OpenAI strengthens the core stack

Welcome back to The Shift. Let’s get straight to what matters in AI today…

Today we have:

🧠 OpenAI consolidates talent and compute in one week

🏠 How to Visualize a Finished Room with Gemini Nano Banana Pro

👨‍💻 Google Pushes Gemini Into Personal Intelligence and Smarter Trend Analysis

🔨 Tools and Shifts you cannot miss

🧠 OpenAI consolidates talent and compute in one week

Mira Murati’s Thinking Machines Lab is seeing co-founder churn as leaders return to OpenAI. Murati founded it after leaving as CTO in September 2024 and raised $2B at $12B. OpenAI also signed a major Cerebras compute deal. 

The Shift:

1. Co-founder exits hit Thinking Machines early. Murati confirmed CTO Barret Zoph left, with Soumith Chintala taking over. She called him a brilliant, seasoned leader with major contributions to AI.

2. OpenAI is reabsorbing top technical talent. OpenAI’s Fidji Simo announced that Barret Zoph, Luke Metz, and Sam Schoenholz are joining back. The timing suggests this return was planned for weeks.

3. OpenAI secured major Cerebras compute. Cerebras will deliver 750 megawatts starting this year through 2028, reportedly worth over $10B. OpenAI says it adds low-latency inference for faster outputs and claims faster-than-GPU performance.

This shows how quickly AI power shifts through talent and infrastructure, not just models. It also reinforces that speed, reliability, and compute access are becoming core competitive advantages.

^{TOGETHER WITH NEURONS}

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🏠 How to Visualize a Finished Room with Gemini Nano Banana Pro

Now you can see your design ideas come to life before buying or moving a thing. Upload your room photo and wishlist items, Gemini Nano Banana Pro blends them into one realistic visual so you can preview your space.

How it works

1. Upload your room photo: This becomes the base scene for your design.
   

2. Upload wishlist item images: Add furniture, décor, lighting, or accessories you’re considering.
   

3. Tell the model what you want:  Prompt something like:
   
    “Place the sofa by the window, add the rug centered, and move the lamp to the corner.”
   

4. Generate the scene: Gemini Nano Banana Pro synthesizes the elements into a cohesive, photoreal preview, no manual editing.

✨ Great for interior planning, product visuals, or social content showing before/after designs. You can try it here.

👨‍💻 Google Pushes Gemini Into Personal Intelligence and Smarter Trend Analysis

Google announced two meaningful upgrades that change how Gemini understands users and how teams research trends. In parallel, Google Trends Explore gets a Gemini-powered overhaul that automates trend discovery and comparison. 

The Shift:

1. Unified personal context engine - Gemini can pull insights from emails, photos, searches, and YouTube history without explicit prompts, enabling answers shaped by real personal patterns.

2. Automatic context-aware suggestions: The model identifies which data source matters and enriches responses with details like past trips or previous actions, moving beyond simple retrieval.

3. Gemini-driven Trends Explore upgrade: The new interface auto-identifies related topics, expands comparison capacity, doubles rising queries, and adds clearer visual mapping for multi-term analysis.

4. New guided research workflow: A side panel offers suggested prompts, editable terms, filters, and category options, reducing manual digging and speeding up directional insights.

These capabilities roll out first to Gemini AI Pro and Ultra subscribers in the U.S., before expanding to free tiers and AI Mode. For operators and growth teams, the shift unlocks faster decision-making, richer context, and more efficient trend discovery inside Google’s ecosystem.

^{TOGETHER WITH MINDSTREAM}

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🔨AI Tools for the Shift

📄 Velocibid – Generate agency ready proposals instantly and eliminate hours of manual data entry with AI.

🤖 JobGPT – Automate your job search as AI applies to roles for you around the clock.

🎨 ToneMatch – Discover your seasonal color profile and match outfits to your natural skin tone instantly.

💬 CreateWAlink – Generate instant WhatsApp chat links so users can message you without saving contacts.

🧠 Purple Leaf – Optimize and generate content for AI search engines traditional SEO and social media from one platform.

🚀Quick Shifts

📚 Microsoft, Meta, Amazon, Perplexity, and Mistral are now paying Wikimedia Enterprise for a premium “commercial-tuned” Wikipedia API, meaning AI models can access cleaner, structured data while Wikimedia funds sustainability through enterprise licensing.

🏠 Airbnb just hired Meta’s ex-Llama AI leader as CTO, and the goal is clear. They want to turn search into a personalized conversation that remembers every prior interaction and adapts results uniquely to each user.

🇧🇷 WhatsApp just gave Brazil a carve-out, letting ChatGPT and Grok keep running for +55 users even after its Jan 15 crackdown, using a 90-day grace period. 

🚨 Musk says he’s “literally zero” aware of underage nude Grok images, but California’s AG just launched a probe into xAI over nonconsensual explicit deepfakes, after reports of ~1 image per minute and a 6,700-per-hour sample spike.

🛒 Google says “personalized upselling” is not price gouging, but the fear is real! A watchdog’s post hit ~400K views, warning Google’s new shopping agent protocol could enable “surveillance pricing”, but Google says it bans higher-than-site prices

🧩 Prompt of the Day

How to Plan an Event Sponsorship That Actually Builds Brand Visibility

Turn “let’s sponsor something” into a clear event strategy with the right formats, benefits, and activations that drive real attention.

Paste the prompt: Drop this into ChatGPT, then fill in your brand, audience, and the type of visibility you want to win.

Prompt to paste

Create an event sponsorship strategy for [Brand]. Include event types to target, sponsorship benefits to negotiate, and activation ideas to drive engagement before, during, and after the event. Keep it practical, audience-aligned, and focused on measurable brand visibility outcomes.

🤳AI Nugget of the Day

That’s all for today’s edition see you tomorrow as we track down and get you all that matters in the daily AI Shift!

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