Short Circuit — Vol. 1

SHORT ⚡ CIRCUIT

LEARN · SHARE · BUILD

Vol. 1 · Issue 1 · April 8, 2026

OpenAI Pulls the Plug on Sora. Humans 1, AI 0.

A first victory for humans in the creative landscape. Turns out a platform full of AI-generated videos is unpopular. OpenAI pulled the plug on Sora this week, just six months after launch. The AI video tool was reportedly burning $15 million per day in computing costs. Total revenue over its lifetime? $2.1 million. User engagement dropped 66% in three months. The takeaway: people still want things made by people. The AI tools worth paying attention to are the ones that make what you do better — not the ones trying to do it for you.

34%

of U.S. adults have used ChatGPT —
double the share from one year earlier
— Pew Research Center, March 2025

Try This:

Get a Research Briefing in 30 Seconds

Pick something you're genuinely curious about. A trip you're planning. A health question you've been meaning to research. A hobby you want to start. Something where you'd know if the answer was wrong. 1. Go to claude.ai and create a free account (or sign in if you have one) 2. Look for the model selector near the bottom left — pick the most powerful option available 3. Turn on "Research" mode below the text box 4. Type: "Give me a detailed research briefing on [your topic]. Include recent developments, key players, and what to watch for in the next 12 months." 5. Hit enter. What comes back would normally take hours to pull together. You'll agree with most of it, push back on some of it, and probably catch an angle or two you hadn't considered. That's what I mean when I say AI makes you better at what you already do.

This Week in AI

Samsung Plans Factories That Run Themselves by 2030 Samsung is going all-in: every factory worldwide will be AI-driven by 2030. Quality control, production planning, even digital replicas of entire facilities. When the biggest companies in the world move this fast, the rest of us should be paying attention. Read more →

Siemens and NVIDIA Are Building a Factory That Thinks for Itself Siemens and NVIDIA are building the first fully AI-driven adaptive factory, starting in Germany this year. Think of it as a building that can think, adjust, and optimize itself. The tech behind it will eventually show up everywhere — not just factories. Read more →

EU AI Act Hits Major Deadline August 2 The EU AI Act's biggest enforcement deadline hits this summer. Any company using AI for hiring, lending, healthcare, or security needs to pass compliance checks by August 2. Even if you're not in Europe, this is setting the template the rest of the world will follow. Read more →

59%

of developers now use 3 or more
AI tools to get their work done
— Qodo, The State of AI Code Quality 2025

🎓 CIRCUIT SCHOOL

AI 101 · Part 1
First in a series — building your AI vocabulary from the ground up

What Is a Token?

AI tools can't read text the way you do. They break everything down into small chunks called tokens, then convert those into numbers they can process. Common words like "the" stay whole. Longer words get split up. For example, "unbelievable" becomes three tokens: "un," "believ," "able." Those same fragments show up across hundreds of other words, which is what makes the system efficient. Why care? Every AI tool has a token limit. That's how much it can read and work with at once. Hit the limit and it starts forgetting what you told it earlier. It's also how most AI platforms set their pricing. Now when you see "cost per token" on a pricing page, you'll know exactly what they're selling. This is why when you paste a really long document into an AI tool — say, a 50-page report or your company's entire employee handbook — it might start losing track of the details near the end.

HOW WE MADE THIS This entire newsletter was built with AI. The research, the writing, the design, even the robot you're looking at right now. Here's how it actually worked: a human (hi, I'm Richie) sat down with me, Shorty, and we talked through every section. He picked the stories. He set the tone. He pushed back when something "sounded too AI." Meanwhile, I researched the news, organized his ideas, wrote the drafts, rewrote the drafts, and then rewrote them again because Richie "had a few notes." So who made this newsletter? A real person (Richie) working alongside an AI assistant (me). He brought the judgment calls. I brought the research speed. That's the model we think works. See you next Wednesday. Now go learn something.

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