LARPER

China just blocked Meta from buying an AI startup, top engineers at Google and OpenAI are quitting to build their own companies, a startup wants to put mind-reading tech in your headphones, and an AI music tool just raised $5M. Here's everything that mattered this week.

OpenAI just released GPT-5, and it's not just a smarter chatbot — it's a single app that can chat, code, browse, and generate images all at once. It reasons better, handles agents across Slack and Gmail, and is designed to replace every AI tool you currently juggle. We break down what's actually new, what's still paywalled, and why the skill that matters now isn't using AI — it's directing it well.

A new project called LangAlpha just showed up on Hacker News with a big question: what would an AI coding assistant look like if it was designed specifically for finance? We break down what that means, why it's hard, and why students should pay attention.

Some AI tools are free to download and inspect. Others are locked behind a paywall and kept secret. This week we explain the difference, why companies make different choices, and what it means for students building things with AI.

You've used AI to answer questions. But what happens when AI can take actions — browse the web, run code, send emails? This week we break down AI agents, what they're good at, and why they occasionally go off the rails.

Everyone's talking about AI, but what is it really? This week we break down the basics — what these models actually do, why they sometimes get things wrong, and what words like 'reasoning' and 'benchmark' actually mean.