Good morning, welcome to this week’s Lore Brief, your 3-minute brief of the most important moves in AI and tech.
This issue is brought to you by Factory — autonomous engineering agents that actually ship production code. I invested early and have watched them grow into a leader in the space. Word is they've surpassed $60M ARR, up from $10M ARR in Jan. They're on fire!
OpenAI closes $122 billion funding round at $852 billion valuation → The company said the capital will speed up putting “useful intelligence” in people’s hands worldwide and give it the resources to lead at scale. Read more here →
Google DeepMind launches Gemma 4 → Demis Hassabis announced the new open models as the strongest in the world for their respective sizes. The lineup includes a high-performance 31B dense version, a fast 26B MoE for low latency, and tiny 2B and 4B variants built for phones and edge devices, all under a fully open Apache 2.0 license and available now in Google AI Studio and others. Read more here →
Anthropic accidentally leaks Claude Code source code → A packaging error during an npm update exposed more than 512,000 lines of the AI coding tool’s internals, including planned features such as Undercover mode and always-on agents. Anthropic has already issued thousands of takedown notices, but the code has been mirrored and analyzed widely online. Read more here →
Artemis 2 orbital path:
Local open source models are getting better:
The first memo about Sequoia’s Apple investment:
Gmail makes “Inbox Zero” a thing of the past with new AI Inbox feature → The beta tool uses smart prioritization to surface what matters and sends you a daily personalized briefing that cuts through the noise. It is rolling out today for Google AI Ultra subscribers in the US. Read more here →
Z.ai launches GLM-5V-Turbo vision coding model → The multimodal model natively processes images, videos, and design drafts to generate runnable code and powers GUI agents. It claims leading benchmarks in visual coding and deep integration with Claude Code and OpenClaw. Read more here →
Chatbase founder drops $9M ARR bootstrapping playbook → Yasser outlines sales-led growth, warm outbound, content, and pricing tweaks that turned early self-serve traction into scalable revenue. The thread has become required reading for AI agent founders. Read more here →
Claude power user shares token-saving playbook → A viral thread explains that editing prompts instead of sending follow-ups, batching questions, and using Projects for recurring files can slash token burn dramatically. The habits let users stay under limits without upgrading plans. Read more here →
WHOOP raises $575 million at $10.1 billion valuation → The wearable health company brought in Abbott, Mayo Clinic, and top athletes as it shifts from performance tracking into AI-powered preventive health and blood testing. The round underscores growing institutional bets on continuous biometric data. Read more here →
Mercor AI suffers major breach → Hackers claim 939GB of source code and 4TB of candidate data, including resumes and interview videos, were stolen via Tailscale VPN. The leak has raised alarms over exposed training data from major AI labs. Read more here →
Cloudflare CTO announces EmDash → The TypeScript-based, serverless CMS imports existing WordPress sites in minutes and ships with built-in MCP for agents plus x402 monetization. It is MIT licensed and deploys anywhere Node runs. Read more here →
