EP: 478 OpenAI's $20,000/mo agent, Manus impresses, Google's new AI Mode and more AI News that Matters

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There's a new super smart autonomous agent that might be better than anything any other AI company has to offer. Meta is going after hundreds of millions of businesses with their next AI innovation, OpenAI. Would you pay $20,000 a month for a super smart future model? And are Microsoft and OpenAI kind of breaking up? Or is it just Microsoft diversifying options for its copilot platform? All right, we're going to be answering those questions and hopefully a lot more on today's edition of Everyday AI. What's going on, y'? All? My name is Jordan Wilson and I'm the host of Everyday AI. This is your daily live stream, podcast and free daily newsletter helping everyday people not just learn AI, but how we can all actually leverage it to be the smartest person in your department or in your company when it comes to AI. So if you want to not just grow your company, but grow your career with AI, you are in the right place if it's your first time. Thank you for listening or watching. So yeah, if you're on the podcast, please make sure to subscribe. Click that subscribe button. If this is helpful, leave a rating or you know, maybe come join us live because this is a live stream. So what's up? And good morning to our live stream audience, Michael and Sandra on YouTube, Brian, Sandy, Samuel, Rolando, Joe, everyone else, thank you for tuning in. So almost every single Monday, we bring you the AI news that matters. So you shouldn't do this. You shouldn't spend hours every single day keeping up with AI. You should actually just be using the best of it and leave us to the rest of it. That was unscripted by the way. But you know, we do this every single day. And on Monday we essentially say, yo, here's what's happened this week, here's what's coming up. Let's cut through the fluff and just tell you what actually matters. So you know, yeah, if you can't maybe join us every single day or spend hours on your own exploring what the AI world has to offer, this on every single Monday. That's when you should definitely be joining us. Also, if you haven't already, please go to your everyday AI dot com. That's where you can sign up for our free daily newsletter. Because yeah, aside from the live stream, the podcast, we recap each podcasts in the newsletter as well as bringing you insights from everywhere else across the web. All right. And as a reminder, I will be out next week in San Jose at the Nvidia GTC conference. So partnering up with Nvidia, I'm excited about that. So if you're going to be at the GTC conference in Nvidia, let me know. Nvidia essentially powers the whole generative AI movement, so there should be some pretty exciting happenings happening there. And make sure you tune in because we're going to have some special special podcast interviews with some leaders at Nvidia and others that you're not going to hear anywhere else. All right, so make sure you tune in next week. All right, let's get into the AI news that matters for the week of March 10th. Let's get it. All right, so first, Microsoft unveiled some new AI sales agents to challenge Salesforce. So Microsoft introduced a pair of AI driven sales agents aimed at automating sales tasks and directly competing with Salesforce CRM AI offering. So yeah, Salesforce has kind of been picking a fight with Microsoft I think intentionally to try to grab headlines and to try to carve out their space in the autonomous agent space. So yeah, Salesforce has their agent force autonomous AI agents and you know, Microsoft is now clapped back. So their new sales agent in sales chat are AI tools that can identify leads, schedule meetings, follow up with customers and provide sales insights by analyzing emails, CRM records and other data. So the agents integrate with both Microsoft Dynamics 365 and also Salesforce's platform, letting sales teams work deals even without opening their CRM software. So Microsoft says they can be fine tuned on company specific data for more accurate tailored responses. So the new AI sales agents will enter public preview in May. This May, so about two months here via Microsoft 365 copilot expanding the Copilot ecosystem from mere assisted prompts to fully autonomous task completion in sales workflows. So to encourage adoption, Microsoft also launched an AI accelerator for sales program to help businesses build and implement those agents. Part of an effort to lure customers away from quote unquote legacy CRM vendors like Salesforce. So you know, I'm, I'm interested to see how this is all going to pan out. Also live stream audience, let me know what you want to hear more of. Probably going to bring on some Microsoft leaders in the coming weeks because I think they've really been crushing it, right? So not just what we have here from Salesforce, but you know, they have their new co pilot Dragon in the health space. Their co pilot free platform has gone Bonkers. Just like they're now offering for free what even other companies are making you pay for. So, so pretty exciting announcements coming out of Microsoft. All right, next, a new venture called Reflection AI has emerged from stealth with 130 million in early stage funding aiming to develop super intelligent AI systems. So this is from some former researchers at Google DeepMind and some other places, but they've raised $130 million across two different rounds. A $25 million seed led by Sequoia Capital and CRV