice keyboards, browser agents. Built to solve specific problems. The kind of tools you actually use instead of demo once and forget.
What unites them is a shared insight: the hard part was never the intelligence. The hard part was making intelligence useful. OpenAI and Anthropic built the engines. These companies built the steering wheels.
Here are ten tools worth knowing about. Some automate tedious workflows. Others give you a second brain. A few let you delegate entire browser sessions to an AI agent that clicks and scrolls while you watch. All of them found users because they solved real friction, not hypothetical futures.
Sign up once, read everything for free. No algorithms, no fluff—just the AI intel that actually matters for your work.
Get free access →
A Spotify engineer built a memory layer for Claude Code that treats your half-finished Obsidian organization as signal, not failure. Now he's racing platform giants to define how AI remembers.
A developer gave Claude Code access to 100 books and a simple command: "find something interesting." What came back wasn't summaries. It was connections no hand-tuned pipeline could find.
Sam Altman's "Code Red" memo triggered OpenAI's fastest major release ever. Ten days later, GPT-5.2 arrived with doubled benchmarks and 40% higher API costs. The gains are real. So are questions about what got sacrificed for speed.
The AI tool market has fragmented into 30+ specialized applications. This guide cuts through the noise with honest assessments and current pricing, from $5/month voice synthesis to $399/month enterprise SEO suites. Which ones actually deliver?
Get the 5-minute Silicon Valley AI briefing, every weekday morning — free.
