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GM! It’s Brett again. I turned 35 last week.

This year, I was very heads down on the startup, but I came out of it with maybe the deepest understanding of myself I've ever had.
Startup guy. Bay Area kid. Lover. Pattern recognizer. Rational thinker. Artist. Jew. Challenge pursuer. That’s me.

A good life is just stacking as many hours as possible where you’re fully yourself. That starts with knowing who you are.

I'll always be discovering new things about myself, but 35 feels like the end of discovery and the beginning of truly living as who I am for the next 35 and beyond.

🏠 AI

The User Privacy

The New York Times is suing OpenAI for copyright infringement. That’s old news. What’s new is that the NYT asked the court to force OpenAI to keep all user data - every single ChatGPT conversation, including the ones people delete or thought were temporary. And the court said yes.

So now, OpenAI is supposed to retain and store all ChatGPT and API logs, going forward. This affects anyone using Free, Plus, Pro, or regular API, unless you’re on Enterprise, Edu, or the Zero Data Retention API, in which case you’re safe.

OpenAI is pushing back hard, calling the order “sweeping, unprecedented,” and a violation of user trust. They’ve appealed, arguing that retaining this data not only breaks their privacy commitments but could put them in breach of GDPR and enterprise contracts.

NYT’s argument is that OpenAI might be “destroying evidence” of copyright violations - by deleting chats that could show copyright violations, so OpenAI needs to keep everything… just in case.

The big picture - This isn’t just about copyright anymore. It’s shaping up to be a precedent-setting battle between data privacy and legal discovery. And also how AI companies handle user data going forward.

Global payroll complexity? Here’s the playbook.

Managing global payroll shouldn’t mean juggling vendors and compliance risks. Deel, recognized in the Gartner® Market Guide for Multicountry Payroll Solutions, helps finance teams automate payments, standardize reporting, and stay compliant in 100+ countries. Get key insights from industry experts to future-proof your payroll strategy.

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🤝 THE LATEST IN…

TECH

• Meta signed a 20-year nuclear power deal to fuel its AI and compute surge.

• Reddit sues Anthropic for allegedly not paying for training data.

• X changed developer policy to stop AI models from training on its data.

• Volvo’s new seatbelts use real-time data to adapt to different body types.

• Photoshop app is now on Android, 4 months after the iPhone app.

• Tesla files new ‘Robotaxi’ trademark applications.

AI

• IBM acquires Seek AI, launched Watsonx AI Labs to scale enterprise AI.

• ChatGPT can now connect to your workplace apps & records your meetings.

• Trump threatens to pull federal subsidies from Elon - putting billions at stake for Tesla & SpaceX.

• Yoshua Bengio launched LawZero, a nonprofit focusing on a new safe-by-design approach to AI.

• Anthropic launched custom AI models for US national security customers.

• Gemini 2.5 Pro beats o3 model in processing complex, lengthy texts.

SCIENCE

• A new AI architecture fuses DNA modeling with LLM reasoning, boosting bio benchmark performance by 15%.

• A breakthrough study may have found a powerful new triple therapy for one of the deadliest brain cancers.

• There’s a new way to make the HIV virus visible within white blood cells.

• World-first biocomputing platform hits the market - fuses human brain cells on a silicon chip.

CRYPTO

• Crypto exchange Gemini files draft statement to go public.

• Bitcoin holds $105,000 level.

• OpenSea hits highest monthly users since 2023 as OS2 exits beta.

• Hyperliquid hits record $248B perp volume in May.

🏃‍♀️ QUICKIES

Raise: Anduril, a defense tech startup building autonomous weapons and control software, raised $2.5B in a Series G round to scale operations after doubling revenue to $1B in 2024 and securing a major US Army AR/VR headset contract.

Stat: 86 million. That’s the number of AT&T customer records resurfacing on the dark web, likely from a past data breach.

Rabbit Hole: AGI Is Not Multimodal (Benjamin A. Spiegel)

🛠️ FOUNDERS CORNER

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

💥 Unusual figures out what your visitors vibe with, and tweaks your site in real time to move them down the funnel.

🔥 Here’s how you can vibe code a full stack app in 30 Min with AI.

🍎 Apple’s Latest: The Illusion of Thinking
Apple researchers find that large reasoning models break down on complex problems - revealing that more “thinking” doesn’t always mean better answers.

🧠 LLM-driven Data Annotation: Prompt, Then Distill
Instead of forcing a single label, this new ACL 2025 paper proposes letting LLMs output multiple possible labels when uncertain - then trains a smaller model to distill the final answer. Better accuracy, less noise.

🤩 MONDAY MOTIVATION

🎯 The 80 / 20

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

Fake Deadlines, Real Results

Parkinson’s Law says work expands to fill the time you give it. So if you block 3 hours to finish something, it’ll take 3 hours - because you let it.

Instead, give yourself x minutes (say 45 minutes). Then schedule a meeting right after. You’ve got a hard stop. No buffer. No wiggle room.

It forces your brain to lock in. You’ll finish in 45 what would've dragged across a full afternoon, because you have a meeting right after that 45 minutes block. It’s like tricking your nervous system into urgency - without stress.

You can layer this trick with deep work sessions, Pomodoros, or writing sprints. The key is the deadline feels real because it is.

❓️ AI GENERATED OR NOT

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

🟩🟩🟩🟩⬜️⬜️ Yeah (~67%)

🟨🟨⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️ Nope (~33%)

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.

That said, Homescreen subscribers can cut the line - go to micro.so/waitlist, join the waitlist, and write in “Homescreen” for Other in the “How did you hear about us” question to get early access.

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