and $105 million Series A CO led by CRV and Lightspeed Venture Partners. So the company's backers include tech heavyweights like Nvidia's venture arm LinkedIn co founder Reid Hoffman and Scale A Alexander Wang. All all star roster. Sorry, an all star roster reflecting high confidence in reflection AI's vision. So it's founded by ex Google DeepMind researchers who both worked on Google's Gemini AI project which so as a first step, the team is developing an autonomous coding tool that can handle complex programming tasks without human help. So the founders argue that mastering autonomous coding first will require breakthroughs in reasoning and self improvement that naturally extend to broader computer based work. So in other words, a coding agent that can teach itself and reason through problems could be repurposed later as a more general super intelligent assistant. So yeah, n goal is super intelligence. It's always weird now saying out loud when companies start with the end goal to just, you know, get super intelligent when you know, we technically, depending on what definition you look at, haven't achieved, you know, AGI or artificial general intelligence, which is essentially when a single AI system is, you know, smarter than most all humans across all tasks. So pretty, pretty interesting now to see not just Reflection AI raising some big money, but also ssi. Safe Safe Super Intelligence Incorporated from Ilya Suskever. So pretty, pretty interesting. A lot of money and big AI brains, you know, working straight in this super intelligent space. Which I guess is better, right? I guess it's better that we have super smart people working on, you know, hopefully safe super intelligence and not just, you know, waiting until we quote, unquote, cross the finish line for AGI. So I guess it's, it's nice that, you know, people are looking at what comes after AGI because if you listen to the show, I did a show about a year ago, maybe I'll have to do it again. But you know, this, this whole artificial general intelligence debate, I don't know, it's kind of strange because the goal posts are just going to continually be moving as AI systems become more and more capable. You know, if you look at definitions from 15 years ago, right? This is what I did. I spent way too many hours going to look at definitions from, you know, the year 2005, 2008, 2010, right? If you look at those older definitions from 15 plus years ago, we've definitely achieved artificial general intelligence. But it's a working definition, it's fluid, it always changes. But, you know, I guess there's plenty of money to be working in super intelligence. All right, I'd say one of the more exciting stories of the week is probably China's fully autonomous AI agent, Manus. So it debuted and it is powered, FYI, and this was confirmed by Manus's and I don't know if it's Manus or Manus, I guess we'll find out. I haven't had time to play with it yet because it is currently invite only, but it is powered by Claude and also Alibaba's QWQ model. So a Chinese startup named Monica has unveiled Maintenance, calling it the world's first autonomous AI agent, capable of executing complex tasks without human intervention. So the debut sparked buzz as Manus reportedly outperformed other AI assistants on key benchmarks, hinting at a new leap in agent capabilities. So, in demos, Manus handled real world tasks from end to end, from screening job resumes to conducting property research, all on its own dedicated computing instance. So it can browse the web, write and debug code, generate images, and even perform gigs on freelance platforms like Upwork and Fiverr without human guidance. So the team behind Manus claims it can achieve state of the art results on different benchmarks, surpassing general AI agents like ChatGPT and Google Gemini in similar evaluations. So, like I said, Manus is currently invite only, but the developers plan to open source its underlying models later in 2025 to foster transparency and common collaboration. So, under the hood, Manus leverages a combination of cutting edge AI models. So reports and, well, their own team has confirmed that it uses Anthropic's Claude but quad 3.5. Interestingly enough, I'm guessing the Claude 3.7 the Manus team was probably already too far in the development, so we'll see if it does upgrade to Claude 37 or maybe uses a different model. But it does use Claude 3.5 for as well as Alibaba's QWQ to carry out its tasks. So the emergence of Manus highlights the rapid progress of independent AI labs. And this is pretty, pretty I think we're going to be talking about this a lot in the next couple of weeks, mainly because it almost seemingly competes with multiple of OpenAI's highest tiered kind of products or models. So it does a lot of the kind of deep research, which I think is OpenAI's deep research, I would say, at least for the average person. Right. The average person is not going out there and coding for many hours a day. Right. So for different fields or different job types, different verticals, I think there's maybe more impressive AI tools or AI systems out there. But for the average everyday person, I think across the board, OpenAI's deep research is by far the most capable and the most powerful AI tool anyone can use right now. But this man is. Could change that. Well, we'll see once it's available to everyone, because it does have a little bit of the deep research vibes. It can go off and do deep researching tasks on its own, but also it does kind of have operator vibes as