3297626
A hub for startup news, trends, and insights, covering the global startup ecosystem for founders, investors, and innovators. Community: @startupdis Buy Ads: @strategy (this is our only account).
🚀 China lands Long March-10A first stage on water for the first time
China has completed a water landing of the first stage of Long March-10A, its super-heavy reusable rocket. The vehicle stands 67 meters tall with a 5-meter diameter.
Long March-10A is designed for lunar missions. China plans to use it to deliver taikonauts to the Moon by 2030.
Reusable heavy lift is now part of the lunar timeline.
💧 Sponsored by @rainbetcom - rainbet.com
📊 @tech
🎓 Udemy integrates its 290,000 courses into ChatGPT
Udemy announced a partnership with OpenAI. Its catalog of more than 290,000 courses is now accessible inside ChatGPT through a course discovery feature.
Users can browse and interact with Udemy’s learning content directly in chat instead of leaving the interface.
The move comes as Udemy prepares to merge with Coursera in a deal valued at about $2.5B. The transaction, announced in December 2025, is expected to close in the second half of 2026 and would combine the two largest online learning platforms under the Coursera brand.
AI search is becoming the new front door for education platforms.
💧 Sponsored by @rainbetcom - rainbet.com
📊 @tech
🎮 10-minute animated fight made with Seedance 2 for $60
A creator produced a 10-minute animated fighting scene using Seedance 2, a relatively new Chinese model from ByteDance. Total spend: $60.
Seedance 2 is already filling timelines with short clips. Some look impressive. Some look chaotic. The cost barrier keeps dropping.
High-end game and film production used to mean serious budgets. Now a laptop and a small budget can get you minutes of animated action.
💧 Sponsored by @rainbetcom - rainbet.com
📊 @tech
🖥 Claude Cowork lands on Windows
Claude Cowork is now available on Windows. The tool is often described as “Claude Code without coding.”
It works directly with files on your computer and can connect to external tools to complete multi-step tasks. The focus is on handling workflows that span documents and apps, not writing software.
Access is open to all paid subscribers of Anthropic’s Claude.
💧 Sponsored by @rainbetcom - rainbet.com
📊 @tech
🔥 A teleprompter hiding in the MacBook notch
A small app called Moody places a scrolling script directly inside the MacBook camera notch. The text sits next to the lens, so when you read, your eyes stay where the camera is.
This fixes a familiar problem. Reading from the screen always pulls your gaze down. On video it looks obvious and awkward. Memorizing long scripts rarely scales when the text is long.
Moody solves it without hardware or extra screens. It is just text, moved to the only place that actually matters.
A tiny change that makes laptop video look noticeably more natural.
💧 Sponsored by @rainbetcom - rainbet.com
📊 @tech
🌐 How a $100 domain turned into a $70,000,000 sale
In 1993, Arsyan Ismail registered AI.com for $100. He was 10 years old. The letters matched his initials. He held the domain for 32 years.
Ismail built early internet projects in parallel. He released Orenscript as a teenager, shipped popular mIRC tools, launched a local social network, founded 1337 Tech, and became an early Bitcoin user with marketplace experiments.
Over time, AI.com became one of the rarest domains online. Two letters tied to the most valuable tech narrative. By 2023, it was redirecting between giants like ChatGPT and xAI, watched as a digital trophy.
In 2026, the sale closed. Crypto.com CEO Kris Marszalek bought AI.com for $70,000,000, paid fully in crypto. The deal was brokered by Larry Fischer.
$100 became $70M. Time did the work.
✔️ Subscribe on @venture
A team of traders has recently launched their own private channel! Access to the channel is currently free for everyone until tomorrow. After that, the entry price will be $2,000.
Join here — /channel/+mVleAUfcvawwOTUy
The channel shares information from a team of traders and investors. Inside, readers will find ideas and analysis across areas such as crypto, trading, Web3, Forex, degen strategies, and venture capital.
Only 100 spots are available so the most active readers have a chance to join first.
#promo
🚀 Guy rode the hype and made $22K
You’ve probably heard of OpenClaw, also called Clawbot or Moltbot depending on the week.
Someone quickly built a simple service that installs OpenClaw on a server in one click, for people who don’t want to deal with setup themselves.
He caught the hype, made about $22K, and is now listing the project for $200K.
Fast problem spotting. Faster execution. Sometimes that’s the whole game.
💧 Sponsored by @rainbetcom - rainbet.com
📊 @tech
🤖 EPFL builds a robotic hand that breaks past human limits
EPFL engineers designed a robotic hand that does not copy human anatomy. It uses up to 6 identical fingers that bend in both directions. Any pair can form a pinch grip. There is no fixed palm or back.
