👋 Good morning. Did you type 1234, 1111, 0000, or 1342 to unlock your phone and read this email? If so, you might want to X out of here real quick and change that. Those are the most common four-digit PINs found in data breaches, per the Australian Broadcasting Corp.’s analysis of HaveIBeenPwned.com’s database, which contains 320m+ passwords and PINs from past leaks. Maybe peek at the list before you make a change (hint: stay away from your birth year).
🎧 On the pod:How two creatives used AI to create 31 projects in a single month.
NEWS FLASH
🏙️ That desert megacity wasn’t just a fever dream: Saudi Arabia’s Neom is still working toward a high-tech utopian future. The project recently signed a $5B deal to build a 1.5-gigawatt data center in the city’s Oxagon industrial hub. Beyond supporting the many robots set to inhabit the megacity, the data center is a step forward for Saudi Arabia in its AI race with the United Arab Emirates. Last week, the UAE and France pledged $31B-$52B in spending to build Europe’s largest AI data center. AI isn’t the only tech Neom is cooking up: It’s partnering with Neuralink competitor Paradromics to establish a Brain-Computer Interface Center of Excellence, AKA… chips in brains.
🍎 An apple a day: Apple launched the Apple Health Study in collaboration with Boston’s Brigham and Women’s Hospital to study how its tech — Apple Watch, iPhone, and AirPods — can improve physical and mental health. Users can opt into the voluntary study through the Research app and control what data types Apple can access. It’s not the tech giant’s first foray into health research: Apple has run a women’s health study, hearing study, and movement study since 2019 that have a combined 350k+ participants. Is sitting in a desk chair for 10 hours a day bad for your health? Stay tuned.
🧟 Living dead mall: Walmart purchased the Monroeville Mall in Monroeville, Pennsylvania. It’s now managed by Cypress Equities, which gave a very broad statement about the mall’s future redevelopment, citing several potential uses from retail to residential. Why is this interesting? Because this very mall appeared in George A. Romero’s Dawn of the Dead (1978), offering shelter to a group of survivors in a world ravaged by zombies. Today, it’s home to a related zombie gift shop and horror convention.
MORE NEWS TO KNOW
Pour one out: The Duolingo owl has croaked. The language-learning app posted on X that its mascot had “probably died waiting for you to do your lesson.” It’s the latest viral stunt from the company — the post has been viewed 80m+ times — which has been an unlikely social media success story.
Y’all love gut health, apparently: Olipop is now valued at $1.85B following a $50m Series C. The prebiotic soda raked in $400m+ in sales in 2024, and is America’s top nonalcoholic brand.
Zelle payments topped $1T in 2024, which it told CNBC is the “most money ever moved by a P2P payments service in a single year.” Zelle attributed its growth to the gradual ditching of cash and checks, and small businesses adopting the payment system.
FROM OUR FRIENDS AT MINDSTREAM
Great, just what we needed: Cybercriminals have a new helper
GhostGPT is a nightmare. Researchers described it as “a chatbot specifically designed to cater to cybercriminals,” making it a significant security concern.
What exactly is it? An uncensored AI chatbot designed to assist malicious activities like malware creation and phishing scams. Unlike ethical AI systems with safeguards to block harmful requests, GhostGPT removes these restrictions entirely.
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THE BIG IDEA
Lab31 released 31 AI projects in 31 days — here’s how
Two creative leads, Jenny Nicholson and Allister Hercus, met on LinkedIn and decided to do something ambitious: release a custom ChatGPT every day in January 2024.
This year, they went bigger, releasing 31 projects made with OpenAI’s suite, Anthropic’s Claude, Google Gemini 2.0, DALL-E 3, Grok by X, Luma, and more.
Life Stats: An immersive experience that estimates how many times someone’s fallen in love with you or how many bugs you’ve eaten.
The Attention Audit: A browser extension that analyzes your history to figure out where your focus went each day.
Pocket Guide: An audio assistant that tells you about your surroundings so you’re not stuck staring at your screen.
The hardest part…
… isn’t working with AI, the pair said, but coming up with an idea. Once you have that, Hercus and Nicholson suggest explaining that idea to an LLM, then asking it — as you might a human collaborator — how to execute it.
For example, you might be a writer or an artist, but not an app developer. An LLM could help you figure out what software tools could expedite tasks and how to use them, cutting the time it takes to make a project to mere hours.
Some more takeaways
Get weird. Maybe the model can’t help you, but give it a shot.
Models return precisely what you ask for — and if not, it’s a sign that you didn’t ask for what you thought you did.
You can never give a model too much info.
The more creative, helpful, and invested you are when communicating with an LLM, the more that will reflect in its response.
“Our shorthand is always, don’t use AI to do what you’ve always done, just faster and cheaper without humans, [but] what happens when you use AI to do things that you couldn’t have done before?” Nicholson said.
“We feel… that the most important skillset of the next several years isn’t going to be knowing [specific AI tools or having a specific technical background, but] having a mindset of, ‘I don’t know, but I bet I can figure it out.’”
Why does every generation love McDonald’s? Their director of culture marketing dishes the secret sauce.
DATA POINT
Love is in the air — and so is a lot of money. Valentine’s Day spending is expected to hit $27.5B this year, up from $25.8B last year and narrowly surpassing the previous record of $27.4B set in 2020, per the National Retail Federation’s 2025 Valentine’s Day Spending Survey.
More than half (56%) of US consumers plan to celebrate the holiday, up 3% from 2024, at an average spend of $188.81 per person.
And while money can’t buy love, it can help express it — most popularly, this year, in the form of candy (56%), flowers (40%), greeting cards (40%), a night out (35%), and jewelry (22%)…
🎼 On this day: In 1914, the American Society of Composers, Authors, and Publishers (ASCAP) was founded to ensure musicians could earn money for their work.
