AI @ Work
Friday, May 8, 2026
Issue #005
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This week: Elon Musk’s company is now powering Sam Altman’s AI competitor — while the two battle each other in federal court. Claude gets a memory upgrade that lets it learn from its own past mistakes. OpenAI quietly launches ads inside ChatGPT. And every major AI platform simultaneously targets your finance team. All of it translated into what it actually means for your work.
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★ This Week’s Big Story
Why this matters to you
SpaceX is now powering Claude — while Elon and Sam fight each other in court. The AI industry just got stranger.
Anthropic signed a major compute deal with SpaceX this week, giving Claude access to over 220,000 NVIDIA GPUs at SpaceX’s Colossus 1 data center in Texas. The immediate practical effect for you: Anthropic is doubling Claude Code usage limits on paid plans. More compute means faster responses, fewer rate limits, and more capacity to handle the kind of long, complex tasks that AI agents are increasingly being asked to do.
But the backstory is the thing. Elon Musk is currently in federal court suing Sam Altman and OpenAI — Anthropic’s biggest competitor — for abandoning the nonprofit mission they founded together. And yet Musk’s company is now the infrastructure powering Altman’s competition. The AI industry’s relationships are complicated, its money is enormous, and the lines between rivals and partners are almost impossible to draw. What it tells you: AI infrastructure is so valuable right now that even sworn enemies do business together. | Executive & Strategy | IT & Security | All Readers |
Source: Superhuman Newsletter & Techpresso, May 7, 2026
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AI Platforms
Claude / Anthropic
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Claude can now learn from its own mistakes over time — which makes it noticeably better the more you use it.
Claude’s New “Dreaming” Feature Lets It Reflect on Past Sessions and Fix Its Own Bad Habits
Anthropic rolled out a “dreaming” feature for Claude Managed Agents this week. Between sessions, Claude reviews its past conversations to spot recurring patterns: mistakes it keeps making, preferences you keep expressing, assumptions that keep turning out wrong. It then produces a cleaned-up memory store so the next session starts sharper. Think of it as the difference between an assistant who forgets everything every morning and one who quietly reviews their notes each night. If you use Claude for repeated tasks — research, writing, analysis — this is the update that makes it feel genuinely more like a coworker and less like a reset button. | Operations | HR & People | Executive & Strategy |
Source: Superhuman Newsletter, May 7, 2026
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If your organization uses Microsoft 365, Claude just showed up in your existing tools without any installation.
Claude Is Now Inside Microsoft Excel, Word, and PowerPoint — With Outlook Coming Soon
Anthropic launched Claude add-ins for Microsoft 365 this week, meaning you can now access Claude directly inside Excel, Word, and PowerPoint without switching tabs or copying text back and forth. The add-ins are particularly aimed at finance teams — Claude can help build pitch books, screen documents, review valuations, and close books, all from within the Office interface your team already uses every day. Outlook integration is coming shortly. If your organization already pays for Microsoft 365, this costs nothing extra to activate. | Finance | Operations | IT & Security |
Source: The Deep View, May 7, 2026
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ChatGPT / OpenAI
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The free ride inside ChatGPT just got a little less free — ads are coming, and this is what that means.
OpenAI Launches a Self-Serve Ad Platform Inside ChatGPT — A Significant Strategic Shift
OpenAI quietly launched a self-serve advertising platform this week, opening ChatGPT to paid placements for the first time. OpenAI has spent years positioning ChatGPT as a premium, subscription-driven product — the anti-Google. Adding advertising changes that equation. For most users right now, the ads won’t be obvious or disruptive, but the infrastructure is in place. For businesses building customer interactions around ChatGPT’s clean, neutral responses, it’s worth watching whether advertising relationships begin to shape how the model responds to product-related questions. | Marketing | Executive & Strategy | Legal & Compliance |
Source: The Deep View, May 7, 2026
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If your career path assumes tomorrow looks like today, this Harvard Business Review concept is worth five minutes of your time.
The “AI Fog”: A New Name for Why Long-Term Career Planning Feels Almost Impossible Right Now
Harvard Business Review published a concept this week that struck a nerve: “AI fog.” The idea is that AI is rewriting the future faster than we can plan for it — making traditional long-term commitments like degrees, mortgages, and career ladders feel like bets on a future that may not arrive as expected. The practical advice: optimize for optionality instead of locking into single paths. Reskill often, stay mentally prepared to pivot, and don’t assume the investment you’re making now will pay off the same way it would have five years ago. Not pessimism — just an honest reckoning with what uncertainty actually demands of us. | HR & People | Executive & Strategy | All Readers |
Source: Superhuman Newsletter, May 7, 2026 · Harvard Business Review
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Gemini / Google
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If your organization runs Gemma models on its own servers, they just got three times faster at no additional cost.
