ChatGPT ads 📰, Tesla ride 🚗, opinionated agents 🤖

OpenAI is now internally testing ads inside ChatGPT. The ChatGPT Android app beta includes new references to an ads feature ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌  ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ 

Sign Up |Advertise|View Online TLDR Together With TLDR 2025-12-01 🎄 Tis the season to ship faster and head home (Sponsor) Companies like Dropbox, Notion and Wiz have found a new testing paradigm - and they can't imagine working without it. Built by ex-Palantir engineers, the core doesn't rely on LLMs. Instead, Meticulous autonomously creates a continuously evolving suite of E2E UI tests that delivers near-exhaustive coverage with zero developer effort - impossible to deliver by any other means. It works in the background like magic: Near-exhaustive coverage on every test run No test creation No maintenance (seriously) Zero flakes (built on a deterministic browser) 🤨 Curious? Get on a call with a Meticulous founding engineer 📱 Big Tech & Startups Leak confirms OpenAI is preparing ads on ChatGPT for public rollout (1 minute read) OpenAI is now internally testing ads inside ChatGPT. The ChatGPT Android app beta includes new references to an ads feature. The ads seem to be initially limited to the search experience only. ChatGPT has roughly 800 million weekly users, so the move has the potential to disrupt the web economy. "Tesla Ride" program lets riders experience FSD and Grok AI in real-world demos (3 minute read) The new Tesla Ride program brings supervised Full Self-Driving demos and Grok AI-guided experiences to consumers. Participants will be allowed to sit in the driver's seat while a Tesla Advisor rides in the front as co-pilot. The sessions are capped at 45 minutes each, and participants are required to have a valid driver's license and insurance. The program will run at some locations until the end of December. 🚀 Science & Futuristic Technology Datacenters in space are a terrible, horrible, no good idea (14 minute read) Putting data centers into space is a terrible idea and makes no sense. The components needed to make a data center work don't work in space. The reality of making space hardware actually function in space is not necessarily intuitively obvious. It is possible, but it would be disproportionately costly compared to Earth-based data centers and would offer mediocre performance at best. Achieving lasting remission for HIV (6 minute read) Researchers have discovered a way to keep HIV under control long-term without constant treatment. Some individuals with long-term HIV eventually produce antibodies that can neutralize the virus. Scientists are now racing to find the most potent broadly neutralizing antibodies and engineer them into a functional cure. Two independent trials have already shown promise, with some participants maintaining undetectable levels of HIV for over a year after treatment without taking antiretrovirals. 💻 Programming, Design & Data Science Pay for test coverage, not QA hours (Sponsor) Scaling QA is hard to achieve purely in-house. QA Wolf is the AI-native service that lets you pay for test coverage, not labor hours. Their automation-first approach delivers 5x faster tests, 15-minute QA cycles, human-verified bug reports, and 80% coverage in less than 4 months. See how QA Wolf delivers results How good engineers write bad code at big companies (10 minute read) For engineers working on self-contained technical projects, the only explanation for bad code is incompetence. Other engineers operate more like plumbers or electricians, working on projects with awkward or surprising parts that are relatively new to them. In these cases, bad code is inevitable, but as long as the overall system works well enough, the project is a success. Engineers don't get to choose the type of work they end up doing - the mistakes made in an unfamiliar system are a deliberate tradeoff being made by the company, not the engineer. Agents Should Be More Opinionated (10 minute read) The best agent products are the most opinionated. The goal in agent products is to give users a delightful experience. A good baseline for agents is that everything works reliably without tweaking too many settings. Good product design is the result of creators distilling their vision into an intuitive interface that just works. 🎁 Miscellaneous 300,000 AI-Animated Poses in an Instant: My Visit to Disney and the New Reality for Cartoons (7 minute read) Disney's proprietary AI animation tools allow artists to draw a sketch and control an animation based on the sketch. It brings sketches to life while retaining the unique art style of the animator. Artists can make corrections to any of the AI-generated animations. The AI tools free artists up from repetitive tasks to spend more time on the creative side. HP plans to save millions by laying off thousands, ramping up AI use (3 minute read) HP plans to lay off 4,000 to 6,000 employees in favor of AI deployments. The company claims the move will help save $1 billion in annualized gross run rate by the end of its fiscal 2028. The reductions will affect employees in product development, internal operations, and customer support. HP hopes that AI will accelerate product innovation, improve customer satisfaction, and boost productivity. ⚡ Quick Links Broad vision or and precise control (Sponsor) Why pick one? Marqeta's modern payments platform puts you in control of both. Learn more Black Friday Broke Records (4 minute read) Shoppers are trusting AI to do the busywork and find them the best value. We are on the cusp of a profound change in the field of mathematics (1 minute read) Harmonic Math's Aristotle AI just proved Erdos Problem #124 all by itself. The Battle Over Africa's Great Untapped Resource: IP Addresses (9 minute read) A Chinese entrepreneur has spent ten years collecting millions of IP addresses in Africa to lease to companies outside of Africa. Durable Consumables (6 minute read) The rational response to constantly shifting frontiers and accelerating progress is a shorter time horizon, faster replacement cycles, and less investment in permanence. Gemini app downloads are catching up to ChatGPT (1 minute read) Gemini users spend more time in the app than ChatGPT users. Japan Unveils Human Washing Machine, Now You Can Get Washed Like Laundry (3 minute read) Japanese tech company Science has created a capsule-style device that lets users lie inside and enjoy a full-body cleanse. Love TLDR? Tell your friends and get rewards! Share your referral link below with friends to get free TLDR swag! https://refer.tldr.tech/7c97ce4b/ Track your referrals here. Want to advertise in TLDR? 📰 If your company is interested in reaching an audience of tech executives, decision-makers and engineers, you may want to advertise with us. Want to work at TLDR? 💼 Apply here or send a friend's resume to jobs@tldr.tech and get $1k if we hire them! If you have any comments or feedback, just respond to this email! Thanks for reading, Dan Ni & Stephen Flanders Manage your subscriptions to our other newsletters on tech, startups, and programming. Or if TLDR isn't for you, please unsubscribe.