Welcome, humans.

Apparently, the fastest way to land an AI sponsorship is to publicly humiliate the AI.

Creator Matt Husk said AI labs came knocking after his videos exposed their chatbots' questionable life skills. In one, ChatGPT turned a few seconds into roughly 10 minutes while trying to time him. In another, he asked AI to negotiate a $10,000 Craigslist bread listing down to $5. It proudly settled for $400.

Husk said OpenAI, Anthropic, and xAI reached out, though he turned down OpenAI's offers. According to him, xAI even offered a Tesla for a week in exchange for exclusive videos.

At this rate, the next AI benchmark will involve a Craigslist listing and a complimentary Tesla.

Here’s what happened in AI today:

• 😸 AI companies offer concessions after voters rejected data centers.

• 📰 Palo Alto Networks is in talks to buy Clutch for $500M.

• 📰 Apple reportedly cut engineers’ daily AI budgets to $200.

• 🍪 Planet AI lets you search ten years of satellite imagery.

• 🎓 Google Forms’ new Actionable Insights recommends next steps from surveys.

😺 Voters push back on data centers, and AI companies offer them a deal

Imagine a company wants to build a giant facility full of computers near your house. It promises jobs and investment. You just want to know whether your electric bill is going up.

That’s the conversation AI companies are having with towns across America. And this week, voters gave them a pretty clear answer: you haven’t convinced us yet.

In Alhambra, California, 83% voted to ban data centers. In Wells, Maine, 82% backed a 180-day pause. Ballotpedia counted 46 of 47 local data-center votes this year going toward tighter limits. That includes votes before Tuesday, with communities approving restrictions or rejecting proposals that would help development.

Two days after the midterms, OpenAI announced new commitments to the towns hosting its future data centers. Residents would get more say in the plans. The company would cover its power costs and invest in things the community actually wants.

Okay, but shouldn’t it already be paying its electric bill?

The argument is over everything needed to deliver that electricity. A data center can require new power lines and other grid upgrades. Depending on how those costs get divided, nearby households could help pay for them through their utility bills.

An October Senate investigation found companies disputed how much they should pay for shared-grid upgrades triggered by their projects. You can cancel ChatGPT Plus. Getting its infrastructure off your electric bill is a little harder.

Here’s what OpenAI promised:

• Pay for electricity and infrastructure, with financial guarantees so residents aren’t left covering costs if a project falls through.

• Publish each site’s water and power use, noise studies, and local hiring information.

• Stop requiring confidentiality agreements from public officials, except for narrow security and proprietary information protections.

• Give residents input while plans can still change, and fund priorities they help choose.

There’s money attached, too. OpenAI pledged local investments of $80 million in Effingham County, Georgia, and $40 million in Pike County, Ohio.

Other companies have been making their own offers. Microsoft pledged in January to cover the electricity infrastructure needed for its data centers and stop asking towns for lower property tax rates. Amazon’s Built Together initiative promises more than $1 billion over five years for education, job training, energy efficiency, and other local priorities.

Why this matters: The catch is which buildings count. OpenAI’s promises cover future sites it owns and operates. Partners such as Oracle own much of the computing capacity they use, so those facilities don’t automatically receive the same commitments.

The part I’d watch is what gets put in writing and who can enforce it. If construction stops, who pays? If the promised benefits don’t arrive, what can the town do?

Voters have shown they can say no. Now AI companies have to give them a reason to say yes.

🎓 AI Skill of the Day: Turn survey responses into your next three moves

You collected the feedback. Now comes the part everyone puts off: figuring out what to do with it.

Google’s new Actionable Insights in Forms uses Gemini to find patterns across survey questions and recommend next steps. Think spotting what disappointed first-time attendees at your event, instead of just reading the average satisfaction score.

It’s rolling out to eligible paid plans. Your form needs at least 12 responses and three questions, according to Google’s instructions.

Here’s how to try it:

1. Open a Google Form and click Responses.

2. Find Actionable Insights, then click Generate insights.

3. Expand Analysis steps to review how it reached its conclusions.

Want a more focused plan? Copy the findings into Gemini and try this prompt:

Based on these survey findings, recommend three actions we can take next week. For each, identify the supporting evidence, likely effort, and one assumption we should check. Separate recurring complaints from isolated comments.

Survey findings: [paste here]

Check the recommendations against the original responses before acting. The useful skill is connecting feedback to a decision you can actually make.

Have a specific skill you want to learn? Request it here.

🍪 Treats to Try

1. Planet AI lets you search ten years of satellite imagery through chat, investigate changes, and create timelapses.

2. Gemini Omni 1.2 Flash generates 15-second videos, then changes backgrounds or lighting through follow-up prompts.

3. Datastripes Data Stories turns your spreadsheet into an editable story with charts and findings you can publish.

4. Kivo turns dictation into clean text in any Mac app while keeping audio on your computer.

5. Living Brain shares project notes and decisions across compatible AI tools so you can carry context between them.

📰 Around the Horn

1. Palo Alto Networks is in talks to buy cybersecurity startup Clutch for about $500 million to help control AI agents’ access to company systems.

2. Apple reportedly cut some engineers’ daily AI spending limits from $300 to $200, a sign that spending might be outpacing what companies are willing to pay.

3. The NFL provided Carnegie Mellon researchers with game film and player-tracking data to develop AI to automate football analysis.

4. University of Michigan researchers found non-English prompts used up to 179 times more energy than equivalent English prompts, often with lower accuracy.

5. Marine biologist Denise Herzing shared how AI is helping researchers uncover patterns in decades of dolphin recordings that could offer clues to how the animals communicate.

☀️ Sunday Special

Top 5 Stories of the Week

1. OpenAI released GPT-6 Cyber, a restricted model that finds software vulnerabilities and builds exploits for approved security testers.

2. Proton canceled AI-use re-interviews after employees pushed back against plans to question nearly everyone about how they use AI.

3. Google announced new school AI controls that raised questions about whether schools could keep Search while rejecting its AI features.

4. OpenAI agreed to acquire Pierre, whose code-browsing and review tools already power parts of Codex.

5. Meta acquired Conductor, the coding-agent workspace whose cloud service will shut down November 20.

Top 5 Tools of the Week

1. Images 2.6 creates looping GIFs and saves reference images so you can reuse characters and products across requests.

2. Claude’s Personal Finance hub connects to bank and card accounts so you can analyze spending and spot duplicate charges, with read-only access.

3. Xmind Agent turns a sentence, file, or link into a mind map you can restructure through chat.

4. Hera turns your description into editable motion graphics, from launch videos to animated infographics.

5. Testifly turns your web app’s URL into user-flow tests that rerun after deployments and adapt when the interface changes.

🧩 Thursday Trivia: The reveal

In Thursday’s challenge, A was AI generated. B was real.

New from The Neuron: AI Explained

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