well. So, you know, chat GBT operator is an autonomous agent that can go out and perform tasks in a virtual environment. So it's, it's almost like menace does kind of both. Right. And like I said, it has kind of this two model approach under the hood. You know, it has the kind of transformer model of Claude 3.5 and then the qwq 32B from Alibaba to do some reasoning. So it's looks fairly impressive. Early reports, like I said, it's. It's invite only. I don't have access yet, but if I do, if y' all want to see a show on this, if and when it either is open to the public or if I do get access, uh, let me know and I'll, uh, you know, give it, give it the uh, the usual deep dive. But it, it could be a real contender here. Right. Especially I think, as the team explores early feedback. Right. So, yeah, it just kind of launched, I think a couple of days ago, very limited invite only, but like I said, it seems like it kind of combines. I think there's three, three main pieces to dissect here. One is it does use this hybrid model approach using both CLAUDE and. QWQ Two, it does have this kind of deep research capabilities to go off and do a lot of research for people. But then also it is more agentic, like operator. Right. It can go out and actually just perform tasks for you autonomously without human intervention on your behalf. So it can go out and code things. It can go out and you Know, create documents. Right. It can go out and perform. Perform actions for you. So it's, it's kind of like a combination of three different key pieces that something like Chat GPT does right now. Yeah. Michael says somebody invite Jordan. Wtf Manus. Yeah, I agree. Someone. Someone dropped me an invite. Are you still running in circles trying to figure out how to actually grow your business with AI? Maybe your company has been tinkering with large language models for a year or more, but can't really get traction to find ROI on Genai. Hey, this is Jordan Wilson, host of this very podcast. Companies like Adobe, Microsoft and Nvidia have partnered with us because they trust our expertise in educating the masses around generative AI to get ahead. And some of the most innovative companies in the country hire us to help with their AI strategy and to train hundreds of their employees on how to to use gen AI. So whether you're looking for chat GPT training for thousands or just need help building your front end AI strategy, you can partner with us too. Just like some of the biggest companies in the world do. Go to your everyday AI.com partner to get in contact with our team or you can just click on the partner section of our website. We'll help you stop running in those AI circles and help get your team ahead and build a straight path to ROI on GEni. All right, let's keep going. Speaking of invites, Meta's like trying to invite hundreds of millions of businesses to use llama. So Meta is predicting that hundreds of millions of businesses will adopt to their AI agents. So Meta's head of government business AI Clara, she has said the company is gearing up for a world where virtually every business uses AI agents to interact with customers. So in an interview she noted Meta's AI tech already reaches 700 million individuals, you know, through their other arms. Right. So through Facebook, WhatsApp, llama. Right. Like meta has a little of everything. Instagram, right. And they drop, you know, llama and their AI smart assistants everywhere. But it sounds like their goals are much more than that because Meta is focusing especially on small businesses. Yeah, hundreds of millions of small businesses that lack in house AI teams. So Meta's idea is to provide affordable AI agents through their current platforms like WhatsApp, Facebook and Instagram that can answer customer questions, remember preferences, and automate repetitive tasks 24, 7. So this could democratize AI access to much smaller, you know, small businesses. Right. That might just be side hustles that are operating on WhatsApp, something like that. So, so pretty interesting approach. Here from Meta. So the company's confidence is reflected in its investments. So Meta has been expanding its AI offerings, positioning itself as a key provider of business AI for marketing, customer service and beyond. So if Meta's vision holds true, AI agents could soon handle frontline customer interactions for millions of merchants globally. So yeah, then all us humans can, you know, I guess go scroll, you know, Facebook and Instagram and WhatsApp, you know, while the autonomous AI agents, you know, slide into everyone's DMS and you know, push, push your merch or something like that. So yeah, keep, keep an eye out on Meta. They have their first ever Llama Con coming up pretty soon, which I'm, I'm excited to see that is in April. Uh, so we might be seeing, uh, Llama four. You know, some rumors are saying we might see something, uh, in the autonomous AI agents, uh, space. So pretty big, uh, pretty announcement coming up from Meta as we kind of gear up into the spring announcement season for AI companies. So yeah, starting with Nvidia gtc, then we'll have Meta's llamacon as well as a few other big kind of tech and AI conferences coming up. All right, let's keep this AI train rolling. Choo choo. So pretty interesting that I didn't see a lot of people talking about this, not even a lot of news coverage, which I found interesting. But Anthropic is urging the creation of classified info sharing for AI companies with the US government. So in a policy proposal, AI startup