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Good morning, AI enthusiasts. The Tesla CEO is fighting the largest compensation dispute in corporate history, with the stakes now reaching $134 billion.
What started as a controversial pay package has ballooned into a legal battle that dwarfs any previous executive compensation case, and the final decision could reshape how tech founders structure their equity deals.
In today's recap:
Musk's $134B legal battle over Tesla pay package
Thinking Machines loses two co-founders to OpenAI
Create infographics with NotebookLM and Gemini
Cursor builds browser from scratch using AI agents
4 new AI tools, prompts, and more
MUSK & OPENAI
Musk's legal fight scales to $134 billion
AP
Recaply: Elon Musk just filed a court document seeking between $79B and $134B from OpenAI and Microsoft, claiming he deserves the "wrongful gains" from his early support when he co-founded the company in 2015.
Key details:
Musk contributed $38M in seed funding (60% of OpenAI's early capital) and helped recruit talent while lending credibility, with his expert witness now calculating he's entitled to a percentage of OpenAI's current $500B valuation.
The damages calculation breaks down to $65.5B-$109.4B from OpenAI and $13.3B-$25.1B from Microsoft, representing returns his contributions generated based on the companies' current valuations.
OpenAI called it "an unserious demand" and part of Musk's "harassment campaign," releasing a blog post showing 2017 call notes where Musk agreed OpenAI needed to transition from non-profit to B-corp or C-corp.
The trial is expected to start in April 2026 in Oakland, California, with a jury deciding whether Musk's fraud claims over OpenAI's shift to for-profit structure hold merit.
Why it matters: This isn't just courtroom drama anymore. The $134B figure represents one of the largest damage claims in tech history, and Musk's expert is arguing that early startup contributions deserve returns matching current valuations. If this logic holds, it could reshape how founding disputes get valued when nonprofits transition to for-profits. OpenAI's defense leans on showing Musk himself wanted the for-profit structure and even created the PBC entity, but the real question is whether leaving in 2018 means forfeiting claims to later gains.
PRESENTED BY FORWARD FUTURE
The Future of Tech. One Daily News Briefing.
AI is moving faster than any other technology cycle in history. New models. New tools. New claims. New noise.
Most people feel like they’re behind. But the people that don’t, aren’t smarter. They’re just better informed.
Forward Future is a daily news briefing for people who want clarity, not hype. In one concise newsletter each day, you’ll get the most important AI and tech developments, learn why they matter, and what they signal about what’s coming next.
We cover real product launches, model updates, policy shifts, and industry moves shaping how AI actually gets built, adopted, and regulated. Written for operators, builders, leaders, and anyone who wants to sound sharp when AI comes up in the meeting.
It takes about five minutes to read, but the edge lasts all day.
THINKING MACHINES
Thinking Machines loses two co-founders to OpenAI
Getty Images
Recaply: Mira Murati's startup Thinking Machines just announced the departure of two co-founders including CTO Barret Zoph, with both returning to OpenAI alongside researcher Sam Schoenholz after working on the $12B-valued company for less than a year.
Key details:
Zoph previously worked as OpenAI's VP of research before co-founding Thinking Machines with Murati in February 2025, while Luke Metz also served as co-founder before both left.
The startup closed a $2B seed round in July 2025 led by Andreessen Horowitz with participation from Nvidia and AMD, valuing the company at $12B just eight months ago.
Wired reported the split wasn't amicable, with Murati announcing Soumith Chintala as the new CTO while Fidji Simo at OpenAI said the returns "had been in the works for several weeks."
Another co-founder Andrew Tulloch already left for Meta in October 2025, making this the second major leadership loss for the startup since its high-profile February launch.
Why it matters: Losing your CTO and two co-founders less than a year after raising $2B at a $12B valuation is a brutal blow for any startup, even one led by former OpenAI's CTO. It suggests either Thinking Machines hit roadblocks Zoph and Metz didn't want to push through, or OpenAI made an offer they couldn't refuse. Either way, it's a reminder that funding and founder pedigree don't guarantee team cohesion, and talent moves in AI remain volatile even at the highest levels.
TUTORIAL
Create infographics with NotebookLM and Gemini
Recaply: In this tutorial, you will learn how to make professional infographics. Use NotebookLM to auto-generate designs from your files. Use Gemini to create custom visuals that match your brand.
Step-by-step:
Open NotebookLM and create a new notebook. Add your sources like PDFs, docs, or links. Go to Studio, click Infographic, then pick your format.
