howdy, it’s Barsee again.

happy monday, AI family, and welcome back to AI Valley.

here are the biggest things worth knowing today:

• Reflection is about to drop a big American open-weight AI model

• Trump just created a “Super Intelligence Force”

• OpenAI is putting ads inside image generation

• Plus trending AI tools, posts, and resources

Let’s dive into the Valley of AI…

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THROUGH THE VALLEY

1/ Reflection is about to drop a big American open-weight AI model - the Nvidia-backed startup is reportedly preparing to release its first model, aimed squarely at Chinese open models like Kimi and Qwen. It probably won't beat the absolute best models from OpenAI, Anthropic or Google at launch, but Axios says it'll be competitive with the top Chinese open-weight models.

That's actually important because China pretty much dominates the high-end open-weight model market right now. Reflection is trying to build a Western alternative that companies can download, customize and run themselves instead of sending everything through OpenAI or Anthropic's APIs.

But the bigger plan is something Reflection calls an “AI factory.” Basically, give it your company's private data, Reflection's models and a bunch of Nvidia GPUs, and you can build your own proprietary AI system. For companies sitting on really valuable data, like banks, hedge funds or even governments, that's a pretty compelling pitch.

The model is apparently coming soon, alongside several other Western open-weight models this month.

2/ Trump just created a “Super Intelligence Force” - yes, that's actually what it's called. After telling the US government to start calling AI “Super Intelligence” last week, Trump has now named Director of National Intelligence Jay Clayton as his AI czar and put him in charge of a new White House task force focused on it.

The group has 120 days to study the risks and opportunities of AI and recommend what Washington should actually do about it, including how to handle AI incidents, cyberattacks and advanced models going wrong.

Clayton seems pretty firmly on the acceleration side. He says the risk of America not being first in AI is high and has pushed back on calls to pause development. Basically, figure out how to make this stuff safer without slowing the US down.

And apparently we're really committing to the whole “SI” thing now. Elon Musk says he's renaming SpaceXAI to SpaceXSI.

3/ OpenAI is putting ads inside image generation - OpenAI is testing a new ad format that shows sponsored products and experiences while you're generating images in ChatGPT, starting in the US later this month.

The ads will be labeled and kept separate from your actual content, and OpenAI says advertising still won't influence ChatGPT's answers. But image generation is a pretty interesting place to put them. Ask ChatGPT to design your living room, generate an outfit or visualize a new desk setup, and there are suddenly a lot of products that could naturally be advertised alongside what you're making.

No pricing yet, and OpenAI hasn't announced a way to opt out of these image-generation ads.

TRENDING TOOLS

• Promethee - an app that turns your work into a multiplayer game, to perform

• Hark by Figure AI - new kind of system for getting things done. Whatever you need, let Hark handle it

• Pilot5 - five frontier AI models analyze the same matter independently, challenge each other anonymously, and converge on a recommendation

• Marv - an AI cursor companion that shows you what to click

• Flux 3 Image - Control every pixel

• Dot - OpenAI’s new always-on agent

• Kolibri - 78B parameters. 3.46B active. Up to 1M tokens of context. Built in Europe

• Aperture - an AI code editor that checks its own work

• Grok Bot - hand off coding tasks to Cursor, manage PRs with GitHub and Origin plugins

• Codync - the open-source alternative to Grok Bot, Muse and Dots

WHAT I'M CONSUMING

• Everyone is building the same thing

• 2026 in LLMs (so far) by Simon Willison

• Only 2% of US households pay for AI services. Andreessen Horowitz's recent report revealed that 98% of U.S. households do not subscribe to dedicated AI services

• How Sam Altman uses his dot to run OpenAI

• AI-linked roles have accounted for more than 750,000+ new jobs created in the US since 2023

THE VALLEY GEMS

What’s trending on social today:

THAT’S ALL FOR TODAY

Thank you for reading today’s edition. That’s all for today’s issue.

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