Happy Sunday. This week Elon's lab dropped a cheap new frontier model, three top AI labs shipped on the same day, and Anthropic quietly passed OpenAI. Here's what actually mattered, broken down so it's worth your five minutes. Let's get into it.
This week in tech + AI
Elon's SpaceXAI dropped Grok 4.5, and it's cheap. It's their first big release since going public and buying the AI coding startup Cursor, and Musk calls it an "Opus-class model, but faster, more token-efficient and lower cost." It's tuned for coding and agentic work (even finance and legal) and costs just $2 per million input tokens, well under the top Anthropic and OpenAI models. What it means: frontier-level AI just got a lot cheaper again. If you build with these tools, the best models keep dropping in price while going up in quality. (Heads up, it's not in the EU yet lol)
For the first time ever, three top AI labs had a new frontier model out on the same day. Grok 4.5, Anthropic's Fable 5 (back worldwide after the US lifted its export controls) and OpenAI lining up GPT-5.6 all landed in the same window. OpenAI even plans to run its new Sol model on special Cerebras chips at around 750 tokens per second, roughly 15x faster than normal. What it means: the pace is genuinely unprecedented. The tools you use are getting better, faster and cheaper on a timescale of weeks, not years.
Anthropic quietly passed OpenAI in revenue. The maker of Claude crossed a $30 billion annual run rate this week, about $6 billion ahead of OpenAI. What it means: The "OpenAI is the obvious default" era is over, real competition is here and that's good for all of us.
OpenAI offered the US government a 5% stake in the company. That's worth roughly $42 billion at its recent valuation, and Sam Altman is pitching it as a way to give the public a financial stake in AI's upside, with other labs potentially doing the same. What it means: AI is now so big that governments and companies are rethinking who should own the upside. Whatever you make of it, it shows how high the stakes have gotten.
AI is moving into serious finance, and the money is following. Taktile, which builds agentic decision tools for banks and insurers, raised $110 million led by Goldman Sachs' growth arm. What it means: "AI plus finance" is one of the hottest and best-paid intersections right now. If you're into quant or fintech, that's where a lot of the real opportunity is.
On my mind
You should allow yourself to be a beginner more often. Im currently preparing for my upcoming Master programme at ETH and for that im studying lots of mathematics and statistics. As a finance major, higher mathematics is definitely something new for me and I’m constantly feeling like an absolute beginner. But it is very important that you allow yourself to feel this way. Nobody is good at the beginning and nobody is bad after 100 tries. But in order to get to that 100th try you need to keep going even when it feels embarrassing. Nobody who is ahead of you will judge you for trying and being bad at something at first, because they all have been in the same situation at some point. Also just admitting to being a beginner and being open to learn is a very good and helpful mindset that you should always keep.
More from me
My latest video: How I went from my finance undergrad to a master in statistics, tips to become more technical. Watch here
Recommendation of the week: Stanford's CS153, Frontier Systems. I started rewatching it this week and the speaker lineup is honestly insane. All free on YouTube. Watch here
Tool of the week: What I use daily to prompt Claude :) It’s completely free and every Link click below supports me! Thank you in advance
10x the context. Half the time.
Speak your prompts into ChatGPT or Claude and get detailed, paste-ready input that actually gives you useful output. Wispr Flow captures what you'd cut when typing. Free on Mac, Windows, and iPhone.
Have a great week,
Chris