AI Agents Go Live—GPT Ships, Claude Slips, $2B Vaporware Rises.

OpenAI agents launch, Claude apps arrive under tighter token caps, and Thinking Machines bags record seed pre-product.

Good Morning,
In this issue of The Singularity Advantage:
  • GPT Agents blur the line between chat, ops, and execution.

  • Claude adds real-time SaaS Connectors—but caps usage with zero warning.

  • Google Search to call your local salon, run deep research, or drop Gemini 2.5 into any query.

  • Mira Murati raises $2B—without a product.

  • JPMorgan turns AI tooling into a sales weapon during market panic.

🔥Top stories.

🤖 OpenAI launches GPT Agents—and AGI feels real

Source: OpenAI

ChatGPT Agents just dropped, and it’s not just smarter—it acts.

These agents use a virtual computer to execute tasks, access terminals, build slideshows, analyze files, generate swag, and even evaluate their own outputs. They can browse, code, book hotels, place orders, and respond to live edits mid-task.

It crushed Humanity’s Last Exam with a 41.6 score—15 points ahead of Deep Research—and performed equally well on DSBench, BrowseComp, and FrontierMath. OpenAI’s Pro users get 400 queries/month; Plus and Team users get 40.

Translation: this isn’t a chatbot upgrade. It’s GPT + Operator + OS. And it’s already here.

🔌 Claude Connectors arrive—but transparency doesn’t

Claude now integrates directly with Stripe, Figma, Google Calendar, Linear, and more via new Connectors. You can pull in meeting notes, design files, revenue reports—no more bouncing between tabs.

But while Claude is eating SaaS workflows, Anthropic is burning trust. This week, users hit random, unannounced usage caps. No warning, no dashboard clarity—just broken workflows and $200/month subscriptions with disappearing limits.

Claude is turning into a brilliant coworker—with a mystery box contract. 👀 

🔍 Google Search just got its biggest IQ bump since PageRank

AI Mode in Google Search now embeds Gemini 2.5 Pro, Deep Search, and a new voice-calling agent. 

Users can ask Google to call businesses, ask questions, and return answers like availability or pricing—without ever picking up the phone. Meanwhile, Gemini now handles reasoning-heavy prompts directly in Search. Cool? Cool.

💳 ChatGPT quietly adds checkout

OpenAI is testing a new checkout feature in ChatGPT—likely leveraging Shopify or Stripe as payment backends. The interface is minimal, but if integrated with Agents, it could unlock instant workflows like:

“Find a $100 gift for my friend who likes coffee” → “Buy it” → “Ship it.”

Combined with voice, file uploads, and native tools, this makes ChatGPT a future command center—not just a chatbot.

💰 Mira Murati’s Thinking Machines raises $2B with zero product

The former OpenAI CTO raised $2 billion at a $12 billion valuation for Thinking Machines, a new AI startup focused on “safe and trustworthy” next-gen systems.

Backed by a16z, Nvidia, AMD, and ServiceNow, it’s one of the biggest pre-product raises in tech history.

The signal? Responsible AI is now a billion-dollar narrative—if you have the receipts.

🔍 Brand in study.

JPMorgan Turns AI Into a Market-Meltdown Growth Engine

When financial markets nosedived in April 2025, most firms froze. JPMorgan Chase didn’t. It accelerated.

Mary Callahan Erdoes, CEO, J.P. Morgan Asset Management, JPMorgan Chase.

The Problem:

The bank’s private wealth division was swamped. High-net-worth clients flooded inboxes and phone lines with panicked questions—“Should I pull out?” “What’s happening with the bond market?”

Advisors had to triage hundreds of cases while still trying to convert volatility into opportunity. Human bandwidth alone wasn’t going to cut it.

The Strategy:

Rather than deploy chatbots or shallow automation, JPMorgan used AI as a co-pilot for its most valuable humans: wealth advisors.

Their proprietary systems were trained on real-time financial data, individual portfolio movements, risk models, and macro news. Then came the key workflows:

  • Insight prioritization: AI analyzed each client’s holdings to spot which accounts were most exposed to current volatility.

  • Proactive briefings: The system generated personalized talking points and opportunity flags (“this client has cash on the sidelines; suggest high-grade corporate debt”).

  • Advisor enablement: Internal tools like “AlphaDesk” sent daily 60-second briefs per client—actionable, context-rich, and timed.

