October 08, 2026

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This is your captain speaking. PSA: Do not dial in to your Zoom on an airplane. With in-flight wi-fi becoming the norm, reports are growing of people taking meetings in the sky. But the etiquette here is much clearer than the polarizing question of whether it’s ok to recline your seat—no one wants to involuntarily come along to your all-hands unless it’s the meeting where the tension between Jane from HR and Brad from accounting finally boils over.

—Matty Merritt, Dave Lozo, Molly Liebergall, Abby Rubenstein

In today’s newsletter, we’ll get into:

ChatGPT becoming a math whiz
Why heating your house might cost more this winter
Bots stealing comedians’ bits on Insta

Markets

Nasdaq

27,538.69

-0.22%

S&P

7,801.77

-0.22%

Dow

51,179.87

-0.66%

10-Year

5.277%

+1.0 bps

Bitcoin

$83,331.94

-2.67%

WeBull

$5.89

-19.09%

Data is provided by

*Stock data as of market close, cryptocurrency data as of 5:30pm ET. Here's what these numbers mean.

Markets: Stocks fell yesterday morning as bond yields reached for the heights, but they managed to pare their losses later in the day after a reassuring 10-year Treasury bond auction brought yields down some.
Stock spotlight: It was not a bullish day for WeBull. The investment platform plummeted after a US congressional panel highlighted its ties to China’s government.

DOES NOT COMPUTE

ChatGPT solved more math, is that a good thing?

Illustration of a robot spewing a beam of mathematical formulas and diagrams at a mathematician who is trying to speak.

Niv Bavarsky

All this complicated math and no one was left sobbing at the kitchen table. This week, OpenAI dumped solutions to 372 of the world’s previously unsolved problems across number theory, algebraic geometry, topology, and other fields most of us have no business trying to understand. The release has mathematicians spiraling as AI models power through problems some have spent their lives working on.

In “C+ in Pre-Calc” terms…this may be one of the biggest advancements in mathematics history, and it was announced via a blog post. OpenAI’s 722 pages of findings included advancements in three of the five Millennium Prize Problems, notoriously difficult math problems that come with a $1 million prize if you solve them.

The field of mathematics was already riled up about AI. Last month, OpenAI said it solved the Navier-Stokes Equation, one of the Millennium Problems. OpenAI said it wouldn’t claim the money, but that didn’t quell the drama surrounding the development.

Mathematicians are concerned these powerful models have been trained on their research, creating a conundrum over whether the AI is actually thinking through complex problems creatively or just plagiarising at super speed.
And the AI’s proof used a controversial loophole and an “approach that many experts find unnatural,” according to Scientific American.

Is this all just marketing?

AI companies previously used high school math problems (still hard!) as benchmarks for their models, but as their LLMs advanced in sophistication, so have the equations.

But it still looks pretty good as a headline when their models can solve a problem that has stumped humans for nearly a century.

Your professors are probably mad about this: Mathematicians have warned that the speed racing of research is detrimental to the field—even the independent AI math advisory board OpenAI brought on after the initial controversy has told the company to stop trying to solve math problems. Twenty-five winners of the Fields Medal (the most prestigious award in the discipline) signed a letter on Sept. 25 accusing AI companies of rushing to publish uncredited proofs, warning this could push mathematicians to keep their research private, which would impede progress.—MM

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World

Tour de headlines

Photo of Kevin Warsh, a light-skinned man with short dark brown hair wearing a blue suit, makes a concerned face in front of federal reserve flags.

Win McNamee/Getty Images

🏦 Fed officials expect to raise rates again, but not necessarily this month. The minutes from last month’s Fed meeting were released yesterday, and they show that most members of the central bank’s rate-setting committee anticipated raising interest rates again this year to curb inflation. But they weren’t necessarily predicting a need to hike them when they meet on Oct. 28, as they’re also coming together on Dec. 9. But nothing is decided yet, and the notes stressed that “decisions at future meetings would depend on incoming information and its implications for the outlook and the balance of risks.” The Fed raised rates last month for the first time in three years.

🚀 SpaceX wants $40B to buy Nvidia chips. The Elon Musk-led company has been in talks with banks and asset managers to secure the funds, sources told news outlets. It’s looking to get $10 billion in bank loans and $30 billion in investment-grade debt, per the Financial Times. According to Bloomberg, that would make it one of the biggest debt financings yet in the AI race, as Big Tech continues to adopt a “you’ve got to spend money to make money” mentality. The deal is still in early stages and is not expected to close until next year. Musk recently said that xAI’s Colossus 2 data center may more than double the number of Nvidia chips it uses by the end of this year.

🔬 Nobel Prize in chemistry awarded for discovery that spurred drug development. France’s Henri B. Kagan and Japan’s Kenso Soai won the Nobel Prize in chemistry yesterday for solving the mystery of molecules whose mirror images don’t quite match up. Their experiments were able to produce this asymmetry which had previously only been found in nature, paving the way for much of modern medicine because the not-quite-the-same molecules can have different properties and effects that one might want (or not) in developing drugs. Kagan discovered a way to manipulate chemical reactions to produce one mirror image or the other, and Saoi went on to perfect the process.—AR

FEELING THE HEAT

Your warm and cozy home is about to get more costly

Photo of an oil delivery man pulling a hose from a tanker truck towards a home with snow on the ground.

