Ilya Sutskever breaks silence on AI's future

PLUS: Anthropic finds AI could double U.S. productivity growth

Good morning, AI enthusiasts. The AI industry is betting hundreds of billions on one idea: more compute equals smarter AI.

But the man who helped build ChatGPT says that era is ending. OpenAI co-founder Ilya Sutskever just broke his silence in a rare interview — sharing his take on ASI timelines, his secretive startup, and why research will drive the next AI leap.

In today’s AI rundown:

  • Ilya Sutskever says AI's 'age of scaling' is ending

  • Black Forest Labs’ Flux.2 image generation suite

  • Use ChatGPT shopping research to find best deals

  • Anthropic: AI could double U.S. productivity growth

  • 4 new AI tools, community workflows, and more

LATEST DEVELOPMENTS

ILYA SUTSKEVER

Image source: Dwarkesh Podcast

The Rundown: Safe Superintelligence founder Ilya Sutskever just appeared on the Dwarkesh Podcast, giving his take on scaling, ASI, his secretive startup, and more — arguing that research breakthroughs, not compute, will drive the next wave of progress.

The details:

  • Sutskever said that 2020-2025 was the “age of scaling”, but we’ve reached the point where research becomes the differentiating factor for AI breakthroughs.

  • He forecasts 5-20 years until superhuman-like learning AI emerges, adding that the first ASI systems should be built to care about sentient life.

  • Sutskever said that his startup, SSI, is taking a “different technical approach” to superintelligence, and called it an “age of research” company.

  • He also revealed that SSI was raising at a $32B valuation and declined an acquisition offer from Meta, with his cofounder marking the only departure.

Why it matters: Sutskever has been out of the spotlight since his exit from OpenAI, with SSI quietly working in the shadows — but his words carry massive weight in the AI world. His take on a “return to research” over compute comes at an awkward time, as the majority of the industry continues to pour massive money into scaling infrastructure.

TOGETHER WITH GURU

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BLACK FOREST LABS

Image source: Black Forest Labs

The Rundown: Black Forest Labs dropped Flux.2, a new family of powerful image models — featuring multi-reference capabilities that maintain character and style consistency across up to ten input images and cost reductions compared to rivals.

The details:

  • FLUX.2 combines a model that handles both text and images with another that handles spatial relationships for realistic lighting, physics, and compositions.

  • The models come in slightly below Google’s recently released SOTA Nano Banana Pro, but offer a significant cost reduction in pricing.

  • The lineup includes Pro for top-quality API access, Flex for dev customization, Dev as an open-weights option, and Klein coming soon as fully open-source.

  • Outputs now reach up to 4MP with improved typography capabilities, enabling production-ready infographics, UI mockups, and complex text layouts.

Why it matters: Nano Banana Pro felt like a step change in the range of creative workflows and abilities, but Flux.2 shows the competition isn’t lagging far behind. While AI’s image realism was already virtually imperceptible from reality, the next-gen world knowledge, consistency, and text capabilities are the next leap forward.

AI TRAINING

The Rundown: In this tutorial, you will learn how to use ChatGPT's Shopping Research feature to find the best deals without hopping across multiple sites, centralizing the entire experience from search to price comparison to checkout links.

Step-by-step:

  1. Go to ChatGPT, click the plus button, and select Shopping Research to enable the tool

  2. Describe what you're looking for (e.g., "Find me the best Black Friday laptop deals and compare across sites")—answer follow-up questions about budget, specs, and use case to refine results

  3. Review final suggestions showing top deals, price comparisons across retailers, trade-offs, alternatives, and direct links to each listing

  4. Select your product, click through to the retailer, and complete your purchase

Pro Tip: Soon, you’ll also be able to buy selected products directly in ChatGPT via services like Stripe or PayPal — no need to visit the retailer’s site.

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AI RESEARCH

Image source: Anthropic

The Rundown: Anthropic published new research analyzing 100K Claude conversations to track AI’s productivity gains, estimating that widespread AI adoption could boost annual U.S. labor productivity growth by 1.8% — doubling the current rate.

The details:

  • Anthropic researchers fed 100K anonymized conversations through its Clio privacy tool, mapping tasks to federal labor data to calculate productivity gains.

  • Researchers found Claude cuts task completion time by roughly 80%, with the average work request taking about 90 minutes without assistance.

  • Software developers account for 19% of estimated productivity gains, followed by operations managers, marketing specialists, and customer service roles.

  • Examples of tasks with massive time savings included curriculum development (96%), research assistance (91%), and executive admin functions (87%).

Why it matters: There is plenty of debate over AI’s actual impact vs. hype, and this research shows the real gains across a variety of sectors and tasks. But the bigger question the study sidesteps: whether the estimated doubling of productivity growth comes with the job displacement Anthropic's own CEO continues to warn about.

QUICK HITS

  • 🤖 Claude Opus 4.5 - Anthropic’s new benchmark-topping frontier model

  • 🎆 FLUX.2 - Black Forest Labs’ new visual intelligence model

  • 🛒 Shopping Research - New interactive shopping experience in ChatGPT

  • 👁️ HunyuanOCR - Tencent’s open-source, SOTA visual understanding model

Nvidia responded to concerns over Google’s TPUs gaining a foothold, saying its hardware is “a generation ahead” with “greater performance, versatility, and fungibility.”

Anthropic tested Claude Opus 4.5 on a take-home exam given to prospective performance engineers, with the AI scoring “higher than any human candidate ever.”

AI music platform Suno partnered with Warner Music Group to train on licensed recordings and let users create songs with participating artists' voices and styles.

Google’s Gemini 3 Pro set a new high score for AI models with a 130 on Tracking AI’s offline IQ test, surpassing Grok 4 Expert Mode’s 126.

Tencent’s Hunyuan open-sourced HunyuanOCR, a SOTA visual understanding model for document parsing, information extraction, text detection, and more.

Perplexity launched a free AI shopping feature for U.S. users that learns personal preferences and enables purchases directly within the app through PayPal.

COMMUNITY

Every newsletter, we showcase how a reader is using AI to work smarter, save time, or make life easier.

Today’s workflow comes from reader Tara R. in the U.K.:

"I use NotebookLM to create podcasts for my students, as a way to refresh a whole term’s worth of teaching. It’s a practical way for them to review topics while they’re on the go, especially great for those who struggle to find time to revise.”

How do you use AI? Tell us here.

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Rowan, Joey, Zach, Shubham, and Jennifer — the humans behind The Rundown

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