The hand supports 33 human-style grasps and actions people cannot do. It can hold an object on the back of the hand while manipulating another. Two outer fingers can shift position and act as opposing thumbs from either side.
The hand can also detach and move on its own. Each finger works independently, letting it crawl into tight spaces. Lab head Aude Billard calls this “loco-manipulation”.
This is a shift from imitation to function-first robot design.
💧 Sponsored by @rainbetcom - rainbet.com
📊 @tech
Now you can mass unsubscribe from emails from within the Gmail app.
This is the first really good gmail feature release since they killed Inbox.
💧 Sponsored by @rainbetcom - rainbet.com
📊 @tech
🧪 OpenAI links GPT-5 to an autonomous lab and cuts protein costs by 40%
OpenAI connected GPT-5 to a fully autonomous laboratory. The setup reduced the cost of producing the sfGFP protein from $698 to $422 per gram.
Human involvement was limited to preparing reagents and monitoring.
GPT-5 designed experiment batches. The lab executed them. Results were fed back into the next cycle.
There were 6 iterations in total, covering 36,000 reaction compositions.
The system identified cheaper reaction mixes that had not been tested before. Protein yield increased by 27% after optimization.
This is a full closed-loop setup. At this stage, it is large-scale automated trial and error, but done faster and cheaper than manual lab work.
💧 Sponsored by @rainbetcom - rainbet.com
📊 @tech
A guy just cooked with code and robotics, and made a machine move like it has rhythm.
💧 Sponsored by @rainbetcom - rainbet.com
📊 @tech
🧠 The man who invented AI
In 1956, one mathematician asked a question that sounded like science fiction at the time:
“What if a machine could think?”
That question gave birth to the term Artificial Intelligence.
That man was John McCarthy.
And that moment quietly started the AI story we are living inside today.
McCarthy did not build startups or pitch investors. He did something riskier. He defined ideas decades ahead of their time.
🔸 He argued that intelligence is not magic or “human essence”, but a formal system that can be described with logic
🔸 He created Lisp, the language used for AI long before Python or neural networks
🔸 He believed real AI should reason, set goals, and draw conclusions, not just predict the next token
When we talk today about AI agents, reasoning models, or autonomous decision systems, we are mostly catching up to ideas outlined 60 to 70 years ago.
The irony is that McCarthy was a skeptic. He did not believe in black-box magic and would likely be very strict with modern LLMs.
But his focus on logic, goals, and agency is exactly what is becoming relevant again.
💧 Sponsored by @rainbetcom - rainbet.com
⏰ LEGO clock tracks time up to a galactic year
A YouTube creator built a fully mechanical LEGO clock that measures time from seconds up to a galactic year.
The system works continuously and includes a scale reaching 1 billion years.
A galactic year is one full orbit of the Solar System around the Milky Way’s center.
It lasts about 225–250 million Earth years.
The clock places the universe at roughly 61 galactic years old, with the Solar System around 20 and currently mid-way through the 21st.
The mechanism uses a classic pendulum with an escapement and a weight on a string.
When the weight reaches the bottom, an electric motor rewinds it through a differential so the pendulum keeps swinging.
Power comes from a built-in solar panel that rotates with the Sun.
💧 Sponsored by @rainbetcom - rainbet.com
📺 Anthropic runs Super Bowl ads taking aim at ChatGPT-style monetization
Anthropic aired a series of Super Bowl ads that mock advertising inside AI chatbots. The jokes are pointed.
In one spot, a man asks an AI how to do pull-ups and gets an ad for height-increasing insoles.
In another, someone asks for help repairing a relationship with his mother and is shown a dating app ad “to meet other adult women.”
Every clip ends the same way: ads appear in AI, but not in Claude.
The target is clear. The ads ridicule the idea of chatbots blending help with contextual ads.
Sam Altman publicly pushed back. He said Anthropic is attacking ad formats OpenAI does not plan to use, calling the campaign misleading. He framed the disagreement as a choice between broad access to AI and a tightly controlled, premium-only model.
AI rivalry has moved from product posts to prime-time TV.
💧 Sponsored by @rainbetcom - rainbet.com
⚠️ Anthropic safety researcher resigns, says “the world is in danger” from fast AI progress
🖱 A senior AI safety researcher at Anthropic, Mrinank Sharma, stepped down, warning that rapid AI development puts the world at risk. He said safety teams face ongoing pressure to sideline core concerns, including bioterrorism and other catastrophic scenarios.