Anthropic is calling for new classified communication channels between AI companies and the US government. So the aim is to securely share information about advanced AI developments, reflecting concerns that powerful frontier AI systems could pose national security risks. So Anthropic's recommendations came in a 10 page response to the White House's request for public input on AI on their national action plan. So the company warned that AI capable of matching or exceeding Nobel level human intellect could arrive as soon as next year, yeah, 2026. And argued that officials need better tools to monitor such rapid progress. So among the ideas, Anthropic proposes establishing classified channels so that top AI labs can discreetly share sensitive details of their most advanced AI models with government secured security agencies. So this would be complemented by expedited security clearances for key industry scientists, ensuring the government isn't caught off guard by breakthroughs known to, to corporate insiders. So Anthropic, led by CEO Dario Amati, likened the situation to arms controlled coordination, suggesting that secrecy and tight coordination may be needed to manage AI capable of unprecedented reasoning or autonomous actions. So anthropic stance highlights a tension. While these classified channels could help US Authorities respond to AI threats, they might also limit public transparency around critical AI decisions. So, yeah, I don't know, I don't necessarily see this happening. The current Trump administration has taken a pretty hands off approach when it comes to AI, right? They kind of gutted the USAI Safety Institute. So I don't necessarily see this happening, although it probably should, right? When you think about when these companies are developing AGI, essentially now you have labs working on asi, right? ASI is when it kind of gets scary, y'. All, that's when AI systems develop their own AI that, you know, they don't need humans for, right? That's when it starts to be like, yeah, maybe we should, you know, top AI labs instead of just, you know, fiercely competing with each other, maybe they should be sharing what breakthroughs they have achieved, at least if it could impact national security, if it could impact, you know, the world economy, which, you know, I'm not being a crazy weird AI guy when I say that that's actual concerns that we should all be focusing on, right? Because think of what you, think of what you at peak, you know, human performance can do with an AI system, right? It's a multiplier, it is a compound multiplier, right? In terms of what you, an individual human can achieve, right? When, when you get, you know, chat, GPTs, operator or deep Research or Manus, when it can do all these things, right? Think of what you one human can do when you have these powerful AI systems now think these systems that we're playing with and using with now are old news, right? All the AI labs have the next version of these and probably the next version, which are probably scary good. So you have to think of, okay, what happens when and if this gets into the wrong hands or what happens to jobs, what happens to the economy, right? What happens to national security, right? If you have an AI system that could essentially go rogue, right? And it's smarter than literally every single human researcher, you know, in a couple of years when it's smarter than every single human researcher and it can just build its own version of, you know, can build its own version of Operator, right? Like that's something I saw with Manus. Someone used Manus to build a, essentially a fine tuned version of Manus, right? So, yes, the, the systems that we have today are capable of building their own systems with human intervention, but what happens when they're way smarter? So I like what Anthropic is pushing. I don't personally think that this is going to hit, at least with this current administration's more hands off approach to AI. All right. Google has unveiled AI mode in search, a major shift on how we interact with the web. So Google has introduced AI Mode, an experimental paid feature that uses advanced AI capabilities to develop more comprehensive answers to search queries. So Google has announced AI Mode as a part of its Google One AI premium service, marking the second phase of its AI driven search evolution. So this feature builds on its Gemini 2.0 model, offering advanced reasoning, multimodal capabilities and real time information. So unlike traditional search, Google's new AI mode allows users to ask follow up questions and provides AI generated summaries alongside links to to relevant websites. However, concerns remain about whether users will actually click the links, potentially reducing traffic to external sites. And yeah, then we just have this whole, you know, the Internet just becomes, becomes AI generated slop because high quality content producers go out of business because no one's clicking their links and signing up for their newsletters and using their products and signing up for their services. Right. So yeah, there's a lot of downsides, you know, when we have these very capable, you know, tools that can just browse the web and give us literally the pinpoint insights that we need. You know, I'm curious if anyone on the live stream audience has used AI mode from Google yet. I'm thinking we might do a dedicated show on this this week just because it is a little different than their deep than Google's deep Research. I think it's also a little different than