Google’s Gemma 4 Gets a 3x Speed Boost — Here’s the Technique That Made It Possible
Google updated Gemma 4 this week with speculative decoding — a technique where a small, fast model predicts likely next words and a larger model checks them in parallel. The result is up to three times faster inference without any loss in quality or any change to your existing setup. For organizations running Gemma locally for data privacy reasons, this is a significant practical improvement: the same privately-hosted model now handles three times the workload. Google also updated AI Overviews in Search to include Reddit posts and social media content, making AI-powered search results more current. | IT & Security | Operations |
Source: TLDR Newsletter, May 8, 2026
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Cross-Platform
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If you work in finance, all three major AI platforms just launched tools specifically for your job this week — at the same time.
Claude, ChatGPT, and Perplexity All Targeted Finance Professionals Simultaneously. Here’s What Each Offers.
Anthropic launched ready-to-run agent templates for building pitch books, screening KYC files, reviewing valuations, and closing books. OpenAI partnered with PwC to build agents for planning, forecasting, treasury, taxes, and accounting. Perplexity extended its Computer agent to finance teams with access to licensed data from Morningstar and Pitchbook, and 35 dedicated workflows for analyst work. A research director at Info-Tech put it plainly: “This is the first time the direction feels usable as a tool and not just a huge risk.” The caveat everyone agreed on: keep a human in the loop. Finance is too regulated and too consequential for AI to operate alone. | Finance | Legal & Compliance | Executive & Strategy |
Source: The Deep View, May 7, 2026
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Tools & Workflow — Try These This Week
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For anyone who creates content — one prompt turns one piece into five different formats.
The Content Repurposing Prompt: Turn Any Article Into a Twitter Thread, LinkedIn Post, and Video Script Simultaneously
Copy this into ChatGPT or Claude, paste your content at the bottom, and get five platform-ready outputs in one shot: a Twitter/X thread of 8–12 tweets with hooks, a LinkedIn post with a storytelling structure, an Instagram caption with emojis and a call to action, and three short-form video scripts under 60 seconds each. The prompt instructs the AI to make each feel native to its platform rather than a copy-paste job. It’s the kind of workflow that makes a one-person communications team feel like four people. r/ChatGPT | Marketing | Creative | Operations |
Source: Superhuman Newsletter, May 7, 2026 ·
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For anyone who manages enterprise AI tools — your token bill is about to become a budget problem if it isn’t already.
IBM’s CEO Says Most Enterprises Are Underusing AI — Here’s the Two-Project Strategy That Actually Works
IBM’s CEO Arvind Krishna made a pointed observation at IBM Think this week: most enterprises are running AI “at the margin” — using it for small tasks at the edges of their workflows while leaving core processes untouched. His advice: pick two or three high-impact areas, pour energy into making those work, then use that confidence to expand. The practical flip side: the organizations using AI intensively are racking up token costs faster than expected. Before you expand AI access across your organization, build the measurement infrastructure first — real-time dashboards, per-team budgets, and usage caps keep the bill manageable. | Executive & Strategy | Finance | Operations |
Source: The Deep View, May 7, 2026
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Worth Watching
Apple is paying $250 million to iPhone 15 Pro and 16 users — a settlement for failing to deliver promised Siri 2.0 AI features on time. Every vendor promising AI capabilities by a specific date should note this precedent. | Legal & Compliance | Executive & Strategy |
DeepSeek is in talks to raise $4 billion at a $50 billion valuation. The Chinese AI lab that disrupted the industry earlier this year is attracting serious institutional investment, signaling China’s AI ecosystem is a long-term competitor — not just a one-off disruptor. | Executive & Strategy |
Cloudflare laid off staff and cited AI efficiency gains as the reason. This is becoming a more common explanation in tech layoff announcements — worth watching whether it spreads beyond tech into broader industries. | HR & People | Executive & Strategy |
AI companies are flooding linear TV with ads. Major AI firms are on pace to match or surpass their entire 2025 TV ad budgets in just the first few months of 2026. The mainstream AI adoption push is real and well-funded. | Marketing | Executive & Strategy |
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Published by Independent Intelligence — an independent AI newsletter for people who use AI at work, not just read about it. Five newsletters, one Substack. Friday general edition + Wednesday deep-dives on Claude, ChatGPT, Gemini, and Perplexity. Forward freely.