🖱 Anthropic was founded to build safer AI systems, yet even its CEO Dario Amodei has publicly cautioned that progress may be moving too quickly and called for slowing deployment.
🖱 Similar tensions have surfaced elsewhere. Senior safety researchers, including members of the former Superalignment team at OpenAI, have left, arguing that commercial priorities are overtaking efforts to reduce risks from systems that could surpass human intelligence.
🖱 Former OpenAI researcher Zoe Hitzig resigned after ads were introduced in ChatGPT. She warned that advertising inside highly personal conversations could enable subtle manipulation, especially as users share sensitive details about health, finances, and relationships.
Safety debates are no longer internal. They are playing out in public as AI systems scale.
✔️ Subscribe on @venture
🧠 DeepMind builds an AI that scores 91.9% on elite math proof test
Google DeepMind introduced Aletheia, a math-focused AI agent that scored 91.9% on IMO-ProofBench Advanced, one of the toughest public benchmarks for Olympiad-style proofs.
Aletheia runs on Gemini Deep Think and uses a loop of generating proofs, checking them, then refining mistakes. DeepMind says it outperforms even newer Gemini Deep Think Advanced setups while using less compute.
Beyond benchmarks, the agent has formally solved four problems from the Erdős list, with one likely not previously closed in literature. It also wrote a full math paper with correct results and assisted researchers on real academic work.
Proof-based reasoning is becoming measurable, scalable, and cheaper at the same time.
💧 Sponsored by @rainbetcom - rainbet.com
📊 @tech
🧠 MIT finds heavy ChatGPT use weakens recall and brain activity
MIT studied how ChatGPT affects users during writing tasks. 83.3% of participants using the tool could not recall a single sentence they had written minutes earlier. Participants who wrote without AI recalled their work easily.
Neural connectivity scores for ChatGPT users dropped from 79 to 42, a 47% decline. This was the lowest level among all groups. Even after stopping AI use, these participants showed persistently lower activity in later sessions.
AI-written essays were technically correct but often described as robotic and shallow. ChatGPT made users 60% faster while reducing mental effort by 32%.
The strongest results came from people who wrote on their own first and used AI later.
💧 Sponsored by @rainbetcom - rainbet.com
📊 @tech
💸 AI models are already taking a slice of creator platforms
OnlyFans generated $7.2B in revenue in 2025, with 400M users and 4.1M creators. The platform is still growing around 20% year over year.
At the same time, Fanvue is scaling fast, reaching $65M ARR with 450% annual growth. One key difference is that Fanvue openly allows AI-generated creators.
AI “models” are already driving about 15% of Fanvue’s revenue.
🔸 Emily Pellegrini: 555K Instagram followers, ~$23,000/month (up from $6K in 3 months)
🔸 Aitana Lopez: 326K Instagram followers, ~$11,000/month
🔸 Hailey Lopez: built with Stable Diffusion, ~$2,500–4,000/month
This is one of the first clear cases where synthetic content is becoming a real business line.
💧 Sponsored by @rainbetcom - rainbet.com
📊 @tech
🧠 ChatGPT starts testing ads inside conversations
OpenAI has begun testing ads in ChatGPT. The test runs in the US only, for adult users on the Free and Go plans. Plus, Pro, Business, and Enterprise are excluded.
Ads are selected based on the topic of the chat, past conversations, and previous ad interactions. They appear as sponsored blocks, visually separated from answers. OpenAI says ads do not affect how responses are generated.
Advertisers do not see user chats or personal data. They only get aggregated stats like views and clicks. Ads are blocked around health, mental health, and politics. Users can hide ads, delete ad data, or turn off personalization. Disabling ads on the free tier comes with lower message limits.
This puts ads inside a much more personal flow than feeds or search. It is not a scroll. It sits between thoughts.
OpenAI calls it an early experiment and says feedback will shape what comes next.
💧 Sponsored by @rainbetcom - rainbet.com
📊 @tech
🤖 Atlas nails a backflip after failing hard
Boston Dynamics showed Atlas performing a clean backflip after a run-up. The video also includes failed attempts where the robot loses balance or lands on its head.
This was the final test of the research Atlas, built to push hardware and control limits. The work was done with the Robotics and AI Institute led by Marc Raibert. The key method was zero-shot transfer, where motions trained in simulation are deployed on the real robot without tuning.
The commercial Atlas is next. It has 56 degrees of freedom and tactile grippers. Hyundai plans factory deployment in Georgia by 2028.
Backflips are done. Factory work is coming.
