In partnership with
NVIDIA just released Alpamayo 2 Super, a 34-billion parameter driving model, free for commercial deployment.
It explains every decision in plain causal language before handing over the weights. Who gets blamed when the explanation lies?
Today in the “Incredible AI” world:
NVIDIA Pushes Open Robotaxi AI Forward
OpenAI Brings Plugins to Every Classroom
SpaceX Earns More From AI Than Space
Create AI Videos From Text in Minutes
5 Super-Useful AI Tools You Should Try
Top AI-Generated Image of the Day
Read Time: 4 minutes
- LATEST DEVELOPMENTS -
Autonomous Driving Gets A New Brain:
NVIDIA just dropped Alpamayo 2 Super — a 34B-parameter vision-language-action model built for autonomous driving, released under a permissive open license. It’s not just another benchmark win; it’s a commercial-ready system that rewrites how robotaxis handle rare, chaotic road scenarios.
Things to Know:
Architecture: NVIDIA combined a 32-billion reasoning backbone with a 2.3-billion diffusion action decoder. Single camera pass, five simultaneous outputs.
Benchmarks: LingoQA scoring puts Alpamayo first among nearly forty evaluated competitors. It outscored GPT-4o by 23.2 points, Gemini by fifteen.
Licensing: Weights ship under OpenMDW-1.1, source code under Apache 2.0. Commercial deployment, fine-tuning and redistribution need no additional permission.
The Catch: Testing peaked around 72GB on an H100 accelerator, so nothing squeezes underneath a dashboard yet. Distillation remains mandatory.
Open weights quietly convert autonomous driving from a walled research fortress into something a determined startup can fork on a Tuesday. NVIDIA sells shovels, never cars. Every fork burns GPU hours.
OpenAI Plugins Reshape Classroom Learning:
OpenAI just rolled out three new education plugins for ChatGPT Work and Codex — tailored for K–12 teachers, college educators, and students. They’re designed to make AI less of a shortcut and more of a co-pilot for actual learning.
Things to Know:
Teacher Toolkit: The K–12 plugin helps teachers design visuals, differentiated resources, and assessments. It integrates with Learning Commons to align materials with academic standards.
Faculty Workflow: College educators can update syllabi, build interactive sites, and adapt materials for diverse learners. It connects seamlessly with calendars, LMS platforms, and research tasks.
Student Support: University students gain personalized tutors, study guides, and flashcards. The plugin prioritizes deeper understanding, turning course materials into interactive learning experiences.
This isn’t about automating classrooms; it’s about shifting agency back to educators and students. AI becomes scaffolding, not a crutch. The real test will be whether institutions embrace this balance of power.
50 Excel Hacks That Make Spreadsheets Work For You
Most Excel users waste hours on tasks that take experts minutes. The difference is not talent. It is knowing the right shortcuts.
These 50 Excel hacks from Kenji Explains cover the functions, formulas, and workflows that make spreadsheets work for you instead of against you.
Each one comes with step-by-step instructions and ready-to-use templates. Subscribe to Marketing Against the Grain and get all 50 free.
Here's what you'll get:
Time-saving shortcuts that eliminate the most common formula frustrations
Interface essentials most users never discover on their own
Game-changing functions for data analysis, automation, and visualization
Guided practice template so you can apply every hack immediately
The people who are fast in Excel are not smarter. They just stopped fighting the tool.
Get 50 Excel Hacks free when you subscribe to Marketing Against the Grain today.
Musk Became AI's Newest Cloud Landlord:
SpaceX’s latest earnings reveal a bizarre twist: the company made more money selling AI compute than launching rockets, yet it’s still bleeding cash. Starlink remains the only profitable segment keeping Musk’s empire afloat.
Things to Know:
The Numbers: AI revenue climbed 247% to approximately $2.6 billion, nearly doubling companywide totals. Operating loss narrowed to $143 million.
The Customers: Anthropic signed during May, Google followed immediately afterward. Reported monthly value of Google's arrangement approaches $920 million.
The Problem: SpaceX's AI division still lost approximately $1.5 billion building capacity those contracts eventually repay. Capex grew twentyfold.
The Stakes: Pre-IPO filings called artificial intelligence the source of most SpaceX value. Rockets are apparently the secondary business now.
Everybody wants to be the landlord during a gold rush. The tenants here are the ones actually building shovels, so rent depends entirely on their appetite continuing. Somebody eventually stops paying.
- TRY THIS -
How to Create Professional AI Videos in Minutes:
Producing a decent video used to mean booking a studio, setting up lighting, recording multiple takes, and spending hours in post-production. For most solo creators and small teams, that's just not realistic on a daily basis.
Synthesia lets you create professional videos from a text script and an AI avatar. No camera, no studio, no on-screen presence required.
Here's how it works:
Write your script: Type out exactly what you want the video to say. That's your entire production brief.
Choose your avatar: Pick from over 160 AI avatars or customize one to match your brand. The avatar delivers your script on screen with realistic speech and movement.
Generate your video: Synthesia produces the finished video automatically. No editing software, no rendering queue, no retakes.
Use it across formats: Training videos, explainers, marketing content, customer service clips. The same workflow works for all of them.
If you need to produce video content regularly but don't want to be on camera every time, or simply don't have the setup for it, this removes that barrier entirely.
- DAILY POLL AND RESULT -
Today’s Poll:
Q) Should companies disclose AI-generated customer interactions?
Vote and find out the result tomorrow.
Yesterday’s Result:
Q) Is fine-tuning better than prompt engineering?
A) Yes, deeper customization - 60% 👑
B) No, prompts are flexible - 40%
- TOOLS OF THE DAY -
Omnisend: Omnisend is an e-commerce marketing platform with AI-powered email and SMS automation designed to help online stores recover carts and drive more sales.
Mention: Mention tracks your brand, competitors, and industry keywords across the web and social media in real time with AI sentiment analysis.
Cal.com: Cal.com is an open-source scheduling tool that gives you full control over your availability, booking pages, and calendar integrations.
Eightfold AI: Eightfold AI is a talent intelligence platform that uses AI to help companies hire, develop, and retain the right people more effectively.
Topaz AI: Topaz AI offers a suite of tools for sharpening, denoising, and upscaling photos using AI that genuinely understands image structure.
- AI IMAGE OF THE DAY -
Small Paws Handle Very Expensive Military Hardware:
Prompt:
“Photorealistic anthropomorphic hamster in green Multicam military uniform with tactical gear, gripping a Matrice-style controller as a large reconnaissance quadcopter hovers beside him. Pine forest, low angle, dramatic cinematic composition. Realistic fur and shadows, ultra-detailed equipment, soft morning sunlight with volumetric rays, shallow depth of field, orange and teal grading, 4K HDR, Unreal Engine 5 quality, award-winning photography, no text or watermarks.”
Try this prompt in any decent AI image generator and let me know your result.
