Pivot 5 is the must-read daily AI briefing for over 1 million busy professionals who need signal, not noise.
5 headlines. 5 minutes. 5 days a week.
MEDIA
AI-Generated “Italian Brain Rot” Characters Captivate Gen Alpha Across TikTok and Roblox
Italian Brain Rot’s AI-created ballerina-teacup star Ballerina Cappuccina drew more than 55 million TikTok views and 4 million likes in the first half of 2025. Her rise anchors a meme wave of surreal animal-object hybrids voiced in pseudo-Italian that entertains tweens and confounds their parents.
Other breakout figures like sneaker-wearing shark Tralalero Tralala and warplane-crocodile Bombardiro Crocodilo have spawned catchphrases, physical toys and live plays. A Roblox game titled “Steal a Brainrot” ranked among the platform’s most-played offerings, and a TikTok of a child crying over a stolen character has 46.8 million views.
Children’s media researcher Emilie Owens says the fad gives Gen Alpha a purposely nonsensical retreat from relentless self-improvement demands. Oxford University Press validated the theme by naming “brain rot” its 2024 word of the year, highlighting worries about trivial online consumption.
Read more here.
TOOLS
Data, Not Compute, Emerges as the Real Bottleneck in Scaling AI
The article argues the AI field misread Rich Sutton’s “Bitter Lesson,” pouring money into GPUs instead of the larger datasets that actually drive model gains. It says doubling compute without adding roughly 40% more data amounts to wasted spend.
Referencing DeepMind’s Chinchilla findings, it notes usable, high-quality text and code top out near 10 trillion tokens, meaning the internet’s best training data is practically exhausted. With GitHub and other specialized sources also thinning, language-model scaling now hits a hard data ceiling.
It outlines two current avenues: “Architects” squeeze steady 20–30% improvements from smarter model designs, while “Alchemists” chase high-variance leaps by generating synthetic data through self-play and feedback loops. The author concludes that data scarcity, not hardware budgets, now dictates which AI teams advance or stall.
Read more here.
WORK
OpenAI Targets LinkedIn With AI Jobs Platform
OpenAI unveiled the OpenAI Jobs Platform, an AI-powered hiring service slated for mid-2026 launch. Applications chief Fidji Simo says the tool will match companies with workers using AI and will include a track for small businesses and local governments.
The initiative collides directly with Microsoft-owned LinkedIn, whose co-founder Reid Hoffman is an early OpenAI investor. OpenAI will also pilot professional certifications through its Academy in late 2025 and is partnering with Walmart to certify 10 million Americans by 2030.
The move expands OpenAI beyond ChatGPT into workforce services aligned with the White House’s AI literacy campaign. Simo frames the platform and certifications as a response to warnings from tech leaders that AI could erase up to half of entry-level white-collar jobs by 2030.
Read more here.
Presented by The Flyover
This Upstart News Outlet Is Already 5x Bigger than CNN
The Flyover is rethinking news platforms at just the right time—when people are losing their trust in mainstream media. How? By reaching audiences locally with more fact-based news—and no algorithms.
They’re here to replace that lost trust with clear, accurate, common sense news for common sense Americans.
The business model is proving even stronger than they thought:
Already profitable: 7x revenue growth, with 24% net margin
Huge audience: 5x bigger than CNN’s primetime viewership
Rapid growth: From 0 to 2.5m loyal readers in just two years
The best is yet to come as they scale to new verticals as one of the fastest-growing media companies in America.
This is a paid advertisement for The Flyover’s Regulation CF offering. Please read the offering circular at https://invest.jointheflyover.com/
INVESTORS
Jensen Huang’s Weekend Emails And Equity Stake Propel SoundHound To $5.4 Billion
SoundHound AI cofounder Keyvan Mohajer says Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang has been a hands-on mentor for a decade. Huang followed up by buying 1.73 million SoundHound shares in 2023, cementing the tie.
Huang routinely emailed Mohajer research papers on Sunday mornings and expected written feedback the same day. SoundHound went public in 2022, and its market cap now stands at about $5.4 billion.
Mohajer credits Huang’s constant engagement for sharpening his own all-in leadership approach. He says those exchanges directly impressed Huang and played a role in SoundHound’s rise from dorm-room idea to multi-billion-dollar company.
Read more here.
TOOLS
Voice-First AI Writing With Monologue Outpaces Typing and Reshapes Work Habits
A staff writer at Every has replaced typing with Monologue, an AI voice transcription app linked to ChatGPT, and has already drafted seven full articles by talking instead of typing. The tool captures her speech, cleans it of stammers, and funnels it into a dedicated ChatGPT workspace that returns outlines and drafts on the spot.
Monologue, created by Every entrepreneur-in-residence Naveen Naidu Mummana, is in public beta and plans to exit beta later this month. The author says existing dictation tools lagged or bogged down her computer, but pressing one key with Monologue delivers real-time transcription that finally makes voice workflows feel effortless.
Dictation unlocks faster idea flow, clearer structure, and less self-editing than keyboard work, shifting her focus to higher-level questions of nuance and argument. Yet the always-ready AI also stretches her work into weekends, mimicking the long conversational hours of 62.5-hour-a-week CEOs and creating an entrainment cycle with algorithmic responsiveness.
Read more here.