OpenAI’s Shopping Play, $12M Domains, and the Coming Brand Arms Race

Hi everyone,

This is Lore Brief—your weekly edge in the age of AI.

Thanks for being one of 30,000+ builders and techno-optimists reading this week. 🙏

🚀 Things Are Getting Better

UCLA discovers first stroke rehabilitation drug to reestablish brain connections in mice

Why it matters: Molecular-level stroke recovery could replace months of therapy with a single drug dose—transforming patient outcomes worldwide.

⚡️ Quick Hits

• [Notebook LM update] – Google’s Noteboom LM, the tool that creates AI podcasts, now available in 50 languages!

• [NVIDIA to invest $500B in American AI Infrastructure ] – Jensen Huang, NVIDIA's CEO, announced a $500B investment in America to advance AGI, while cautioning that China is closing the AI gap.

• [Visa Intelligent Commerce launch] – Visa unveiled “Visa Intelligent Commerce,” partnering with Microsoft, OpenAI, Anthropic, Mistral AI, Samsung and Stripe to let autonomous AI agents book travel, order groceries and complete check-out on a user’s behalf while the cardholder keeps spending controls.

• [ChatGPT shopping upgrade] – OpenAI added a retail-focused search mode to ChatGPT: it now surfaces personalized product suggestions with images, reviews and direct purchase links, moving the chatbot closer to an AI shopping assistant

• [Llama API goes live] – Meta opened an official Llama API and began offering Llama 4 models through AWS Bedrock, Google Vertex AI and its own endpoints, giving developers managed, multimodal access to the new family of open-weight models.

💡 What I’m Thinking About

OpenAI’s Shopping Play, $12M Domains, and the Coming Brand Arms Race

OpenAI just dropped a bomb. ChatGPT now integrates Shopify product results directly into its answers. Combine that with growing talk of ChatGPT becoming the fastest-growing traffic source for many businesses, and it's clear that commerce and discovery are moving from Google links to AI-native answers.

Meanwhile, a new AI ad-maker startup called ICON reportedly paid twelve million dollars for the Icon.com domain. That sounds insane until you realize how quickly brand memory is becoming the only moat an AI cannot copy. I've turned down large offers for Lore.com for the same reason and plan to never sell. In a world where anyone can clone your features overnight, the name people (and models) remember is the name that wins.

Why it matters:
Whoever embeds their brand in an AI’s memory first could own key searches for years, just as early Google SEO winners dominated page one. This could end up being worth an order of magnitude more than ranking on Google ever did.

What to do right now:

• Invest in SEO. It’s still a core signal and feeds the AI ranking engines.

• Get active on social and video. Authority beats AI slop. Visible humans build trust.

• Own a clear, pronounceable domain. Great for authority today and AI voice search tomorrow.

• Launch fast on new AI surfaces. Early engagement data cements future ranking.

Get loud on social media and YouTube, stay memorable, and move quickly before someone else teaches the AI to recommend their brand instead of yours. The brand arms race to rank #1 on AI has begun.

✨ Prompt of the Week (use with ChatGPT o3)

You are “Career Architect,” a strategic advisor that uses everything you already know about me —skills, experience, accomplishments, preferences, and constraints—to help me design the next 5 years of my professional life.

1. Briefly restate (in ≤120 words) the key data points you already have about me so we’re on the same page. Label this section “What I Know About You.”

2. Ask up to 4 clarifying questions only if a critical detail is missing. Keep them numbered.

3. When you have enough information (either now or after I answer), deliver a roadmap: • North-Star Vision (1 sentence)
   • Year-by-Year Milestones (5 bullet points, one per year)
   • Quarter-1 Action List (3–5 high-leverage tasks I can start immediately)
   • Skills & Credentials to Acquire (ranked by ROI)
   • Network & Brand Moves (specific people, platforms, or events to target)

Respond in a concise, practical tone. Assume I’m comfortable with detailed advice.

📚 Things I’m Learning From

• [Link] – How To Use AI Avatars In Your Business (Full Guide)

• [Link] –The Techno-Optimist Manifesto, by Marc Andreessen, is out!

• [Link] – Andrej Karpathy tweet about how he’s now doing less vibe coding, and more careful AI coding by providing proper context to models.

That’s all for today. Please consider sharing the newsletter with your friends if you think they’d enjoy it. 🙏

-Nathan

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