Google's or sorry, than Perplexity and Grok and OpenAI's deep research. So it is kind of, I think its own kind of way to interact with the web. So you know, live stream audience, let me know if you want to, you know, see a breakdown of the new AI mode from Google. So it is designed to query a broader range of websites and simultaneously search related topics, delivering detailed responses it can also include. It also includes mechanisms to acknowledge uncertainty or avoid generating summaries when confidence is low. Bless up, we need more of just AI refusing to answer things if it doesn't know or if it's not super confident. So while Google has promised more prominent links to websites in AI mode, the current version offers fewer links than the demo shown during the announcement. So Google's approach contrasts with competitors like Chat, GPT and Claude which have gained traction for their conversational AI capabilities. So AI modes integration into Google's search index ads, real time and local business data as well, differentiating it from standalone chatbots. You know, Marie says, sure. Sandra says, love the demos. Michael says, yes. So yeah, we'll see. Maybe we'll do a show on that this week. Maybe we'll ask the newsletter audience as well. You know, I think I intentionally left some some shows open because, you know, knowing I'm going to be at Nvidia gtc, I might not be able to cover as many timely things. So this week kept a couple slots open so we could hopefully, you know, cover some of these newer announcements. All right, next speaking we already mentioned qwq32b what a name. But Alibaba's qwq32b model has topped some open source AI charts. So qwq32b I'm gonna stop saying that. I'm just gonna say qwq I guess which isn't any better. We really just need shorter names for all these models. But it quickly shot to the top of some open source AI rankings showc breakthrough in efficiency and sparking optimism for small but mighty AI models. So qwq 32B is short for Quinn with questions. Which is it actually short with that when it's way more syllables? I don't know. But it is a new large reasoning model released under the Open source Apache 2.0 license from Alibaba, so it's allowing anyone to use or modify it freely. So despite its relatively compact size, which the 32B means 32 billion parameters, qwq demonstrated performance on par with much bigger reasoning models such as deep seqs R1, which has 671 billion parameters. So yes, let me repeat that. So a model about 5% of its size of deep seeks R1. Qwq 32B is from certain performance and certain benchmarks already on par with a much larger deepseek R1. We do see rumors that we might see a deep seek R2, their latest reasoning model, in the coming weeks, so we'll keep an eye out for that. So Alibaba achieved this by focusing QWQ on advanced reasoning and self refinement techniques so the model can generate intermediate questions and reflect on its answers during inference, which makes it excel in domains like math, problem solving and code generation. In fact, the company says you know that QWQ leads or ties open AIs and deep seq models in five major benchmark tests for reasoning. So within days of launch qwq 32B was was ranked number one on at least one global open source model leaderboard. The news also gave Alibaba's stock a huge boost as investors saw the model's success as evidence that Chinese AI innovation can compete head to head with Western rivals on quality and efficiency. What's weird about this, y', all, is before any of this, you know. Qw Q32b before deep seek, before all of this, I told y' all in my 2025 AI roadmap that by the middle of the year that Chinese models would probably overtake most US models, and that more than half of the top 10 models or at least half of the top 10 models would be from Chinese AI companies. So we may see that by April or May, right? We might not have to wait until the middle of the year, but I told you all this was coming, so you shouldn't, shouldn't be shocked. All right, our next piece of AI news. Chat GBT's desktop app has gained two way coding integration. So this is another, I think, small news that's actually kind of big and it also kind of slipped under the radar. This was just essentially announced on the OpenAI Developers Twitter account and I didn't even see a whole lot of news article about it. But let me tell you why I think it's important. But first, here's what it is. So OpenAI's official ChatGPT desktop app on Mac has received a major update, enabling it to work directly with integrated development environments, or IDEs. So in practical terms, that means ChatGPT can now both read but also modify and write code in a user's editor like Xcode or VS code automatically, rather than just suggesting code that the user must copy over. So the new feature is part of OpenAI's work with apps capability on Mac OS that lets paid users. So yeah, you got to be on ChatGPT plus pro teams and I think the enterprise accounts as well. So it allows you to connect the ChatGPT desktop app with developer tools. So for example, Chat GPT can now scan the code in an Xcode project, not just suggesting changes, but also apply those code edits directly in the IDE with an auto Apply mode. So this is pretty big and it's indicative of this recent shift. So first we saw Claude code from Anthropic released a couple of weeks ago that was essentially this, but it's more of a terminal tool than anything else. But Claude code looks pretty impressive, right? And what's interesting is you have all