Helena

Tendrils has raised $30M led by @benchmark to rebuild general-purpose computing. @jaltma is joining our board. At Tendrils, we believe that the future of general-purpose computing lies beyond legacy architectures for legacy software.

Meet Roger, the humanoid purpose-built to protect human life in the most dangerous jobs across energy and public safety. The experts stay safe and in control. Roger goes in. No full autonomy needed. Roger takes the risk. They get the job done. Idea to walking in 5 months.

Working on a new little project. The 𝚁𝙴𝙰𝙳𝙼𝙴 is fully written by hand, because it's for human consumption. The documentation internals are AI English, because they're for agents. This little rule of thumb can make the world better. Blogs, tweets, READMEs: human communication. It's not even about "em dashes" or lack thereof. It's that it's the story-telling moment where you want to connect with other humans through their words.

New newsletter: THE DEATH OF THE AMERICAN HOST The share of Americans who say they host friends or family at their home at least monthly has declined by 70 percent in the last 50 years. derekthompson.org/p/the-deat…

Some data we recently assembled on entrepreneurship/compute in Europe: eudata.vercel.app. We hope that one of the useful roles that Stripe can play is in collecting and publishing empirical data pertaining to entrepreneurship and industry in Europe. There's growing appetite to get Europe on a better footing, and cross-sectional comparisons can often shine light on where opportunities lie. If you're interested in this kind of thing, we publish more at stripeeconomics.substack.com.

Today we’re launching Parallax, the AI energy company with a $117m fundraise led by Founders Fund, Eclipse, Lux, Diffusion, Greylock and General Catalyst. (1/5)

This is GPT-6 Astra. Anything you can do on a computer, Astra can do for you. Fast.

Over the summer, we have been sprinting on safety priorities; it's more important than ever for capabilities and safeguards to advance together. We have more to do but have made a lot of progress. We are also going to be launching our next model soon. There is an obvious tension here: on one hand, Astra is very good and we are excited to see what people will build with it. We are proud of our work. On the other hand, we are clearly in a phase of development where we believe caution is warranted, and we are pacing our progress to ensure that we can meet the safety standards required by new capability levels. Astra has been done training for a while now and is a significant step forward in both capabilities and alignment. For the models after that, we have been slowing things as needed to ensure that we can do sufficient work on safety and alignment. AI is getting extremely capable; no one fully understands the consequences of this. Managing the transition to a world with abundant and powerful AI to optimize for safety and benefits to people should be one of the highest priorities in the world. It is our highest priority at OpenAI. We have been living with the tension between being excited and anxious about progress for some time, and it is still discordant for us. We know it is much more discordant for other people. And yet, we believe strongly that the world needs to understand where AI is going and how models perform in the real world. More importantly, we believe the world will need aligned AI to manage the future phases of this transition. An iterative loop where society and this technology evolve together is what will lead to the highest chance of getting this right. So we hope you enjoy our new model, and we hope the world continues to take what’s happening in AI extremely seriously.

As we prepare to release Astra, we’re focused on making increasingly capable AI safe and broadly accessible. Astra represents a significant advance in cybersecurity capability, reaching the Critical threshold under our Preparedness Framework. We're previewing how we evaluated the model, how its safeguards have advanced alongside its capabilities, and what we'll continue to learn and improve. openai.com/index/path-to-ast…

Introducing Source Material — the weekly series where the designers & creatives shaping culture share the references that shaped them. Our first guest is Thom Bettridge: Editor-in-Chief of @i_D and founder of Content World. 00:00 - Introducing Source Material 00:08 Joe's Magazine (First Issue) 00:49 Colors: A Book about a Magazine About the Rest of the World 01:27 Balenciaga Archetype magazine 02:00 032c 33 (Frank Ocean Cover) 02:28 All-In Nº9 03:32 Highstyle (Migos Cover) 04:23 i-D 374 (“The Unknown Issue” Enza Khoury Cover) 05:42 i-D 375 (“The Beta Issue” Born In 2025 Cover) 06:50 Outro

also so excited to finally go founders mode, will be very fun to figure out future of work in public it was always obvious that i would start a company. been waiting for a trillion dollar opportunity so i wouldn't commit too early and get stuck on things that don't matter

introducing Helena, the world's first self-improving AI marketer. $10M in sales driven for 20,000 businesses already. everyone's shipping an AI that just makes more slop: so we went further. Helena grades her own work, and rebuilds the ones that miss - including the ones she built. what she does: ➤ runs loops to optimize Meta/Google ads & social ➤ drafts SEO content that ranks, straight to WordPress/Webflow/Framer ➤ optimizes emails in Klaviyo/Mailchimp/Brevo ➤ sends you a daily brief: what worked, what she's changing real numbers: ➤ grew organic traffic 35%+ for hundreds of brands ➤ 2x-ed a DTC brand's sales in 5 weeks ➤ scaled a dead ad account from $0 to $10k/mo ➤ drove $40k email revenue in 6 weeks 100+ skills. 3,000+ integrations. purpose-built by marketers who actually scaled hundreds of businesses. just your url. all done in less than 3 minutes. try it now 👇 hirehelena.com

This is the graduation ceremony at the University of the Arts London.

The values Claude expresses also vary with the language of the conversation, most noticeably along the Warmth vs. Rigor axis. Claude leans most toward warmth in Hindi and Arabic. In Russian, it leans toward rigor—often asking the user for supporting evidence.

Every generation inherits a new medium. Ours is taking shape. Introducing @_nellofficial. Built in San Francisco. Backed by Danny Rimer and @IndexVentures, alongside @antonosika, @gokulr, @rauchg, Jason Citron, @joshm, @lennysan, @mati, @Max, @saradu, @soleio, @Thom_Wolf, and several others. More soon.

Instacart co-founder Apoorva Mehta launched a hedge fund that relies on an army of artificial intelligence agents, one of the few using that technology to essentially replace fundamental portfolio managers. bloomberg.com/news/articles/…