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GPT-5 Codex is Here

GPT-5 Codex is Here

AI Breakfast
September 17, 2025

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Good morning. It’s Wednesday, September 17th.

On this day in tech history: In 1988, the Morris Worm became the first major internet worm, exploiting buffer overflows and weak password habits. It led directly to the creation of CERT/CC and seeded decades of research into intrusion detection and network security.

In today’s email:

GPT-5 Codex
Google’s AP2 Builds Trust Rails
Meta Connect 2025
5 New AI Tools
Latest AI Research Papers

You read. We listen. Let us know what you think by replying to this email.

How 433 Investors Unlocked 400X Return Potential

Institutional investors back startups to unlock outsized returns. Regular investors have to wait. But not anymore. Thanks to regulatory updates, some companies are doing things differently.

Take Revolut. In 2016, 433 regular people invested an average of $2,730. Today? They got a 400X buyout offer from the company, as Revolut’s valuation increased 89,900% in the same timeframe.

No wonder 10K+ everyday people are taking the chance on Pacaso.

Founded by a former Zillow exec, Pacaso’s co-ownership tech reshapes the $1.3T vacation home market. They’ve earned $110M+ in gross profit to date, including 41% YoY growth in 2024 alone. They even reserved the Nasdaq ticker PCSO.

The same institutional investors behind Uber, Venmo, and eBay backed Pacaso. And you can join them. But not for long. Pacaso’s investment opportunity ends September 18.

Invest While You Still Can

_{Paid advertisement for Pacaso’s Regulation A offering. Read the offering circular at}_{invest.pacaso.com}_{. Reserving a ticker symbol is not a guarantee that the company will go public. Listing on the NASDAQ is subject to approvals.}

Today’s trending AI news stories

OpenAI debuts GPT-5 Codex, adds new personalization hub and teen safeguards

OpenAI has launched GPT-5 Codex, a specialized model tuned for “agentic coding” that can run software development tasks continuously for over seven hours, debugging, refactoring, and even launching browsers for live validation. It integrates directly into developer pipelines, from VS Code to GitHub, and outperforms GPT-5 on SWE-bench Verified with a 74.5% score, while showing dramatic improvements in code refactoring.

Meanwhile, a new personalization hub pulls custom instructions, communication preferences, and memory into one page. It doesn’t add fresh capabilities, but it kills the messy scattering of settings, finally making ChatGPT less annoying to configure.

A screenshot of the upcoming changes. | Image: Sam Altman

Under mounting scrutiny, OpenAI is tightening the screws on safety. It will now restrict users under 18 from accessing sexual or self-harm content, even in fictional contexts, and roll out parental controls including linked accounts, blackout hours, and distress alerts. An age-estimation system will default to treating ambiguous cases as minors, with ID checks required in some regions.

The company is also quietly reassembling a robotics team after shelving the project in 2020. Job listings cite teleoperation, simulation, and hardware prototyping. A key hire, Stanford’s Chengshu Li, has deep experience in humanoid robot benchmarks. On the business side, OpenAI brought on ex-xAI CFO Mike Liberatore to manage large-scale financing and cloud infrastructure partnerships, a critical step as it scales operations under a $300 billion Oracle cloud deal. Read more.

Google’s AP2 builds trust rails for AI economies, from stablecoins to credit cards

Google is formalizing the leap from AI assistants to autonomous dealmakers with its new Agent Payments Protocol (AP2), an open standard that lets agents not just search for bargains but actually execute transactions. Backed by more than 60 partners including Mastercard, PayPal, Coinbase, and Salesforce, AP2 lays out a common framework across credit cards, bank transfers, and stablecoins.

Every purchase runs on cryptographically signed mandates: an “intent” mandate defines scope and budget, while a “cart” mandate finalizes the buy. Users can pre-authorize stricter rules for fully delegated purchases, while still leaving an auditable trail. To extend reach into crypto, Google has built x402 with Coinbase, MetaMask, and the Ethereum Foundation, enabling self-custody stablecoin payments.

The push lands as DeepMind researchers warn of “agent economies” AI-run markets where agents trade and coordinate at machine speeds beyond human oversight. They caution that without guardrails, these economies could create flash-crash–like spirals or entrench oligopolies of powerful AI systems. Their proposals include sandboxed currencies, fairness-first auctions, “mission economies” aligned to human values, and underscore the stakes. AP2 positions itself as one such guardrail: interoperable, transparent, and auditable by design.

Alphabet is putting £5 billion into UK data infrastructure to fuel DeepMind and renewable-powered, heat-recycling data centers, only to be one-upped the same day by Microsoft, which pledged £22 billion ($30B) for a national AI supercomputer and broader infrastructure push. Read more.

Meta Connect 2025 kicks off with AI glasses, neural wristbands, but no new Quest

Meta Connect 2025 lands this week. The headline act is “Hypernova,” Meta’s first Ray-Ban glasses with a heads-up display in the right lens, dual cameras, and a built-in AI assistant. It is paired with a neural-input wristband powered by surface electromyography (sEMG).

Meta and EssilorLuxottica's upcoming full lineup, from the video. The HUD glasses with sEMG wristband are on the far left | Image via: UploadVR

The band reads micro-finger movements, letting users type on a desk, flick through menus, or call up Meta AI without touching a screen. Priced around $800 and weighing about 70 grams, Hypernova is less full-blown AR than a practical HUD, positioned as a stylish, always-on interface rather than a bulky headset.

Alongside Hypernova, Meta will introduce Oakley “Sphaera” glasses built for athletes with a wraparound lens and central camera, plus a third-generation Ray-Ban Meta line. A leaked video confirmed the branding “Ray-Ban Display,” signaling deep buy-in from EssilorLuxottica. Hardware aside, the event will feature updates on Horizon OS licensing to Lenovo and Asus, but no new Quest VR headsets until 2026, when a lightweight puck-driven model arrives. Read more.

Watch the full event here.

5 new AI-powered tools from around the web

Runable

Runable is a general automation agent capable of automating any digital task a human performs on a computer.

runable.com

Morphic

AI storytelling studio that turns prompts, sketches, or models into cinematic images, videos, and scenes, offering collaborative tools for creators and expanding into game design, filmmaking, and advanced visual model research.

www.morphic.com

Capix

Search millions of companies in minutes with AI. Find companies 10X faster. Go beyond rigid filters and shallow profiles. Describe what you need and Capix AI handles the rest.

www.capix.ai

RizzCalc

RizzCalc is the first AI financial modeling add-on for Google Sheets, enabling users to build and edit models effortlessly using natural language. The name RizzCalc pays tribute to VisiCalc, the first spreadsheet built in 1979.

rizzcalc.com

HuMo AI

Create life-like human videos with full control. Supports Text+Image (TI), Text+Audio (TA), and Text+Image+Audio (TIA) collaborative conditioning with strong subject consistency, text following, and audio‑visual sync.

www.humoai.co