these essentially vibe coding tools, right? We call them that, like Windsurf Cursor Lovable. I Mean there's so many that essentially allow you to talk to their system. And usually these systems, you can choose which model, right? So you could. Most people use, you know, CloudSonic 3.5 because it's great for coding. You know, some people might use something like O3 mini from OpenAI, but essentially you have all these, you know, AI vibe coding models that you just talk to and then they can build you an app, right, in one shot. Super impressive, something you can run on your computer. But now we've seen this shift where it's like, wait, all the AI labs are like, wait, we want that, we want to get in that game. Why can't we own that? So, you know, CLAUDE was first with its Claude code, which is open, you know, that one is more open and free because it just runs in your terminal. You download a GitHub repository and then can run it on your computer. Whereas Chat GPT's version, you do have to have a paid account and you run it through the app. Personally, for me, I like the latter approach because I'm not a super technical person. Although Claude code, it is fairly easy to set up, but you gotta be able to, you know, at least, you know, run some terminal commands. You gotta understand GitHub repos, right? So you have to have a little more tech know how to use Claude code. Whereas Chat GBT's new feature, very, very useful. So the work with apps has always been available. So, you know, as an example, you know, I use this a lot for text edit. So, you know, chat GPTs work with apps, it can just see what's open in my text edits. And previously it could just, you know, it would, anything that you told it to do, it would reply back in the body of the ChatGPT app. So now it will instead, you know, update these actual apps, which I think, you know, the main difference here, nothing is technically new. It just saves you a ton of copy and pasting and really just explanation. So instead of saying like, hey, Chat GPT, here's some code that I'm working on in VS code, right? I'm trying to do this. Could you update the code, et cetera, et cetera, right? And you'd have to copy and paste it from, you know, as an example versus code into Chat GPT and then you'd have to get the output from Chat GPT, go back to VS code. So now it just works by itself, right? Chat GPT can now read and write. So it goes from kind of a one way street to now a two way coding partner. So I would say pretty big news that no one is really paying too much attention to. All right. Something people are paying a ton of attention to. Our next story. Reportedly OpenAI is planning a twenty thousand dollar a month professional AI agent. Yeah, I'm gonna repeat that. I did not. That's not some weird AI glitch, by the way. I was watching Wreck Wrecks the Internet last night. Love that movie. There's a glitch thing. Sorry, I just. I just had to say that one of my favorite songs is Slaughter Race. Anyways, it was not a glitch. Me saying that actually. $20,000 a month professional AI agent plan reportedly so according to reports, Open AI is preparing to offer premium AI agents for businesses at prices up to $20,000 a month. So these advanced AI agents would function like ultra capable employees performing specialized work in areas like analytics, coding or research. And the steep price tag signals the value OpenAI believes they'll be able to deliver to enterprises. So this is according to reporting from the information and other outlets that OpenAI is working on. Three tiers of agent subscriptions. So one, around $2,000 a month that's aimed at business professionals for tasks like marketing or customer analysis, one around $10,000 a month for advanced software development tasks, and a top tier quote, unquote PhD level research agent at $20,000 a month. So these AI agents are envisioned to operate with a high degree of autonomy on behalf of a client, essentially acting as a highly skilled digital staff. So OpenAI CEO Sam Altman predicted earlier this year that we'd see AI agents, quote, unquote, join the workforce and significantly boost company outputs. So the new offerings appear to be how OpenAI will make that happen by literally productizing expert AI workers for hire. And Big Money is backing the idea. So global juggernaut SoftBank has reportedly committed $3 billion to invest in OpenAI's agent venture for 2025. So OpenAI projects that these agent services could eventually make up a quarter of its revenue, highlighting just how central agent as a service might become to its business model beyond just API access or chat GPT subscriptions. So if launched, that $20,000 a month price point meets means these AI agents would cost as much as a senior human employee. So OpenAI's betting companies will pay pay that if the agent can handle work equivalent to an entire team of researchers or developers. So early adopters might include Fortune 500 firms in areas like finance, tech or science that can immediately utilize an AI expert on complex projects. So yeah, and we'll See how things like Manus impacts this, you know, $2,000, $10,000, $20,000 a month price tag. So I think even if we have things like Manus take off and become very popular in our free or low cost, right. I don't think that it's going to be free in the long run, but I don't think it's going to cost. Manus will cost $2,000 a month. I don't think so. But I still think even so, I still think even so, OpenAI is going to get a lot of customers with that 2,000, 10,000, $20,000 