Murati's co-founders return to OpenAI

PLUS: Run parallel media tasks with Claude Cowork

Good morning, AI enthusiasts. OpenAI used to say it was "nothing without its people" — and now it's getting a few big ones back in dramatic fashion.

Former CTO Mira Murati’s Thinking Machines just fired co-founder and CTO Barret Zolph over alleged misconduct, only for him and several others to land back at OAI in the industry’s latest AI talent shakeup.

Reminder: Our next workshop is today at 4 PM EST — join and learn how to leverage Projects and Deep Research in your workflows to upgrade working with AI. RSVP here.

In today’s AI rundown:

  • Thinking Machines loses co-founders to OAI

  • Cursor builds browser with AI agents

  • Run parallel media tasks with Claude Cowork

  • OpenAI invests in Altman’s Neuralink rival

  • 4 new AI tools, community workflows, and more

LATEST DEVELOPMENTS

THINKING MACHINES & OPENAI

Image source: Lovart / The Rundown

The Rundown: Mira Murati's Thinking Machines Lab just parted ways with co-founder and CTO Barret Zoph amid misconduct allegations (H/T to Kylie Robison for breaking the news), with Zoph and several other former staffers returning to OAI just hours later.

The details:

  • Murati announced the split at an all-hands meeting and on X, with Zoph reportedly accused of sharing proprietary information with competitors.

  • OAI applications CEO Fidji Simo welcomed the trio back in a post on X, revealing the company had been in discussions with Zoph for weeks.

  • Murati elevated longtime Meta AI researcher and PyTorch framework creator Soumith Chintala as Thinking Machines' new CTO.

  • The departures mark Thinking Machines’ third co-founder exit in under a year, following Andrew Tulloch's move to Meta in October.

Why it matters: In 2024, Murati's OAI departure was a shock to the AI world, and now her own co-founders are boomeranging back to her former employer under ugly circumstances. OAI is “nothing without its people,” as the old saying goes, and now it’s getting a few big ones back (and potentially more) — albeit in a dramatic fashion.

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CURSOR

Image source: Cursor CEO Michael Truell (@mntruell on X)

The Rundown: Cursor published a new blog revealing it ran hundreds of AI coding agents autonomously for weeks on end — with one experiment producing a 3M+ line web browser built entirely from the ground up using GPT 5.2.

The details:

  • Cursor organized agents into planners, workers, and judges (similar to the viral Ralph Wiggum technique), allowing hundreds to run and collaborate together.

  • The browser was built in under a week by the agents from scratch, with the final output actually loading simple websites correctly.

  • Other experiments included a Windows 7 emulator, an Excel clone, and an internal migration of Cursor's codebase, each spanning a million+ lines of code.

  • The team also noted that GPT-5.2 handled long autonomous runs significantly better than Claude Opus 4.5, which tended to take shortcuts.

Why it matters: The current frontier generation of coding agents has broken through an invisible capability wall, and we’re seeing it everywhere from viral Claude Code use cases to AI agent swarms crushing 1M line projects over weeks. With increased agent coordination and durations of work, the entire economics of development start to shift.

AI TRAINING

The Rundown: In this tutorial, you’ll learn how to use Claude Cowork to process images and videos in parallel — compressing files, extracting audio, and handling media-heavy tasks automatically on your computer.

Step-by-step:

  1. Update your Claude desktop app (requires a Claude Max subscription at $100/month) and open the new Cowork tab

  2. Put one or two images and videos in a new folder, then click "Work in a folder" and select that folder

  3. Give Claude this prompt: "Save copies of the images in this folder, then reduce the file size of each by at least 50%"

  4. Before it finishes, add another prompt: "Extract the audio from the small steps video and save it as an MP3" — Claude will power through both tasks in parallel

Pro tip: Add Context7 extension to give Cowork access to open source documentation.

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MERGE LABS & OPENAI

Image source: Lovart / The Rundown

The Rundown: OpenAI announced a new seed investment into Merge Labs, a brain-computer interface startup co-founded by Sam Altman that emerged from stealth alongside its $252M raise, with the AI giant becoming the company’s largest backer.

The details:

  • Merge is aiming to boost BCI bandwidth using ultrasound and engineered proteins, skipping the surgical brain implants required by rivals like Neuralink.

  • The founding team includes World/Tools for Humanity's Alex Blania and Sandro Herbig, plus researchers from Caltech and the nonprofit Forest Neurotech.

  • OAI will work on AI models and tools to help Merge read brain signals and ramp R&D, saying BCIs will be “natural, human-centered way” to interact with AI.

Why it matters: OAI’s investment continues the circular merry-go-round of dealmaking, this time on a more personal level for Altman. But the bigger story may be the turf he’s encroaching on, bringing his feud with Elon Musk into the brain-computer interface sector — and likely making for a whole new round of drama in the process.

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  • 💬 ChatGPT Translate - Translate text, voice, or images across 50+ languages

  • 🔊 TranslateGemma - Google’s new family of open translation models

  • 💼 Claude Cowork - Bring Claude Code’s agentic capabilities to everyday tasks

*Sponsored Listing

ByteDance released SeedFold, a new open-source protein structure prediction model that outperforms Google’s AlphaFold3 across several benchmarks.

Elon Musk revealed that Grok 4.20 will lag behind Claude in coding, saying Anthropic has “done something special” but that cutting off xAI was “not good for their karma”.

Replit launched mobile app creation, letting users build, test via QR code, and publish directly to the App Store from a single platform.

Airbnb appointed Ahmad Al-Dahle as Chief Technology Officer, bringing in Meta's former head of generative AI and the leader behind the Llama model family.

AI creative platform Higgsfield announced a new $130M funding round at a $1.3B valuation, with the company claiming to be the fastest scaling AI company in history.

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 John D. in Daytona Beach, FL:

"As the IT guy, I enjoy showing coworkers what AI can do. For our accounting team, I fed a CSV file of our annual Business Prime account activity into Claude, and it created a colorful summary with charts & graphs and broke down spending by month, who spent what, product categories we spent most on, and where we can save money.”

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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