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🔓 Thursday’s AI Report:

1. 😵‍💫 Musk’s “unhinged” Grok?

2. ☝️ In partnership with Bounti

3. 📉 Microsoft to fire under-performers

4. 🤯 New wearable can read minds?

5. 🦈 In partnership with Surfshark

6. ⚙️ Trending AI Tools

7. 🏗️ Practical AI Applications

8. 📑 Recommended Resources

Read Time: 5 minutes

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📈 AI STOCK TRACKER

AI and tech stocks mainly consolidated during a flat session overall. The markets are closed, as a National Day of Mourning is taking place for Former US President Jimmy Carter.

LATEST IN AI

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😵‍💫 Musk’s “unhinged” Grok? 

🚨 Our Report — After teasing the idea, over a year ago, Musk appears to be about to launch an “Unhinged Mode” for his chatbot, Grok.

🔓 Key Points:

• According to a newly updated FAQ page, Grok’s “Unhinged Mode” is intended to be “objectionable, inappropriate, and offensive, much like an amateur stand-up comic still learning the craft.”

• When Musk first launched Grok, in 2023, he introduced the bot as bold, edgy, unfiltered, and ‘anti-woke,’ but policy moderation and social restraints have kept Grok within ‘safe’ boundaries. 

• Although, studies have found that Grok does lean to the political left on controversial topics like diversity and inequality, which Musk has blamed on its training data, and vowed to “shift Grok closer to politically neutral.”

🔐 Relevance — Musk has always been vocal about what he sees as “woke censorship” in AI, accusing tools like ChatGPT of censoring viewpoints, avoiding subjects, and filtering responses around things like gender, race, and social equality, so it will be interesting to see how “Unhinged” Grok will turn out, as it’s bound to stir up debate and argument, and has the potential to be seen as either cheekily provocative or downright offensive.

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📉 Microsoft to fire under-performers

🚨 Our Report — As part of its performance management strategy, Microsoft has confirmed that it’ll be making another round of layoffs in 2025—primarily targeting employees who are underperforming and falling short of their standards—across multiple departments.

🔓 Key Points:

• Although it’s confirmed the impending job cuts—“When employees fail to meet performance expectations, appropriate procedures will be taken”—they haven’t disclosed how many employees will be affected.

• However, it is believed that the performance evaluations, layoffs, and restructuring initiative will impact several departments—including the security division—and affect all levels, including senior management.

• Despite the cuts, Microsoft is committed to keeping its high-performers and will be replacing the vacated roles with new hires, indicating a stable, global headcount (estimated to be around 228,000).

🔐 Relevance — Restructuring and job cuts aren’t new tactics for Microsoft CEO, Satya Nadella, as, since he started in 2014, he’s made multiple layoffs: For example, most recently in 2024, he eliminated 2,000 employees from the gaming department (following its $69B acquisition of Activision Blizzard), 1,000 from the Azure Cloud division, and 650 from the Xbox division—taking the total number of layoffs to nearly 3,000 for the year—indicating a keen focus on workforce performance and maintaining operational efficiency.

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🤯 New wearable can read minds?

• AI start-up—Based Hardware—debuted a new AI wearable, designed to boost productivity, called Omni (“Friend”, as it was originally meant to be called, was bought for $1.8M by a fellow rival) at the annual CES.

• Like standard wearables, Omni can be worn like a necklace, but it can also be attached to the side of your head, using tape, and can read your brainwaves to understand when you are/aren’t talking to it.

• When activated (battery lasts 3 days) it permanently listens and, using GPT-4o, will answer questions, summarize conversations, create to-do lists, schedule meetings, and give personalized advice.

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TOGETHER WITH SURFSHARK

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• Surfshark’s VPN ensures your internet connection is private and secure

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• Alternative-ID allows you to create a separate online identity, protecting your privacy and keeping your personal details safe

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TRENDING AI TOOLS

1. Fathom is G2’s #1 AI notetaker that captures, summarizes, and acts on meetings, saving 20mins of work, per call ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ / 5 (G2)

2. TrustLoop is an AI-powered tool for maximizing customer feedback

3. Smart Clerk processes banking statements into data for Excel

PRACTICAL AI

PRO COMMUNITY

How to Stay Ahead of the Competition with AI-Powered Market Analysis

• Manually tracking competitors and market trends is time-consuming, but AI tools can automate the process, giving you a powerful advantage.

• Crayon is an AI-powered competitive intelligence platform that monitors your competitors and gives you relevant insights, in real-time.

• Talkwalker is an AI social listening tool that monitors online conversations and provides insights into brand mentions and industry trends.

• ChatGPT can generate ideas for differentiating your product, targeting unmet customer needs, and optimizing your positioning.

Subscribe to our Pro Community for more tools, premium insights and tactics.

RECOMMENDED RESOURCES

STARTUPS

Name: Scale AI
Value: $13.6B
Funding raised: $600M

Co-founded by Alexandr Wang and Lucy Guo in 2016, Scale AI is a crucial data supplier for generative AI and even partnered with the Pentagon, in February last year, to evaluate LLMs for military planning.

PODCASTS

How Digital Doppelgangers Could Change The Way We Communicate

In this podcast, Victor Riparbelli, CEO of AI video platform, Synthesia, discusses the benefits of having your own AI avatar, how companies are using these to improve communication, and why media literacy is more important than ever.

QUICK HITS

• François Chollet co-founds nonprofit for benchmarking AGI

• Musk agrees we’ve exhausted AI training data

• Microsoft rolls back image creator after quality complaints

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