a month. And I think we have to start thinking of it like this. Don't think of it compared to an AI subscription, think of it compared to paying an employee. Right? Because the smartest, you know, the most in demand employees right now, you know, which are generally working at AI labs, they cost way more than $20,000 a month, right? I mean these people are making NBA like figures, right? Yeah, you have some outliers, you know, making seven plus multiple seven figures a year to work at, you know, big companies like OpenAI, Google, Anthropic, Microsoft, etc. But I would say your quote unquote average everyday, you know, mid tier software developer is making 400, $500,000 plus a year which is much more than the $20,000 a month. So I get that it's, it's immediate sticker shock and people are like, yeah, right. I would not be surprised, I would not be surprised number one, if this is true. You know, this is just according to reports, but I wouldn't be surprised if Fortune 500 companies are going to pay. So here's what I think and I don't have any, you know, inside information on this one at least. Right. But what I think essentially is going to happen is think of the best of OpenAI right now. So you know GPT 4.5 is a very, very capable model, right? It is ranked as the top model in the world on ELO scores or in terms of what the most humans in the world prefer blindly. All right, so GPT 4.5 is a very capable model. It doesn't have reasoning capabilities. It is serving as a base model for OpenAI's next reasoning model which will just be coupled under GPT5. So what I see this as, I see this as a way more capable GPT5 that has reasoning capabilities that has, you know, four way better than 4.5, ability for accuracy, relatability, reliability, plus combining it with things like deep research, combining it with operator, combining it with tasks. Right. I do think that task piece is something people are overlooking, right? The ability to just schedule that. Because right now, even with Deep Research and Operator, you can't schedule those things. Right. They still require a human to kick them off. So think GPT5 plus being able to schedule it plus deep research plus operator, all in one seamless UI UX. Right. That's ultimately what I think. That and the fact that it's U.S. based. And I think that a lot of Fortune 500 companies, Right. From rightfully so, are going to be hesitant to jump on board with anything from China. I think it's actually going to be pretty popular if this is true. Right. I do think that first OpenAI will roll that out in tears just like right now. Yeah, we have the 200amonth chat GPT Pro plan, which I think is well worth it. Right. But they didn't start with that. They started with a free version. They started with a 20, then went to 20amonth, then it went to the 200amonth. So I, I do think we'll probably start with a two thousand dollar a month and then as it gets more capabilities, probably throughout this year and next, then we might see that next step up to $10,000. But I don't know, y'. All. What do you think Kieran is saying? Will OpenAI replace all of its developers with 20K AI agents? If that's worth it. It's a great question, right? I'm always wondering the same thing. I'm like, okay, why are all these companies hiring? Because I think right now, even though the cost of compute is going down, they still need all these developers to develop what's next, Right? So in theory, once we have asi, then we won't need to hire. Right? Or in theory, we wouldn't need to hire smart humans anymore to improve upon whatever AI models. But until then, you probably need the humans to build what's next on top of your latest and greatest kind of offering. Love what Marie here says. Next AI name will be R2D2. That's a better name than a lot of these. You know, Oath, you know, O3 mini high and you know. Qwq 32B. Yeah, let's just name them R2D2 and things like that. Yeah. Michael says gatekeeping, intelligence, starting to support the people calling them closed AI. I don't, I don't have a, I don't personally have a problem with that, but that's just me and OpenAI. Did, you know, talk about potentially open sourcing some of their future models. So we'll see if that if that comes to fruition. All right, last but not least, spicy news. This is soap opera drama. So according to reports, Microsoft is exploring life life beyond OpenAI with both in house models and looking at other companies to bring in to also potentially power its copilot. So despite its multi billion dollar investment with OpenAI and reported 49 equity stake, Microsoft is quietly both developing its own large AI reasoning models and also looking at other partners to partner with to power its own co pilot tech. So recent reports suggest that Microsoft has a plan B for AI which is training internal mod models codenamed Mai that could power products like its Copilot assistants without relying solely on OpenAI's GPT engines. So according to reporting from the information, Microsoft's AI research group led by Mustafa Suleiman has completed training a family of advanced language models dubbed Mai that perform nearly as well as OpenAI or Claude's anthropic clauds models on many benchmarks. These models are significantly larger and more sophisticated than Microsoft's current publicly available, you know, as an example, their 5.4model. So Microsoft has already started experimenting with swapping out OpenAI's models for other alternatives in some of its products internally. And this is according to reports. For