ChatGPT is making a new AI പേന🖋️

OpenAI just dropped $6.5 billion to acquire Jony Ive's design company

and build a pen that could make your iPhone feel ancient.

Not kidding the guy who designed the iPhone is now designing its replacement.

But wait, there's more chaos:

A Chinese AI model just claimed it beat GPT-5 and Claude while being 20x smaller. Plot twist? It might have been accidentally cheating.

And a company you've never heard of just sold 1.5 million AI devices and is making $250 million doing something everyone said was impossible.

I'm Alex. Welcome to L8R by Innov8

Let’s DIVE DEEP 🧠👇

In today’s post:

• •🎬 The AI pen that could end the smartphone era

• •💰 The benchmark scandal that's shaking AI

• •📰 How Plaud cracked the $29B transcription market

OpenAI & Jony Ive Design AI Pen: Goodbye Screens?

Forget the next iPhone update 😂

The real revolution is happening in a quiet design studio where Sam Altman and Jony Ive (the guy who designed the iPhone) are building its replacement.

Meet "Gumdrop" a screenless AI pen that listens, understands, and transcribes your life.

It's a massive bet that the future of tech involves looking up, not down.

🔍 The Key Points

• It’s a literal pen. Clips to your pocket, has a camera/mic, but zero screen. It transcribes handwriting instantly.

• Powered by OpenAI’s newest models. It holds real conversations, handles interruptions, and acts as a 'third core device.'

• Jony Ive’s firm, LoveFrom, is leading the look. It’s roughly the size of an iPod Shuffle.

• Unlike the failed Humane AI Pin ($700 flop), this uses a habit you already have: writing on paper.

🚨 Why This Matters

• We’ve spent 15 years staring at glass rectangles. This is the start of "Zero UI"tech that works in the background.

• Writing by hand boosts memory retention better than typing. This gadget merges analog benefits with digital smarts.

• If OpenAI controls the hardware, they don't have to rely on Apple or Google's ecosystems forever.

⏭️ What's Next

• An always-listening device is scary. Watch how OpenAI markets privacy to avoid the 'surveillance' backlash.

• Will the iPhone play nice with this pen? If Apple blocks deep integration, the pen becomes a useless accessory.

• Foxconn is handling production (avoiding China for geopolitics). Expect a market launch between 2026 and 2027.

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The AI That 'Beat' GPT... Then Got Caught Peeking 🫣

Imagine a student acing an exam in record time, only to find out the answer key was stapled to the test paper.

That’s the story of IQuest-Coder.

A Chinese hedge fund dropped a tiny open-source model that seemingly crushed Claude Sonnet 4.5 and GPT-5 benchmarks.

But within 24 hours, the internet found a massive flaw: it was accidentally cheating.

🔍 The Key Points

• IQuest-Coder (40B params) scored 81.4% on SWE-Bench, beating Claude Sonnet 4.5 (400B+) by 0.1%.

• The test environment accidentally included 'future commits.' The model practically had the solutions before solving the bugs. 🚩

• Controversy aside, it uses 'Code-Flow Training.' It learns from git commit histories (the process), not just static code files.

• It fits on a single GPU. Competitors need massive server clusters.

🚨 Why This Matters

• If a transparent team made this mistake, we have no idea if closed-source giants (OpenAI/Google) are gaming their numbers too.

• It proves that better data curation (like commit histories) beats simply adding more parameters.

• Even with the flaw, the efficiency suggests we can run GPT-4 level coding agents on local hardware soon.

⏭️ What's Next

• The community will demand 'trajectory logs' for all future benchmark claims. No more taking screenshots at face value.

• Expect more labs to copy 'Code-Flow' training. Static datasets are out; evolutionary datasets are in.

• We'll see more small, expert models (like for coding or law) replacing massive generalist models for specific tasks.

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Plaud: The $100M AI Hardware Startup You Missed

While Silicon Valley was obsessing over billion-dollar valuations. 

Shenzhen startup called Plaud quietly built a money-printing machine.

By solving a simple problem recording iPhone calls and meetings without the hassle

They've sold over 1.5 million devices.

🔍 The Key Points

• Sold 1.5M units globally with $100M in annualized revenue

• Their flagship 'Note' clips magnetically to phones; the new 'NotePin S' is a wearable pill for all-day recording.

• They don't train models. They wrap top-tier tech (GPT-4, Claude, Gemini) into a seamless app.

• Just launched 'Plaud Desktop' to record Zoom/Teams natively no awkward bots required.

🚨 Why This Matters

• Anyone can build a GPT wrapper app. Building a physical ecosystem creates loyalty that software alone can't match.

• Competitors like Otter.ai force a bot into your meeting. Plaud records locally or natively, which feels way less intrusive.

• They bootstrapped to profitability in 2023.

⏭️ What's Next

• The new Desktop app is free for device owners and directly attacks the Otter/Fireflies duopoly. ⚔️

• Future updates will capture images and text alongside audio for 'multidimensional' summaries.

• Founder Nathan Xu is building an 'AI work companion' to track everything you say, hear, and see.

🚨 Quick L8R Summary

• OpenAI Pen: $6.5 billion bet that the future of AI is zero screens, not more screens

• IQuest-Coder: Accidentally proved benchmarks are broken while showing efficiency beats scale 

• Plaud: 1.5 million devices sold proves hardware + AI can bootstrap to $250M revenue