Write a custom prompt. Tell it your color palette, your audience, your style, and what facts to highlight. Hit generate and wait 1-2 minutes.
Download the infographic. Check it carefully for spelling errors, wrong numbers, or missing details. AI tools make mistakes sometimes.
Want more control? Open Gemini and click Tools → Create images. Type this prompt: "Generate an infographic. Turn [your topic] into a cheatsheet with key takeaways as a 9:16 image."
Refine the Gemini output. Ask it to fix spelling errors or add missing details. Keep refining until it matches your brand.
Pro tip: NotebookLM sometimes gets data wrong, like dates or ages. Check numbers against your source files using NotebookLM's search before you share the final graphic.
AI RESEARCH
Cursor built a browser from scratch using AI agents
Cursor
Recaply: Cursor just published research showing hundreds of AI agents running autonomously for a week, writing over 1M lines of code across 1,000 files to build a functioning web browser from scratch with HTML parsing, CSS rendering, and a custom JavaScript engine.
Key details:
The browser engine was built entirely in Rust with 3M+ lines across thousands of files, featuring from-scratch HTML parsing, CSS cascade, layout algorithms, text shaping, and a custom JS VM.
They used a planner-worker pipeline where planner agents explored the codebase and created tasks while worker agents focused entirely on completing them, with GPT-5.2 proving better at extended autonomous work than GPT-5.1-Codex.
The system deployed trillions of tokens toward the goal, with other long-running experiments including a Solid-to-React migration in the Cursor codebase taking three weeks with +266K/-193K edits.
The browser "kind of works" with simple websites rendering quickly and mostly correctly, though it still has issues and remains far from Webkit or Chromium parity.
Why it matters: AI agents writing a million lines of working code without human intervention is a glimpse at how software development could scale in the next few years. The fact that new agents can still understand and contribute to a million-line codebase shows these systems can maintain context better than expected. Cursor's experiments with role separation (planners vs workers) and model selection (GPT-5.2 for focus, different models for different roles) are the practical lessons that matter more than the browser itself.
NEWS
What Matters in AI Right Now?
Google introduced Personal Intelligence in beta, connecting Gmail, Photos, YouTube and Search to Gemini with a single tap to provide personalized AI suggestions, with access rolling out to Google AI Pro and Ultra subscribers in the US.
Perplexity partnered with BlueMatrix to bring equity research to Perplexity Enterprise, with buy-side firms accessing AI-enabled research while maintaining existing entitlements, access rules and compliance workflows.
Anthropic added MCP Tool Search to Claude Code, dynamically loading tools into context when MCP servers would otherwise consume more than 10% of available context tokens.
Wikimedia Foundation announced AI partnerships with Amazon, Meta, Microsoft, Mistral AI and Perplexity through Wikimedia Enterprise, with the deals providing large-scale access to Wikipedia's 65 million articles across 300+ languages.
OpenAI expanded ChatGPT Go subscription worldwide at $8/month, with 10x more messages than the free tier, longer memory and unlimited GPT-5.2 Instant access, now rolling out to every country where ChatGPT is available.
ByteDance released SeedFold, an open source protein structure prediction model with 923M parameters trained on 26.5M samples, achieving the top spot on FoldBench and outperforming AlphaFold3 on most protein-related tasks.
TOOLS
Trending AI Tools
✍️ ChatGPT Translate - OpenAI's translation tool for 50+ languages
💨 Claude Cowork - Anthropic's AI assistant for everyday tasks
⚡ Cal - Scheduling app with companion apps for mobile, browser extensions, and desktop
🤖 Vellum - Build AI agents using plain English to automate boring ops tasks
PROMPTS
Design Performance Bonus Policies
#CONTEXT:
Adopt the role of compensation architecture specialist. The organization faces mounting pressure to retain top talent while competitors poach employees with aggressive offers. Previous bonus structures created internal inequity and resentment. Finance demands cost control while departments lobby for larger pools. The board questions ROI on incentive spending after last year's bonuses didn't prevent key departures. You must design a system that motivates performance without creating entitlement or unsustainable expectations.PS: This is not the full prompt. Click the button below to access the complete prompt.
Have a favorite prompt? Tell us about it or rate today’s prompt, click here.
EVENTS
Agentic AI Workshop (ODSC): Jan 20, 2026 • NYC
Microsoft AI Agents Hackathon: Jan 22-23, 2026 • Online
v0 Studio: Jan 29, 2026, San Francisco, CA
Hack the Stackathon: Jan 31, 2026 • San Francisco, CA
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Cheers, Jason