instance, it's reportedly tested Copilot integrations using models from XAI such as Grok, Metas, Llama and even the Chinese model deepseek. Essentially test driving different AI engines to see if they can do the job of OpenAI's technology currently does in Azure and Office 365. So the motivation is partly cost because running big models like GPT4.5 or OpenAI's O3 Mini High or Zero1 Pro, it can get expensive. And Microsoft does bear those costs for services like Biz chat and their365 copilot. And it's partly strategic as well. So by having its own top tier models, Microsoft could then better negotiate terms with OpenAI or eventually deploy more of its AI services entirely on its own proprietary tech. So here's the thing, they haven't technically broken up, but it's, it's like they're not, they might not be exclusive for too much longer at least when it comes to Microsoft 365. So yeah, they might be getting in an open relationship with, with many other AI models, right. So Microsoft, like I said, they haven't officially cut ties and this is just, you know, right now it's, it's rumors. But according to the information which is usually pretty spot on with a lot of its reporting. So it hasn't cut ties with OpenAI yet, but it's actually a major investor, like I said, in OpenAI. So Microsoft has all, you know, all reason to continue to support and build and push hand, you know, hand in hand forward with OpenAI considering its big equity stake in it. But it's turning Microsoft from being just a consumer of OpenAI's models and to a more complex collaboration and also competition. So Microsoft's internal AI lab is now vying to match or exceed OpenAI's offering, signaling a future where Microsoft might run its Cloud AI services on Microsoft made models instead of open AIs. So in the bigger picture, this development indicates a maturing AI ecosystem. So for users, Microsoft's dual track approach could, if it happens, it could mean more diversity in AI features and possibly lower cost or improve performance as Microsoft could choose the best or the most efficient model for a given task, whether it's open AIs, its own, a competitor, or a blend of those. So I think in the end this is a win for consumers. I think it's a smart move from Microsoft not having to be, you know, overly reliant on OpenAI. I don't think they're going to be dropping OpenAI's models anytime soon because they're the best in the world, right? I don't care what anyone says. Go look at the benchmarks, go look at ELO scores, right? ELO scores are, you know, essentially a human puts in a prompt, they get two outputs, they're blind, they don't know which one's which. They say this one's better. Open AI's GPT4.5 is leading that discussion. So OpenAI is not giving up its, its, you know, seat atop the AI kind of king of the hill competition anytime soon. And I think if nothing else, this might just push OpenAI to continue to improve its AI models at an even faster pace. Right. When they may not have as much support and as much data coming in from Microsoft's integration into Microsoft. 365 Copilot. All right, so that is a wrap, y'. All. So let's go ahead and quickly recap the top stories for the AI news that matters for the week of March 10th. All right, so first, Microsoft has unveiled AI sales agents to challenge Salesforce super intelligence startup Reflection AI has launched and come out of stealth with $130 million in funding to work on Super Intelligence China. They're huge, huge advancements coming out of China with AI startup Monica has unveiled Manus, which I think could really compete with OpenAI's products on a lot of different ways. Meta is predicting that hundreds of millions of businesses will adopt its AI agents. Anthropic has urged the creation of classified info sharing channels for AI labs with the US Government. Google has unveiled its new AI mode in search, which could signal a big change on how we use the web. Alibaba's qwq 32B model is topping the open source charts, so pretty impressive work there from Alibaba. ChatGPT kind of a low key update has given the desktop app on max two way coding integration, essentially turning it into an IDE or an integrated development environment or at least allows it to better work with popular IDEs. According to reports, OpenAI is planning a $20,000 a month professional AI agents and last but not least, Microsoft is exploring life beyond just working with OpenAI as it continues to build impressive in house AI models and also test drive some of OpenAI's competitors to see how it'll do. Powering Copilot all right, I hope this was helpful y'. All. If so, don't keep this to yourself. I hope you know our shows, especially the Monday show, but all week I hope that this helps you become the smartest person in AI at your company or your department. If so, please don't just keep this as your secret share. All right, so maybe if you're listening on the Twitter machine, click that retweet or reacts or whatever it's called nowadays. If you're listening on LinkedIn, thank you. Tag a friend. Click that repost button. I'd super appreciate it. If you're on the podcast. Thanks for tuning in. As always. I know these shows get a little long. Listen to me on 2x. I won't get mad. But also please subscribe. Follow the show on Spotify, Apple Music. Wherever you're listening. Get your podcast. Please leave us a rating as well. Thank you for tuning in. I'll see you back tomorrow and every day for more Everyday AI. Thanks y'. All.

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