😺 Six new GPT-5 models, a $6K robot gymnast, and an AI that builds AI

PLUS: The WILD AI interview everyone's watching...

Welcome, humans.

Wanna hear Sam cover all SORTS of interesting questions no one ever asks him? Check out his conversation with Theo Von:

Sam Altman | This Past Weekend w/ Theo Von #599

Sam’s a new dad as you may know, and it was pretty hilarious to listen to him talk about his son gaining new capabilities like a new AI model.

This podcast is so interesting, covering the real questions real people actually have about AI and how Sam Altman (and OpenAI) are thinking about its impact. Definitely give it a watch! We recapped all of the most interesting parts (to us) here.

Here’s what you need to know about AI today:

We recap the top 5 AI news stories from this weekend.
Meta hired a Chief Scientist for Superintelligence Labs
Multiple Browsers blocked Microsoft's Recall feature.
New paper shows AI rewrites its neural network based on your prompts.

Advertise in The Neuron here.

The Top 5 AI news stories from over the weekend…

Okay y’all, we’re going to try something new today!

Over the weekend, there were FIVE stories that caught our eye as potential main story material for Monday.

So instead of picking and choosing, we wrote FIVE DEEP DIVES on each of them, which we’ll recap here and let you choose which sounds more interesting for you to go read more about. Here ya go!

1. AI Just Learned How to Design Better AI (And It's Scary Good)

Scientists created ASI-ARCH, an AI system that can autonomously invent, code, and test new AI architectures. In one experiment, it discovered 106 breakthrough AI designs and found a clear pattern: double the computing power, double the breakthroughs. This one’s big if true y’all: we might be witnessing the start of exponential AI progress driven by AI itself. Read the full deep dive here.

2. Anthropic’s Twin Discoveries Show AI's Hidden Psychological Problems

Anthropic just proved that giving AI more time to “think” often makes it worse. Models get distracted, fixate on irrelevant details, and sometimes develop concerning behaviors. Even weirder—AI models can transmit traits to each other through completely unrelated data, like passing a love of owls through random number sequences. Read the full analysis here.

3. You Can Now Buy a Backflipping Robot for Less Than a Used Car

Chinese company Unitree just dropped R1, a cartwheeling, hand-standing humanoid robot for $5,900—about 70% cheaper than any competitor. This 4-foot robot does cartwheels and handstands, though it can't make breakfast. Read more about it here.

4. Tencent Just Made Minecraft for but for Generative AI

HunyuanWorld 1.0 generates entire explorable 3D worlds from text or images—not just videos, but actual environments you can walk around in VR or export to game engines. Game developers and VR creators now have a tool that can prototype entire worlds from a simple description. Read all about it here.

5. GPT-5 Is Secretly Being Tested RIGHT NOW (And It's Really Good at Coding)

Six mysterious models with names like “Zenith,” “Summit,” and… “Lobster” (doesn’t have the same ring to it) appeared on LM Arena this weekend. The AI community is convinced these are GPT-5 variants being secretly tested—and early reports suggest it absolutely crushes coding tasks. Bonus wild fact: OpenAI apparently plans to use this architecture all the way through GPT-8. Check out our story on that here.

In short, this weekend felt like watching the future arrive in fast-forward. The ASI-ARCH story is probably the most significant—AI designing AI could accelerate progress beyond human research timelines. But those Anthropic findings remind us this path has hidden psychological landmines we're just starting to understand. And of course, GPT-5 could come as soon as today (the 28th was the original rumored launch date) or as late as August… which, y’know, starts on Friday.

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Prompt Tip of the Day

Give your AI chats an instant boost with these three micro‑hacks:

1. The 3‑Word Rule: Try this out: Append “like a [role]” to your prompt to unlock expert‑level, context‑rich answers. Copy this prompt:

“Summarize [text pasted below] like a journalist.”

2. The 80/20 Rule: Try this out: Ask “Give me the 80/20 of [topic]” to surface the vital 20 percent of steps that drive 80 percent of the result. Copy this prompt:

“Give me the 80/20 of learning [topic]”

Check out all of our Prompt Tips of the Day from July here.

P.S: Completely new to AI? Start here!

Treats To Try.

*Asterisk = from our partners. Advertise in The Neuron here.

*Flow is the AI voice keyboard that turns speech into polished text in any iPhone app—Slack, iMessage, Gmail, Notion—5× faster than typing. Free plan with weekly word cap—try it here.
BuildWise keeps your construction projects on track with real-time updates, expert guidance, and a central hub for all project details—no pricing details.
TrunkTools answers your construction document questions in 30 seconds instead of hours of folder searching (raised $40M).
Opal from Google converts your text descriptions into shareable AI apps AI mini-apps by chaining together prompts and tools, then lets you share them with others without writing any code.
Aidoc scans your X-rays and CTs to instantly alert doctors about strokes, brain bleeds, and other emergencies (raised $150M).
AIUC insures AI agents so you can deploy them without worrying about liability if they malfunction (raised $15M).
Jobright finds jobs that match your skills, rewrites your resume for each one, and applies for you automatically.
Cursor launched an AI debugger that analyzes your entire project context, lets you describe bugs in plain English, and suggests real-time fixes across multiple files.
Aeneas is an AI model from DeepMind that restores ancient Latin inscriptions with 73% accuracy using a dataset of 176,000 inscriptions.
Price per token gives you real-time prices for tokens across multiple popular AI models.

See our top 51 AI Tools for Business here!

Around the Horn.

Good discussion on AI’s impact on jobs and education…

OpenAI partnered with Instructure to integrate AI technology into Canvas LMS, featuring custom AI assignment tools as part of Instructure's IgniteAI initiative spanning 1,100+ edtech partners.
Samsung invested in Memories.ai, a startup offering on-device video analysis technology with natural-language search that enhances privacy compared to cloud solutions.
Walmart will soon launch four “super agents”: Sparky (customer shopping), Associate Super Agent (employees), Marty (suppliers/sellers/advertisers), and Developer Super Agent (developers).
Georgia Tech is building a $20M NSF-funded AI supercomputer named Nexus that will deliver 400+ petaflops of compute by 2026.
Testing Catalog revealed that Anthropic is testing a new memory feature and that Google might be close to launching Video Overviews in NotebookLM.
Meta appointed Shengjia Zhao, a prominent AI researcher and co-creator of ChatGPT, as chief scientist of Meta Superintelligence Labs as part of a multi-billion-dollar expansion of the company's AI efforts.
The Las Vegas Sphere announced an AI-powered immersive "Wizard of Oz" premiering August 2025, with Google DeepMind helping upscale the 1939 film to 16K resolution and extending original scenes.
Tesla produced only a few hundred Optimus humanoid robots by mid-2025, falling far short of its 5K-unit annual production goal due to technical challenges including hand engineering problems.
Brave browser and AdGuard blocked Microsoft's Recall screen-capturing feature by default in their latest updates, citing privacy concerns despite Microsoft's claims of local storage and encryption.
Another big paper, “Learning without training”, showed that AI models like ChatGPT secretly rewrite their own neural network weights when you give them examples in prompts—finally explaining how they can learn new tasks without any additional training.
Want to see someone start an AI business from scratch in under 2 hours? Here you go!

Monday Meme

TBH, kinda shocked no one has remade Clippy powered by ChatGPT. If Microsoft actually did this, it would win 100x meme points.

ICYMI: Our latest podcast episode!

Missed us go hands on in with OpenAI’s new tool, ChatGPT Agent? Then watch this video! We literally said “we are so cooked” live on camera when Agent found the exact guitar Corey had been stalking online for months.