🏠 AIssemble

The Great AI Sprint

Author

Brett Goldstein
February 17, 2025

In partnership with

GM! It’s Brett again. My last company was fully remote, and progress was much slower with a terrible culture. In contrast, my current company, where we’re in the office 4x/week, is a completely different story.

Even Jamie Dimon agrees that remote work "simply doesn’t work." He highlights 3 key things it stifles: creativity, decision-making, and young people’s development.

Founders – don’t fall for the remote work trap. It may be tough to hire in person, but it’s worth it.

🏠 AI

This week in AI

It’s been a crazy week in AI, with some big announcements.

First up, Sam Altman said that OpenAI's gonna unify everything - killing their confusing product lineup and building one system to rule them all. GPT-4.5 ("Orion") is the last of the old-school GPTs. GPT-5 is the big one, packing voice, canvas, search everything. And get this: free ChatGPT users get a taste of GPT-5 as well!

Then Perplexity jumped in with their Deep Research launch, taking a direct shot at OpenAI's $200/month feature by making it free for casual users. Reviews are mixed, but the pricing strategy is aggressive.

Then Elon's saying Grok 3 is 'scary smart' - claims it's outperforming everything out there. The wild part is that it can back and forth and iterate through its training data to maintain logical consistency, basically cleaning up its own knowledge base when it spots incorrect info.

But it's not all hype. Anthropic's Dario Amodei's out there saying AI's like "a country of geniuses in a datacenter," talking about security risks and economic disruption.

The big picture - We're watching an all-out AI race, but it's evolved beyond just raw capabilities. It's about who can make the most powerful AI accessible, safe (or at least appear to), and commercially viable. The pace is wild - what used to take years is happening in weeks. Welcome to the new normal in tech.

Try Artisan’s All-in-one Outbound Sales Platform & AI BDR

Ava automates your entire outbound demand generation so you can get leads delivered to your inbox on autopilot. She operates within the Artisan platform, which consolidates every tool you need for outbound:

  • 300M+ High-Quality B2B Prospects, including E-Commerce and Local Business Leads

  • Automated Lead Enrichment With 10+ Data Sources

  • Full Email Deliverability Management

  • Multi-Channel Outreach Across Email & LinkedIn

  • Human-Level Personalization

🤝 THE LATEST IN…

TECH

AI

SCIENCE

CRYPTO

🏃‍♀️ QUICKIES

Raise: Harvey, an AI-powered legal assistant, raised $300M in a Series D funding round to further scale agentic workflows and enterprise use cases in the legal industry.

Stat: $112B. That’s the France’s AI investment pledge as Macron pushes for global cooperation ahead of the Paris AI summit.

Rabbit Hole: What I've Learned from Users (Paul Graham)

🤩 MONDAY MOTIVATION

🛠️ FOUNDERS CORNER

The best resources we recently came across that will help you become a better founder, builder, or investor.

🧑🏻‍💻 SEO AI Agent automates your SEO workflows using real-time Ahref data.

🛠️ Sennu AI is your AI sales agent for tech consulting firms.

🗂️ Supavec is your open source RAG as a service platform.

 

🎯 The 80 / 20

Simple tricks to get a ton of value with minimal effort for work and life.

The What-When Rule

Let's cut through the noise with just 2 questions:

  1. What do you actually need to complete this week?

  2. When are you going to complete it?

That's your entire system right there.

Now, sort your tasks into buckets: high-impact work that moves the needle, self-improvement stuff like learning, admin tasks, and those random fires you need to put out. Be ruthless here - if it doesn't clearly fit one of these, it probably shouldn't be on your list.

Then instead of just adding them to your list, start blocking out time in your calendar for when you'll actually do all of it.

Start with the heavy hitters - carve out 90-minute focus blocks for your most important work. No meetings, no Slack, no email. Just pure, uninterrupted time to crush it. Aim for at least one of these blocks every day.

Then schedule smaller blocks for the admin stuff - those pesky emails and quick tasks. A couple of 30-minute blocks at the start and end of your day usually does the trick.

It's about making sure the important stuff actually happens. Because let's face it - if it's not in your calendar, it's probably not getting done.

 

❓️ AI GENERATED OR NOT

Is this AI generated?

Login or Subscribe to participate in polls.

Last week’s answer: If you guessed AI-generated… you were wrong.

🟨🟨🟨🟨⬜️⬜️ Yeah (~55%)

🟩🟩⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️ Nope (~44%)

Here’s the original.

 👋 A Quick Note About Micro

Micro is a CRM that doesn't feel like homework and an email client that knows what matters. Simply put, it's an all-in-one productivity tool that organizes itself so you don't have to.

I built Micro with some friends because I was tired of getting guilt tripped for not hitting inbox 0 and having to bounce around between so many tools to do my job.

We're launching in 2025, but if you want early access, sign up for the waitlist at micro.so and respond to the confirmation email saying you came from Homescreen.

HOW WAS TODAY'S NEWSLETTER?

Login or Subscribe to participate in polls.

REACH 40K+ FOUNDERS, INVESTORS & OPERATORS

If you’re interested in advertising with us, send an email over to [email protected] with the subject “Homescreen Ads”