From Wizard Zoom Calls to $1.5B AI Settlements 🧙💰

Hey Everyone 👋

We are back after a long Holiday.

Forget dog-ear filters. Today, we’re talking wizard spells on Zoom, billion-dollar AI buyouts, and student copilots. Buckle up — the AIverse is moving faster than Mirage’s frame rate. ⚡

🧙 “From Zoom Call to Wizard Duel”

Mirage shows off real-time AI video magic

On the Every podcast, Dean Leitersdorf casually transformed into a wizard mid-sentence 🧙✨ — shooting candlelight from his hands and turning a tissue box into a portal gun.

The tech? Mirage, Decart’s new real-time video-to-video AI model. Unlike other AI video tools that render clips in chunks, Mirage predicts each frame like an LLM predicts words — with just 40ms delay (soon 16ms).

What it can already do:
🎮 Mod Minecraft worlds in real time
❄️ Turn GTA V into a winter wonderland
📱 Power Delulu, a new selfie-transformation app

👀 Meanwhile, Tencent dropped HunyuanWorld-Voyager, now #1 on Stanford’s WorldScore leaderboard, generating camera-controlled 3D environments exportable straight into 3D formats.

The big picture: Mirage bets on transforming existing content instantly, while Tencent and Google focus on building new 3D worlds. Dean thinks both matter: deterministic code for “bones” (physics, rules), AI for “muscles” (textures, visuals). If he’s right, AI may have just created the skin of the next gaming era.

💰 “Claude’s Costly Lesson”

Anthropic agrees to $1.5B author settlement

Anthropic just cut a check (a very big one) 💸 — agreeing to pay $1.5 billion to settle a lawsuit from authors whose pirated books were used to train Claude.

📚 Over 7M pirated books were found in its dataset, sourced from shadow libraries like LibGen.
⚖️ A judge ruled: training on legal books = fair use, pirated = copyright violation.
💵 Payout: $3,000 per book, covering ~500,000 works.
🗑️ Anthropic must destroy all pirated files.

Why it matters: It’s the first major AI payout — but it doesn’t kill “fair use” for legally obtained data. For Anthropic, with a $183B valuation and $13B fresh funding, this stings more symbolically than financially.

🆕 “OpenAI’s $1.1B Bet on Experiments”

Statsig acquisition makes Vijaye Raji CTO of Applications

OpenAI just made its biggest buy yet: Statsig — the A/B testing and experimentation platform — in a $1.1B all-stock deal.

👔 Vijaye Raji, Statsig’s founder, will be OpenAI’s new CTO of Applications, overseeing ChatGPT + Codex products.
📊 Statsig’s tools → feature flags, real-time decisioning, and product testing.
🧑‍💻 All 150 employees join OpenAI, but the startup stays independent in Seattle.

Why it matters: ChatGPT just hit 700M weekly active users. Scaling responsibly requires experimentation infrastructure. With Raji in charge, OpenAI sharpens its edge against Gemini, Anthropic, and Meta.

🎓 “AI Goes Back to School”

Perplexity launches Comet, a student super-assistant

Move over, SparkNotes. Perplexity just launched Comet, a global AI copilot for students.

📅 Organize schedules: classes, deadlines, study sessions.
📚 Order textbooks directly.
📝 Study mode: flashcards, summaries, personalized learning plans.

Why it matters: Comet positions Perplexity as the go-to student tool — not just a search replacement. With back-to-school season globally, this could quickly snowball into millions of daily users.

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🔍 Other News

💸 ASML bets on Mistral — Dutch chipmaker invests €1.3B, becoming Mistral’s biggest shareholder + board member.

🛰️ SpaceX buys EchoStar spectrum — $17B deal (half cash, half stock) to expand its satellite network.

🎬 OpenAI funds “Critterz” film — $30M animated project with Vertigo Films, aiming to finish in just 9 months to flex generative AI production.

🍏 Apple x Gemini? — Apple reportedly testing Google’s Gemini on its servers for a new Siri search system called World Knowledge Answers.

🧠 Alibaba drops Qwen3-Max — a trillion-parameter beast outperforming DeepSeek V3.1, Kimi K2, and Claude Opus 4 (non-reasoning) in benchmarks.

📧 Google dismisses Gmail hack rumor — reassures that Gmail already blocks 99.9% of phishing/malware.

🌍 Tencent’s translation win — its 7B model, Hunyuan-MT-7B, crushed 30 of 31 categories at WMT2025, matching GPT-4.1 in some benchmarks.

🧍 Alibaba’s Wan2.2-S2V upgrade — new avatar model turns a single photo into singing, talking avatars with scary realism.

🚪 xAI exec exodus — Mike Liberatore (ex-Airbnb, ex-CTO of xAI) quits after 3 months, despite raising $5B (half via SpaceX) and overseeing data center builds.

🗣️ NotebookLM gets style — now lets you pick debate, critique, or brief tones for its audio summaries.

💻 Mastery tools of the day

• Wispr Flow - Vibe coding supercharged with voice

• Nodu - Uses AI to generate storytelling videos for product promotion

• HunyuanWorld-Voyager - AI world model for explorable 3D environments

• Orbit Flows - Creates AI content that will 10x output without sacrificing quality

💡What else are we reading and seeing?

• No, AI Is Not a Bubble

• The influencer in this Vodafone ad isn’t real

• PayPal giving out Perplexity Pro subscriptions

• How to build with Nano Banana: Complete Developer Tutorial

• Google’s NotebookLM can customize AI podcasts

• Microsoft cloud services disrupted by Red Sea cable cuts

👋 That’s a Wrap

From billion-dollar deals to wizard Zoom calls, AI is flexing across entertainment, education, and enterprise. The lawsuits are piling up, but so are the breakthroughs.

Thanks for reading Not So Artificial!
Catch you tomorrow with more AI chaos, clarity, and maybe another tissue-box portal gun 🌀.

✉️ Have thoughts or tips? Hit reply — we read them all.