💧 Sponsored by @rainbetcom - rainbet.com
📊 @tech
📍 Alleged OpenAI headphone ad sparks denial and buzz
A leaked-looking video surfaced on Reddit during the Super Bowl, showing actor Alexander Skarsgård wearing silver headphones while facing a mirrored device.
The post claimed to come from an OpenAI employee who said the ad was pulled at the last minute. The clip was later reposted by Alexis Ohanian.
OpenAI denied any involvement. Greg Brockman and the company’s PR and marketing leads called the video fake.
Online chatter framed it as a possible test balloon or guerrilla marketing attempt. Either way, the clip spread fast without a paid Super Bowl slot.
💧 Sponsored by @rainbetcom - rainbet.com
📊 @tech
Documentary: non-technical founder discovers Claude Code
💧 Sponsored by @rainbetcom - rainbet.com
📊 @tech
🔫 Painkiller RTX uses AI to update a 2004 game at scale
Painkiller is being reworked through the Painkiller RTX project without a traditional remaster. Instead of manually redoing thousands of assets, the team relies on generative AI to upscale old textures into physically based materials with depth, roughness, and light behavior.
The AI handles bulk processing fast and consistently. Human artists stay in the loop, reviewing scenes, fixing failures, and adjusting mood where realism breaks the original feel. Most routine asset work is automated. Creative control stays manual.
Painkiller RTX is less about nostalgia and more about workflow. Old games no longer face a binary choice between being forgotten or getting an expensive remake. Small teams can now revive legacy content using AI-driven pipelines at a fraction of the cost.
💧 Sponsored by @rainbetcom - rainbet.com
📊 @tech
🔈 JLab sells headphones you are not meant to wear
JLab released Blue XL for $100. It looks like oversized headphones, but it is actually 2 speakers connected by a fixed headband.
Each side has a 2.5-inch driver plus a same-size passive radiator for bass. The unit can sit on a desk like a portable speaker. The cups cannot be detached. One side has a volume wheel.
Battery life is rated at 20 hours. Charging takes about 3 hours. Formally, it fits on a head, but the intended use is around the neck, not over the ears.
It is sold only on JLab’s site, in a limited run, in one blue color.
💧 Sponsored by @rainbetcom - rainbet.com
📊 @tech
⏫ SanDisk raises SSD prices
American SSD maker SanDisk sharply increased prices across its lineup.
Some models went up by as much as 4x.
A flagship 8TB SSD now costs over $2,500.
At that price point, the drive alone costs more than a full PC did not long ago.
💧 Sponsored by @rainbetcom - rainbet.com
📊 @tech
🧠 OpenAI ships GPT-5.3 Codex as a new coding model
OpenAI released GPT-5.3 Codex. Sam Altman described it as a response to Opus 4.6. No direct benchmarks were shared.
According to Altman, the model codes better than earlier Codex versions. It holds longer context and lets users change task conditions mid-execution.
He also claims faster execution compared to previous models.
💧 Sponsored by @rainbetcom - rainbet.com
📊 @tech
🎥 Logitech brings AI framing to large meeting rooms
Logitech unveiled Rally AI Camera and Rally AI Camera Pro, priced at $2,500 and $3,000. Both target large conference rooms where speakers drift out of frame and faces get lost.
The cameras use Rally optics with RightSight 2. The system switches automatically between a wide shot, a close-up of the speaker, or a balanced grid view for all participants.
The Pro version adds a dual-camera setup with a 115° wide lens plus a separate optical camera with 15x hybrid zoom and a 1-inch sensor. It supports multi-camera layouts in Zoom and Microsoft Teams, with automatic switching.
This is purpose-built hardware for big rooms, not everyday meeting spaces.
💧 Sponsored by @rainbetcom - rainbet.com
🎮 GTA VI confirmed for November 19 release
GTA VI is still scheduled to launch on November 19. Developers and publisher Take-Two Interactive said there are no plans to delay the release.
The company also confirmed a major marketing push starting this summer. More ads, announcements, and official materials are coming.
The timeline is now locked around a heavy promo cycle.
💧 Sponsored by @rainbetcom - rainbet.com
🤚 China bans hidden door handles on EVs
China will ban flush and retractable door handles on electric vehicles. From Jan 1, 2027, all new EVs must have mechanical door opening inside and outside. Approved models get a delay until Jan 2029.
The rule follows fatal crashes where electronics failed and doors could not be opened, including cases linked to Xiaomi EVs. About 60% of top-selling EVs are affected, including models from Tesla.
BYD and Geely are already switching back. China is now setting EV safety design rules at scale.
📊 @tech