Happy Friday! Microsoft dropped festive Copilot holiday ads featuring Christmas lights synchronized to Vampire Weekend, elves overdosing on hot cocoa, and a questionable inflatable reindeer. It looks magical, except none of it actually works. We tested every command from the ad, and Copilot bombed spectacularly, hallucinating buttons that didn’t exist, mistaking Ikea shelf dowels for screws, and failing basic math when scaling up recipes. Even Santa’s elves (our kids) took heat for falling behind schedule on their chores. Seems Copilot’s holiday cheer is more fantasy than festive.
Ho, ho, holiday: We’re logging off, thanks for reading. 2025 has been an incredible ride… we look forward to seeing you in 2026. Happy Holidays!
Claude’s Agent Skills are the new open standard for enterprise AI. Anthropic thinks big AI models using reusable “skills” will beat small, specialized agents at handling repetitive work. Skills are reusable instruction sets that teach AI how to do specific tasks, from nailing presentations to creating Slack bots. By making Claude Skills open source and allowing teams to share them, Anthropic is now creating the infrastructure everyone else builds on. This means skills can be used in other models like ChatGPT or integrated with tools like Cursor, Figma and Microsoft. Your move, OpenAI.
There’s no such thing as a free VPN. Security researchers just revealed how Urban VPN Proxy has been harvesting and selling private AI conversations from roughly 8 million users. The popular Chrome extension captured chats from tools like ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, and Grok, then passed them to partner companies to be repackaged and sold. Urban VPN’s privacy policy does mention sharing browsing data with partners, but somehow left out the part about selling your chats. Next time, maybe pay the $2.99.
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Auto-reconciliation hits different when you’re not doing it manually at midnight. Ramp AI reviews every expense, automatically.
- Tracks spend in real time
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AI is supposed to multiply productivity, but companies got the math wrong. Corporate America automated aggressively this year, cutting 1.17 million jobs while investors cheered the efficiency gains. Yet productivity didn’t spike. Instead, employees who survived layoffs reported feeling less productive, and operational errors surged 77%. More than 60% of companies lost customers and revenue due to biased AI decisions and lack of oversight. The numbers don’t lie. Betting on talented people plus AI was the winning strategy all along.
Interested in freelance gigs? ChatGPT’s new app store is open and looking for devs.
Remember when AGI was the future? Tech execs spent years hyping artificial general intelligence as either humanity’s greatest leap or its biggest existential threat. Now the buzziest acronym in AI has become an embarrassment. Microsoft’s Satya Nadella dismisses AGI as “nonsensical benchmark hacking,” while Anthropic’s Dario Amodei shrugs it off as a “marketing term.” Silicon Valley CEOs are racing to distance themselves from AGI, rolling out shiny new terms like Personal Superintelligence (PSI) and Humanist Superintelligence (HSI). When tech fails to deliver, the solution is always to rebrand.
Let’s wrap up 2025 with a look at AI’s carbon footprint. Tech firms spent the year dropping world changing models and stacking billion dollar valuations. Behind the scenes, AI pumped out 80 million tonnes of CO₂, equal to New York City’s entire annual output. It also used 765 billion liters of water, enough to fill 306,000 Olympic-size swimming pools. A single hyperscale data center alone generates emissions equal to several international airports and consumes as much electricity as 2 million homes. So who’s picking up the environmental bill? Hint, it’s probably us.
fun stats
☢️ $6 billion. Trump Media’s merger deal to become a nuclear fusion company. The all-stock deal will shift the social media/crypto startup to the ‘holy grail of clean energy’ in 2026.
💡 0. Commercial plants currently producing electricity using fusion.
🫧 55,000%. Stock increase of India’s RRP Semiconductor, the “AI bubble mascot,” over 289 days. The world’s best performing stock is for a company that has 2 employees and shifted from real estate to the AI space in 2024.
🏠 15%. ‘Stubbornly analog’ US households that have zero smart home devices. For the other 85%, only 12% want to add AI to their smart home.