The Execution Stack:

  • Natural Language Generation for reports and call summaries

  • Predictive analytics layered over behavioral data (who’s likely to churn vs. reallocate)

  • Market anomaly detection for flagging risk/exposure mismatches

  • AI-assisted CRM updates, keeping advisors in sync across teams

The Results:

Metric

Before (Baseline)

After (April 2025)

Δ

Client response time

~2 days

<1 day

2× faster

Qualified advisory calls

~15K/month

26K/month

+73%

New asset inflows (HNWI)

Baseline

+22% YoY

Advisor satisfaction (NPS)

38

61

+23

The Lesson:

AI didn’t replace the advisor. It supercharged them.

By compressing research, insight, and decision prep into a single stack, JPMorgan turned a high-stress moment into a commercial growth window.

And perhaps more importantly: they earned client trust when others went quiet.

🏆 Tool of the week.

When the internet is your dataset, you need more than a scraper—you need global-grade infrastructure.

Image Source: OxyLabs.io

What It Is:

Oxylabs provides a serious scraping engine for teams running large-scale data extraction across the public web. It handles messy, modern sites—dynamic content, CAPTCHA hell, geo-blocks—so you don’t have to build your own scraper farm.

Core Features:

  • 175M+ rotating proxies: Residential, mobile, and datacenter-grade.

  • Built-in CAPTCHA solving & IP masking: No bans, no rate limits.

  • Headless browser rendering: For scraping pages that require JavaScript execution.

  • Customizable headers, sessions, and geo-targeting: Ideal for regional data or A/B variation analysis.

  • Structured output (JSON, CSV, HTML): Plug directly into training pipelines, BI dashboards, or enrichment flows.

Why It Beats DIY or Browser Plugins:

Most scraping tools crack under scale or break with JS-heavy pages. Oxylabs is designed for durability. You’re not babysitting error logs—you’re mining structured insights while it handles the grunt work.

Who It’s For:

  • AI product builders training models on web-scale data

  • Marketplaces tracking price dynamics or SKU shifts

  • Financial analysts scraping SEC, job boards, or VC signals

  • Brand intelligence teams scanning social proof, reviews, and copy patterns

  • Growth hackers fueling outbound playbooks with fresh lead data

Use Case Snapshot:

For example, a growth team could scrape 30,000 SKUs across marketplaces weekly and feed the data into GPT-4 to optimize pricing strategy and generate conversion-ready product copy.

Pricing:

Custom plans based on volume, rendering, and proxy needs. You can test it free with their Web Scraper API dashboard.

☕️ Quick Bites.

  1. Google AI Mode chat history soon shareable with friends

    APK teardown reveals a new “share chat history” button is coming to Android’s AI mode. Source

  2. Anthropic launches live AI document collaboration via Artifacts

    Claude’s Artifacts update now lets users co-edit AI-written docs in real time—a step toward Notion-for-AI. Source

  3. Lovable becomes a unicorn with $200M Series A

    The vibe-coding platform just hit a $1.8B valuation, thanks to 2.3M non-coder users building app prototypes without writing code. Source

  4. Hume AI releases EVI 3 API for emotional speech generation

    Hume’s new speech-to-speech model clones voice tone, style, and emotional nuance—perfect for branded assistants and emotional UX. Source

  5. Netflix officially uses GenAI in original series production

    Confirmed in a July 18 report—Netflix integrated generative AI into its content pipeline for the first time. Source

✍🏼 Prompt Playground.

Competitive Analysis for eCommerce Founders

Want to spy on your competitors without crawling 17 tabs?

This prompt—designed for DTC founders—asks GPT or Perplexity to analyze pricing, positioning, branding, and marketing strategies across 3–5 direct competitors.

The Prompt:

Act as an eCommerce strategist.

Help me conduct a competitor analysis for my online store that sells [insert your product type, e.g., sustainable activewear].

I want to compare my brand to 3–5 direct competitors in pricing, brand positioning, product range, value proposition, website experience, social media presence, customer reviews, and marketing strategies.

Provide a comparison table and highlight key insights, strengths, weaknesses, and opportunities for differentiation.

Use publicly available information and marketing best practices to evaluate the competitors.


Expected Outcome: 

A smart, structured comparison that helps you find your edge—what to undercut, where to stand out, and how to spot gaps in your niche. Think of it as instant competitive strategy, minus the spreadsheets.

✌🏻 That’s a wrap.

Stay sharp—the compounding AI dividend favors the marketer who builds before others blink.

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