We publish a short AI news brief on our own site, written for people who run businesses rather than people who build models. Here is this week’s edition in miniature, with the numbers that matter and what we would do about each one.
Claude now leads a quarter of the work that builds the next Claude
Anthropic published three measurements of how much AI is doing inside its own lab. As of August, Claude leads 26 percent of its AI research and development work, meaning it can take most of a task from a prompt to done while a person supervises. In February that share was under 1 percent. The method is worth as much as the number: Anthropic sampled 20 percent of its research staff every week in July, split the work into roughly 15,000 tasks, and had Claude help rate them, which it says out loud.
What we would do: stop treating “we tried AI in March and it was fine” as a settled verdict. Rerun your best prompts and workflows every quarter and keep whatever got better.
ChatGPT moved into Microsoft Word, including the free plan
On September 17, OpenAI shipped ChatGPT for Word: a sidebar that drafts from notes, summarizes, revises and cleans up formatting, on every plan including Free. Quieter item on the same page, and the more expensive one if it applies to you: OpenAI plans to retire custom GPTs, with a migration path to plugins.
What we would do: assume every competitor’s proposal, press release and blog post now comes out of that same sidebar. Average writing just became free, and free plus average is a miserable place to compete. Put your customer’s exact words, your real numbers and an actual opinion into yours.
A dime an hour to turn every sales call into copy
xAI released Grok Voice Transcribe 2.0 at ten cents per hour of recorded audio and twenty cents for live streams, which it says is twice as accurate as version 1.0 at the same price. It labels speakers, takes up to 100 custom terms per request and can drop every um. Atlassian says Loom uses it.
What we would do: transcribe your recorded sales calls, pull the exact phrases customers use for their problem, and put those phrases in your headlines, ads and FAQ answers. People trust their own words, and so do the AI answers that quote pages sounding like the question.
The pattern underneath all three
A good model is no longer an advantage, because your competitor has the same sidebar on the free plan. What separates one business from another is what you feed it: first-party data, recorded customer language, proof you can show and a point of view worth quoting. Best inputs win, not most subscriptions.
Read the full edition, with a source link on every claim. Free, no login, no email required.