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GM! It’s Brett again. Steve Jobs literally believed people who create things are better than people who think.

Doing is thinking. The more you do, the more you learn.

I told a friend building a productivity app - like illustrators do 100 sketches before one final piece, you should build 100 apps.

In the age of AI vibe coding with GPT-5 out, there’s no excuse not to be a doer. The more you do, the better your work gets.

🏠 AI

GPT-5 Launch: A “Bumpy” Start

OpenAI dropped GPT-5 last week - calling it their “best model in the world” and the first unified one, mixing GPT’s speed with the o-series’ reasoning.

It’s the default for all ChatGPT users now, with Plus and Pro tiers getting higher caps and GPT-5 Pro access. API pricing is aggressive, $1.25 per million input tokens, $10 per million output, undercutting Anthropic’s Claude Opus 4.1 and even GPT-4o.

On paper, GPT-5’s a beast. 74.9% on SWE-bench Verified (coding), 89.4% on GPQA Diamond (PhD-level science), and just 1.6% hallucination rate on health benchmarks (vs. 12.9% for GPT-4o). It’s less deceptive, better at safety calls, and ships with new ChatGPT “personalities.”

The launch wasn’t smooth. Sam Altman called the rollout ‘bumpy’, a broken router on day one made GPT-5 feel “dumber” than 4o, sparking user backlash and calls to bring 4o back. Then came the “chart crime” - a misdrawn benchmark graph that went viral. Anthropic also cut OpenAI’s API access, accusing them of testing Claude before launch.

The big picture - GPT-5 tightens OpenAI’s lead in coding and safety, but the pricing move might matter more. If rivals match it, we’re looking at an LLM price war that could reshape the whole AI stack.

Learn from this investor’s $100m mistake

In 2010, a Grammy-winning artist passed on investing $200K in an emerging real estate disruptor. That stake could be worth $100+ million today.

One year later, another real estate disruptor, Zillow, went public. This time, everyday investors had regrets, missing pre-IPO gains.

Now, a new real estate innovator, Pacaso – founded by a former Zillow exec – is disrupting a $1.3T market. And unlike the others, you can invest in Pacaso as a private company.

Pacaso’s co-ownership model has generated $1B+ in luxury home sales and service fees, earned $110M+ in gross profits to date, and received backing from the same VCs behind Uber, Venmo, and eBay. They even reserved the Nasdaq ticker PCSO.

Invest for $2.90/Share

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🤝 THE LATEST IN…

TECH

• North Korean spies posing as remote workers have infiltrated 100s of companies.

• Tinder is testing a redesign with new dating modes and college-only features to drive engagement.

• Instagram takes on Snapchat with new ‘Instagram Map.’

• Meta bans millions of WhatsApp accounts linked to scam operations.

• X plans to introduce ads in Grok’s responses.

AI

• ElevenLabs launched AI music service.

• OpenAI is giving ChatGPT to the government for $1.

• Anthropic cuts off OpenAI’s access to its Claude models.

• 3 weeks after buying Windsurf, Cognition laid off 30 staff and offered buyouts to the remaining 200.

SCIENCE

• AI can now predict where any protein sits in a human cell, aiding disease diagnosis and drug discovery.

• Scientists capture the secret quantum dance of atoms for the first time.

• FDA approves breakthrough eye drops that fix near vision without glasses.

• Accidental lab discovery reveals gold’s secret chemistry.

CRYPTO

• CrediX team vanishes after $4.5M exploit, deletes socials & takes website offline.

• Coinbase launched DEX trading for US users.

• LayerZero, Stargate tokens jump on $110M acquisition plan.

• $34M in crypto payments traced to Embargo ransomware group.

🏃‍♀️ QUICKIES

Raise, Mergers & Acquisitions: 

• Perplexity acquires Invisible to boost AI agent infrastructure.

• Clay closed $100M round at $3.1B valuation.

• Meta acquires AI audio startup WaveForms.

Stat: 700M. That’s the number of people using ChatGPT each week, a 4x jump from last year.

Rabbit Hole: 3 Macro Predictions on AI (James Wang)

🛠️ FOUNDERS CORNER

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

🧠 Is Chain-of-Thought Reasoning of LLMs a Mirage?
Researchers found that Chain-of-Thought prompting boosts LLM performance only when test queries resemble training data - outside that, the “reasoning” quickly breaks down.

‼️ The Private Market Trap Edition 
On markets, liquidity, and the dismantling of the traditional American wealth-creation engine.

😳 Is the IPO Process a Scam?
Did Figma actually leave $3B+ "on the table" with their IPO?

❓ Are we ready for AI sales reps? (Kyle Poyar)

💯 How to Build Differentiated Agentic AI Products?

🔥 Monday Motivation: Dylan Field: Scaling Figma and the Future of Design

🎯 THE 80 / 20

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

The Camcorder Method

Here’s a stupidly easy way to delegate without losing your mind - record yourself doing the task.

Use Loom (or whatever screen recorder you like) and walk through it like you’re training your future replacement. Could be giving design feedback, reviewing a contract, answering the same customer question, even onboarding or training an EA - just hit record.

No meetings. No endless back-and-forth. Just a video people can watch whenever they need.

The magic isn’t in making it perfect. It’s in making it repeatable. If someone else can do the thing at 80% of your level, that’s a massive win.

Because now you’re not the bottleneck. You can move on to the stuff that actually moves the needle - and let the recording keep doing the work for you.

😂 FROM THE FEED

❓️ AI GENERATED OR NOT

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

🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩⬜️ Yeah (~86%)

🟨⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️ Nope (~14%)

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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