Welcome, humans.

Well, gaslighting with AI just hit a whole new level!

Allegedly, OP says his wife has been using GPT as a marriage counsellor (we don’t recommend this use-case) so he thought he’d get even by updating the custom instructions (which she presumably doesn’t know exist?? Otherwise: BUSTED) to take his side in all “relationship advice” or marriage issue related chats.

If you are the wife (or anyone else reading this) and you don’t know: to set custom instructions, click on your name in bottom left corner > Personalization > Update the “Custom Instructions.” box. You can also toggle customization on / off, set a personality (“cynic”, “robot”, “listener” or “nerd”) and even select some of ChatGPT’s own qualifiers to add to your customization, like “chatty”, “witty” “straight shooting” or our personal favorite, “Gen Z” (lots more available if you click the “…”).

If your GPT-5 talks too much like a robot already, you might want to mess around with these settings and see if that helps! You can also set instructions on a project to project basis (our preference) to set different rules for different types of conversations. Have fun… just please don’t gaslight your partners with this newfound power kthxbye!

Here’s what happened in AI today:

1. Anthropic launched Claude Sonnet 4.5 and new tools for building AI agents.

2. You can now buy products directly inside ChatGPT with "Instant Checkout."

3. Microsoft added an "Agent Mode" to Copilot to automate full projects.

4. DeepSeek also dropped a new, more efficient AI model.

Claude Sonnet 4.5, Microsoft Vibeworker, “Buy it in ChatGPT”, and a surprise DeepSeek launch…

Y’know the famous saying, “there are years when nothing happens, and days when years happen?” In AI, there are no days when nothing happens, and days when FOUR major companies all drop something that could each be its own main story, so good night and good luck newsletter writers!

Well, this Monday was one of those days! Enjoy!

First up: You can now buy things directly in ChatGPT! OpenAI launched "Instant Checkout," letting U.S. users buy products from Etsy (and soon, Shopify) directly within a ChatGPT conversation. You can now go from asking for a product to purchasing it with a single tap, no browser needed. Built with Stripe, OpenAI claims results are ranked on relevance, not ads. With 700M weekly users, OpenAI is turning its chatbot into a massive e-commerce channel, creating a “super-app” that could directly challenge Google's and Amazon's dominance.

Next, Anthropic released Claude Sonnet 4.5, a new model that smashes records in coding benchmarks and can manage complex tasks for over 30 hours. Beyond the model, Anthropic shipped a full suite of new tools. For the first time, Checkpoints let you save and rewind progress in Claude Code, there’s a new native VS Code extension for Claude, and it can create files directly. Oh, also? Claude Sonnet 4.5 can now make Claude.ai’s website…

Related to Claude Sonnet 4.5? Microsoft launched its new “vibeworker.” Microsoft upgraded its 365 Copilot with “Agent Mode,” transforming it from a chatbot into an AI that handles entire projects. Instead of just asking for help, you can now delegate complex tasks. For example, tell it to “run a full analysis on this sales data” in Excel, and it will create new sheets, build charts, and check its work. And yes, Claude 4.5 is available in Copilot Studio.

Our take on all this: Why did everything launch Monday? Was it all supposed to go live today, or did one thing trigger another thing? We’re not sure. We know some was planned, but others sprung up on us. What we will say is DeepSeek also launched a new model, and whether it was intentional or not, the US labs succeeded at “flooding the zone” to bury this announcement (to the bottom of this article, anyway).

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Prompt Tip of the Day

Looking for a job? Just need to refresh your LinkedIn? Olivia Moore’s got you; she just shared a great series of tips from Google Gemini on how to use Nano Banana (their image editor) to create a brand new headshot. See below:

Here's what to include in your prompt:

• Lighting: “Soft but dimensional studio lighting that creates a subtle catchlight in the eyes.”

• Framing: Chest-up shot with space above the head, facing camera with a “confident and approachable” expression.

• Styling: “Contemporary blazer with hair in a relaxed yet professional style, with crisp focus on individual strands.”

• Background: “Neutral, solid-colored studio backdrop.”

Here’s the full prompt (G docs version): just copy and paste this into Gemini with a recent photo of you and try it out! Here is an example that is 100% Neuron approved.

P.S: If it doesn’t work the first time, try it a few times with different source photos.

Treats to Try

*Asterisk = from our partners (only the first one!). Advertise in The Neuron here.

1. *Murf AI turns your text into human-like speech in 200+ voices, so you can narrate presentations or create audiobooks without recording anything yourself.

2. n8n is like an open source Zapier for automating tasks—if you want to spend ~8 hours automating a task that would take you 20 mins (but like, you have to do that task every day, so its worth it lol), then use n8n (watch this).

3. DeepSeek-V3.2-Exp analyzes your long documents and conversations (like 300-page reports or entire codebases) by intelligently focusing on relevant sections instead of processing everything, cutting your API costs by 50%+.

4. Figma Make turns your design mockups into functional prototypes, and the Figma MCP server allows AI coding assistants to access your Figma designs' components, variables, and styling directly, so they can generate code that matches your design system, rather than just working from screenshots—here’s how to set up the MCP server.

5. Maximor’s agents integrate with your finance systems to automate reconciliations, close cycles, and produce audit-ready reports without manual spreadsheets (raised $9M).

6. GLM-4.6 is the new flagship model from Zhipu AI, featuring a longer context window and superior coding and reasoning capabilities that are competitive with leading models like Claude Sonnet 4.

7. Imagine with Claude creates fully interactive apps from your prompts, like a choose-your-own-adventure game or management dashboard, where Claude Sonnet 4.5 generates the interface and powers all the backend functionality in real-time (only available for the next 5 days only if you’re a Claude Max user).

Around the Horn

• Meta entered early discussions with Google Cloud to potentially leverage Google's Gemini AI models for improving ad targeting across its platforms.

• OpenAI officially rolled out its new safety routing and parental controls to ChatGPT following suicide and violence incidents linked to problematic chatbot interactions.

• CA Governor Gavin Newsom signed SB 53 into law, which launches CalCompute (a public cloud to spur AI innovation), requires large AI developers to publicly disclose safety plans and report incidents, and adds strong whistleblower protections for lab employees.

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A Cat’s Commentary