Google is testing an AI-first Google Finance that answers questions, layers technical charts, and streams live headlines—speeding up in-tab research while raising fresh trust and accuracy questions for investors.
OpenAI says GPT-5 makes fewer mistakes—mainly when ChatGPT can browse. Turn browsing off and errors rise, especially on SimpleQA. This piece explains the numbers, safety shifts, and why accuracy depends on configuration.
Good Morning from San Francisco, OpenAI shipped GPT-5. Sort of. Turns out it's three models playing dress-up as
Good Morning from San Francisco,
OpenAI ships GPT-5 today. Four versions instead of one breakthrough. Early testers yawn. The $80-per-question reasoning model spent minutes analyzing "Hi, I'm Sam Altman." That's not intelligence—it's expensive overthinking.
Apple pledged another $100 billion to U.S. manufacturing Wednesday. Tim Cook stood beside Trump, promising jobs while keeping iPhone production exactly where it is. The market loved it. Shares jumped 6%.
Trump announced 100% semiconductor tariffs, then exempted everyone who matters. Apple, TSMC, Samsung—all got passes. The Philippines and Malaysia? They pay full price. No U.S. factories, no mercy.
The pattern emerges: dramatic threats, strategic exemptions, stock rallies.
Stay curious,
Marcus Schuler
OpenAI launches GPT-5 today at 10 AM Pacific. Four versions: standard, mini, nano, and chat. Context window doubles to 256,000 tokens. Early testers? Underwhelmed.
The backstory gets worse. OpenAI's first attempt, codenamed Orion, failed so badly they shipped it as GPT-4.5. Remember GPT-4.5? Nobody does. It ran slower, cost more, died fast.
Why launch now? Competition. Google's Gemini matches GPT-4. Anthropic's Claude beats OpenAI at coding. Meta gives away comparable models free. Microsoft dropped $13.5 billion and wants returns.
The o3-pro reasoning model charges $80 per complex question. One tester asked it "Hi, I'm Sam Altman." The model pondered this greeting for several minutes. That's not intelligence. That's a philosophy major discovering coffee.
Sam Altman compared GPT-5 development to the Manhattan Project. Then demonstrated it recommending TV shows. The disconnect tells you everything.
Why this matters:
• The AI gold rush just became an efficiency race—winners will make existing tech cheaper, not chase breakthroughs
• OpenAI launching three versions instead of one breakthrough admits the obvious: one-size-fits-all AI is dead
Marcus Schuler
Prompt:
A man's head is made of colorful light stripes, in the style of a minimalist portrait style, against a red background, with a symmetrical composition, a high-saturation color scheme, and high contrast. The figure is depicted in .
Donald Trump announced a 100% tariff on semiconductor imports Wednesday. Then he exempted basically everyone who matters.
Tim Cook stood beside him in the Oval Office, fresh from pledging another $100 billion in U.S. manufacturing. Apple got its pass. So did TSMC, Samsung, SK Hynix—anyone building or promising to build in America walks free.
Europe negotiated a 15% cap. South Korea cut its own deal. Taiwan's covered through TSMC's Phoenix plants. The Philippines and Malaysia? They're screwed. No U.S. factories means they eat the full 100%.
Markets saw through it immediately. Tech stocks rallied Thursday. TSMC hit record highs. Apple jumped 3.3%. Even struggling Intel rose.
Since Trump's return, tech companies have pledged $1.5 trillion in U.S. investments. Many were already planned. Trump takes credit anyway.
Next week brings tariffs on products containing chips—phones, cars, refrigerators. Expect the same pattern: dramatic threats, widespread exemptions.
Why this matters:
• Trump's tariff threats work better as leverage than policy—big companies buy exemptions with manufacturing promises while smaller nations pay real costs.
• The semiconductor "crisis" is theater where everyone with money gets a speaking part.
Maria Garcia
Granola is an AI notepad that transforms your raw meeting notes into comprehensive summaries. It transcribes your Mac's audio directly while you type, then uses AI to enhance your notes when the meeting ends - no awkward meeting bots joining your calls.
Tutorial:
Trump demanded Intel CEO Lip-Bu Tan resign Thursday on Truth Social, calling him "highly CONFLICTED" after Senator Tom Cotton questioned Tan's Chinese investments and his former company's guilty plea for selling tech to China's military university. Intel's stock dropped 3.4% in premarket trading, proving that nothing says "market confidence" quite like a presidential caps-lock intervention.