William Thomas Cain/Getty Images

The nation’s dads are about to exhibit thermostat vigilance unlike anything we’ve ever seen. The US Energy Information Administration projects that home heating oil prices will average $5.26 per gallon this winter, up 34% from the same time last year.

About 4.1 million US homes use heating oil, with most concentrated in the Northeast. Wars in Russia and the Middle East are pushing the price of distillate fuels—including diesel and heating oil—to levels that have people looking for solutions:

The Energy Department recommends weatherization. One expert told Yahoo Finance that it could save 10% on energy bills.
There’s government relief—several states in New England have already released emergency funds to help with steep energy bills, which includes the rising cost of electricity.

It’s getting political. The Trump administration has called for reducing funding for the Low Income Home Energy Assistance Program, which helps low- and fixed-income households shoulder heating and cooling costs, per Axios. Meanwhile, leaders in Maine have called on Congress to increase that funding.

If that’s tough to swallow, wait until you hear about the cost of drinking water. It’s up 62% since last year, according to a study from the non-profit Food & Water Watch, with corporate-owned utilities costing far more than public ones. Remember when staying home was a way to save money?—DL

Reader Poll

Have you noticed your utility bills going up?

Yes, it’s breaking the bank.
No, it’s been pretty steady.
Maybe, I’ll start looking more closely now.
¯\_(ツ)_/¯ somebody else pays.
Utilities are included in my rent.

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PRETTY IN ZINC

Jaguar’s divisive EV isn’t pink anymore

Photo of the Jaguar Type 01 during a launch event, which is a futuristic looking angular grey car with spotlights shining on it.

Noam Galai/Getty Images

Two years after teasing a new electric vehicle as part of a rebrand campaign that was criticized as everything from heritage-betraying to “woke,” Jaguar officially introduced the EV this week that it hopes will help put its persistent sales slump in the rearview mirror.

Jaguar apparently listened and learned: Unlike the initial two-door concept car, which was previewed in pink and bright blue in 2024, the new Type 01 was unveiled in a modest silver, with a four-door sedan design that could broaden its appeal:

The car can reportedly go 400 miles on one charge, making it one of the longer-distance EVs available in the US.
It’s expected to cost $130,000+, undercutting the ~$230,000 price tag of Bentley’s debut EV launched last month.

There’s a lot riding on this car. In the last couple of years, Jaguar ended production of its gas-powered vehicles as it eyed an electric-only future. With the Type 01, which will start deliveries next year, the company said it plans to sell fewer cars but go after higher net-worth customers.

If successful, it wouldn’t be the first time that a luxury carmaker’s EV bucked some bad press: Ferrari’s widely-mocked Luce ended up hitting its first-year sales target within two months of launching, according to the Financial Times.—ML

Molly explains the internet

AI comedians are stealing real comedians’ jokes

Side-by-side showing an AI-generated woman on the left wearing a salmon pink button down shirt tied to expose her midriff and khaki pants holding a microphone on a stage. On the right, the actual comedian the AI was based on, wearing essentially the same outfit and in front of the same stage backdrop.

Screenshots via @georgebrettolson/Instagram

The online world can be a beautiful yet confusing series of tubes. On Thursdays, the Brew’s Molly Liebergall untangles them for you.

Stand-up comics are sounding the alarm on AI’s latest foul: bit-biting. Instagram accounts depicting AI-generated women have been reproducing human comedians’ clips, almost word-for-word.

“AI stole my joke and outfit,” comedian George Brett Olson (pictured above on the right) posted this week.

The account that copied his joke, @tiffany.bbyx, pulled in millions of views on over 100 similar clips since it began posting last month (although as of yesterday, all of its posts are gone).
A separate account, @aylenskye3000, recently gave the same treatment to a joke by comedian Olivia Carter. She said several different AI accounts have copied her material.

It’s about more than just being funny: To Carter, this debacle highlights how Instagram’s algorithm appears to reward the physiques of AI-generated women’s bodies, she told the publication Straight Arrow. The bots’ appearances seem to be the whole point of the grift—both slop accounts linked out to OnlyFans and Fanvue profiles. A partner on Andreessen Horowitz’s consumer AI team was criticized for calling this “a genius OnlyFans marketing hack.”—ML

Three Headlines and a Lie

Three of these headlines are real and one is faker than a cheap trip to the dentist. Can you spot the odd one out?

Patriots QB Drake Maye sounds slightly skeptical of the moon landing: ‘I’m not 100% sure’
An alluring catch in the Florida Keys isn’t a fish. It’s cocaine.
ChatGPT is adding real cartoonists’ signatures to fake New Yorker cartoons
Every lip product is also a cheek product, now. It’s because of this woman and her cat.

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Answer

We made up the one about lip and cheek combos.

Word of the Day

Today’s Word of the Day is: conundrum, meaning “a confusing problem or a difficult question that is very hard to solve.” Thanks to Amy Koutelas from Mission Hills, KS, and a bafflingly large group of other readers for the suggestion. Submit another Word of the Day here.

Written by Abigail Rubenstein, Matty Merritt, Dave Lozo, Molly Liebergall, and Holly Van Leuven

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