Welcome back to the AI For Humans newsletter!

After a week off, we’re back with a ton of news, including the surprising math breakthroughs from OpenAI’s unreleased Astra model.

But first, there’s a MUCH bigger deal that everyone who reads this newsletter needs to understand:

AIs are REALLY good at using your computer now.

I had a remarkable experience with ChatGPT’s improved Computer Use feature last week (I’ll explain below), and I’m here to tell you these little AIs can now do the most frustrating, boring stuff for you. And do it well.

Let’s get into it!

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Computer use is exactly what it sounds like: the AI takes over your mouse and keyboard. It looks at your screen, clicks buttons, types into forms, and moves files around.

If you tried this a year ago, you know it sucked. It was SO bad.

The early agents were slow, got lost constantly, and asked permission every ten seconds.

Even Atlas, OpenAI’s standalone AI browser, never quite landed. It’s now being sunset, with its brain folded into the new ChatGPT desktop app.

So why would you want this?

Because a ton of what we do daily is interacting with the open web (email, spreadsheets, shared docs) or local files on our computers. Computer use lets AI connect those dots and get stuff done that actually matters.

And again, this used to be a frustrating experience. But it WORKS now.

The best experience I’ve had is in the new ChatGPT app (which used to be the Codex app) on my MacBook. There’s a Windows version too, and for now we’ll consider them the same. Your milage may vary.

Install it, then give it whatever permissions you’re comfortable with. You can adjust these in the chatbox itself. Myself, I’m kind of crazy and give it all the permissions. Most security-minded people would NEVER do this, but it does make everything much faster.

Please use the permissions at first as it will step you through the processes.

Next, the biggest and most important step, come up with something you’d like it to do.

Here’s mine from last week:

YouTube recently let recurring series turn themselves into “shows,” basically a stream designed for TV screens. I went to import all the episodes of AI For Humans and it scrambled the entire order of the series.

That’s a big deal because you want the most recent episode first (not many people need the November 2024 episode unless you’re a Midjourney 5 completist).

And YouTube makes fixing this TEDIOUS. You have to tweak each episode and save it individually.

So I opened the ChatGPT app and asked this:

The important things here: tagging @ computer use (which invokes the skill) and having the ChatGPT Chrome extension installed. Then, it’s just answering a few questions and letting the machine work.

And work it did! I know this sounds stupidly simple, but it did exactly the job I needed and gave me three hours of my life back.

You can now see AI For Human’s show page here. I don’t know what you can do with it to support us but… it’s there!

Now, would I trust it with something I couldn’t easily redo?

NO. NOT ON YOUR LIFE. At least not yet.

But… this is how AI is supposed to work, and now it’s working.

For two-plus years we’ve been promised AI that actually does things for us, and mostly we’ve annoying things that say ‘sure’ and then fail miserably.

This moment does feels different to me.

The boring, fiddly, twenty-clicks-deep tasks (renaming files, updating spreadsheets, fixing settings one at a time) are exactly where these agents are getting good.

Start small: point one at something annoying and reversible. Have it unsubscribe you from fifty newsletters (not this one). It does GREAT with Gmail.

Or clean up your downloads folder. Whatever. Little stuff. I promise you’ll be impressed.

See you next week!

-Gavin

This Week on AI For Humans: GPT-6, Opus 5 & Scary AI News 👇

The patron saint of the AI For Humans newsletter is back!

Andrej Karpathy, the famed AI researcher who joined Anthropic back in May, started experimenting with Claude “production” much in the same way I’ve been working with Fig and Moss.

He gave Claude Opus 5 ten bucks worth of tokens and the first paragraph of Lord of the Rings, then asked it to build the scene as an interactive Three.js world.

Two hours and roughly 5,500 lines of code later, it had placed the assets, written the animations, and built a small explorable 3D world.

Karpathy called it “kind of janky but fun,” which is fair. But project out a little bit farther, and you can see how this becomes something much bigger.

To him, it’s a new way to test LLM capability (“LLMs have all the stamina and patience in the world,” he wrote). To me?

It’s a chance to give Fig and Moss another thing to watch and react to.