Anthropic is hiring engineers 2.68 times faster than it's losing them—better than OpenAI, Meta, or Google—despite CEO Dario Amodei refusing to match the crazy salaries Meta's throwing around. Some employees won't even take Zuckerberg's calls, with Amodei saying Meta's "trying to buy something that cannot be bought"—turns out building safe AI beats fat paychecks when you're already making Silicon Valley money.
Apple lost a dozen AI researchers this year including foundation models chief Ruoming Pang to Meta's $100 million signing bonuses, forcing Tim Cook into a rare all-hands meeting about "winning" in AI while his Siri team gets reshuffled. Recruiters call it "open season" on Apple's 60-person AI team, with one former exec saying "the narrative has gotten away from" Cook as OpenAI, xAI and Cohere pick off engineers faster than Apple can update its voice assistant.
DJI controls 70% of America's commercial drone market and faces a year-end ban unless it passes a national security audit—but after spending $400,000 on lobbyists, the Chinese company can't find a single US agency willing to conduct the review Congress mandated. Senator Rick Scott won't take their meetings ("They want to spy on us"), while police departments from Asheville to Pennsylvania keep using the drones for hurricane rescues and finding missing kids, creating the bizarre situation where DJI desperately wants Washington to investigate them but nobody will answer their calls.
Rubio signed a cable ordering US diplomats across Europe to lobby against the EU's Digital Services Act—which the US says censors free speech and costs tech companies money—telling them to push for its repeal even though EU officials already said their laws aren't negotiable. The directive instructs diplomats to investigate "censorship" cases and meet with anyone who'll listen, marking the latest episode in Trump's crusade against European tech rules that JD Vance kicked off by meeting with Germany's far-right AfD party and accusing Europe of backsliding on democracy.
Google's search chief Liz Reid says AI Overviews aren't killing website traffic—they're actually sending "higher quality clicks" because people search more with longer questions and stick around when they visit sites. Reid dismissed third-party reports showing traffic drops as "flawed methodologies" while admitting some sites lose traffic to forums and first-person content, essentially arguing that AI search works great unless you're one of the websites it doesn't work great for.
Rillet just pulled $70 million from Andreessen Horowitz and ICONIQ at a $500 million valuation to replace "dumb database" accounting tools from Oracle and Microsoft with AI that closes books in hours instead of weeks. The startup founded by ex-N26 exec Nicolas Kopp has doubled its revenue in 12 weeks and counts over 200 companies as customers, proving that even accountants want their spreadsheets to think for themselves.
Rillet kills spreadsheet hell for finance teams. The San Francisco startup automates accounting workflows with AI, making "zero-day close" real—not PowerPoint fiction.
• The Founders
Nicolas Kopp (ex-N26 US CEO, Morgan Stanley) and Stelios Modes (ThoughtWorks, Shazam) launched Rillet in 2021. They saw CFOs drowning in manual reconciliations. Built a fix. Now 200+ companies trust them. 🚀
• The Product
AI-native ERP that connects everything—Stripe, Salesforce, banks. Automates 99.7% of journal entries. Processes 100M transactions daily. Handles multi-entity, multi-currency, deferred revenue. Cuts month-end close from weeks to three days. Real-time insights, not week-old spreadsheets.
• The Competition
Oracle NetSuite and Sage Intacct own the legacy market—clunky databases requiring armies of accountants. QuickBooks handles small business. Xero sits in the middle. Rillet? Built for high-growth companies sick of 1990s software wearing cloud makeup.
• Financing
Just raised $70M Series B (August 2025) co-led by Andreessen Horowitz and ICONIQ. Sequoia led the $25M Series A three months earlier. Total haul: $100M+. Valuation: ~$500M. Doubled revenue between rounds. Board seats for a16z's Alex Rampell and ICONIQ's Seth Pierrepont.
• The Future ⭐⭐⭐⭐
Rillet moves scary fast—three funding rounds in under a year. Customer roster includes unicorns like Postscript. If they crack enterprise sales while keeping product velocity, they'll eat NetSuite's lunch. The risk? Oracle wakes up and copies everything. 😬
Good Morning from San Francisco, OpenAI shipped GPT-5. Sort of. Turns out it's three models playing dress-up as
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