AI News for 2/12/2026-2/13/2026. We checked 12 subreddits, 544 Twitters and 24 Discords (256 channels, and 7993 messages) for you. Estimated reading time saved (at 200wpm): 675 minutes. AINews’ website lets you search all past issues. As a reminder, AINews is now a section of Latent Space. You can opt in/out of email frequencies!
It’s a pretty quiet day — the new Dwarkesh-Dario pod is worthwhile but hasn’t generated much new conversation on day 1, and OpenAI claimed a big result in theoretical physics that is mostly getting questioned by some physicists. This means we get to go back to our backlog of mini-editorial ideas for AINews subscribers!
We’re still not over the Sam Altman town hall; at the town hall he said “tell us what we should build, we’ll probably build it!” and today at Stanford Treehacks he said a variant of the same thing: he thinks of himself as having made a career out of doing things people think are hard, but would be a big deal if it came true.
well okay, Sam: You Should Build Slack. It fits your criteria: it is hard for anyone else without the clout of OpenAI to pull off, it will be very well received by the tech community, and it is an obvious progression of ChatGPT for both your Enterprise -and- your Coding push and build permanent entrenchment in your customers.
Slack rejected developer community and went upmarket in 2019, then Salesforce bought it for $27.7B in 2021, and ever since then Slack has been on a slow rachet up in prices and has struggled to introduce compelling new AI features (Slack AI is occasionally useful but impossible to discover/learn/personalize) while facing constant outages. NPS feels low, and yet every organization in tech uses it.
Everything could be better. Developers routinely complain about Slack’s API costs and permissions (even 3rd or 4th Uber investor and famed vibe coder Jason Calacanis complained on the latest All In podcast). Founders routinely complain about the pricing. Slack users complain about channel fatigue and find the Recap tooling and notifications spam woefully inadequate. Huddles could offer far better realtime multimodal AI features.
Slack Connect is great though, definitely just clone that.
Sure, ChatGPT launched group chats 3 months ago and probably the usage isn’t great outside of OpenAI. It’d be a mistake to think that repeated half hearted attempts in consumer social AI means that you can’t build a successful business social network if you took it as seriously as you do everything else. Microsoft did, and Teams is by all reports a solid success.
In the desktop wars, Anthropic has pursued a far more cohesive strategy than OpenAI: one app for Chat, Cowork, and Claude Code, with optional control of the browser via Claude in Chrome.
By contrast, OpenAI has shipped the org chart to every user’s desktop: get our chat app here, get our browser app here, get our coding app there. Log in fresh every single time. Even doing a unification at some point probably still leaves you behind; you need to lead, not be a slow follower of what Anthropic already did.
“OpenAI Slack” is your chance to retake the initiative. Of course you’re going to be good at chat AI. Of course you care about the multiagent UX of the future. Why not build your own version of the existing multiagent UX we all know to work between humans?
The killer part of course is that this could also be the coding agent interface you always wanted anyway. The main remaining thing missing from the admittedly very good Codex app is the ability to be truly multiplayer. You haven’t felt the AGI until you have given your designer access to your coding agent and let him rip all night with you occasionally chiming in to guide things. You can see swarms of humans and swarms of agents all working together in God’s given orchestration interface: chat.
Put another way, it is now time to layer a customer organization’s social graph and work graph onto ChatGPT, and then lather every interface with agents and AI in the way that OpenAI does best. The network effect makes it 10000x harder to leave you for a competitor, and sure, you could do it atop Slack as you currently do, but it’s easy to switch and won’t give you access to reinvent with as much freedom.
To recap:
- Is it hard to do? yes for almost everyone except you
- Is it a big deal if you get it right? yes for us users, but an even bigger deal for your business
- Will you have lots of low hanging fruit to build new agentic interfaces and a context graph/system of record to power Frontier and everything else you do in SMB and Enterprise? yeah.