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How to Get Started with Claude Cowork 🖥
Two Thinking Machines Lab Cofounders Are Leaving to Rejoin OpenAI 🤯
Gina Acosta
January 15, 2026
In partnership with
Welcome to another edition of Horizon AI,
From organizing messy downloads to turning receipt photos into spreadsheets or notes into slide decks, Cowork acts like a hands-on assistant that can read, edit, and create files. In today’s issue, we walk you through how to set up and use Cowork for your first task.
Let’s jump into it!
Read Time: 4.5 min
Here's what's new today in the Horizon AI
Mira Murati’s Thinking Machines Loses Two Co-Founders to OpenAI
OpenAI Signs $10B Computing Deal With Nvidia Rival Cerebras
AI Tutorial: How to Use Claude Cowork: The "Claude Code" for Non-Technical Tasks
AI Tools to check out
AI Findings/Resources
The Latest in AI and Tech 💡
AI News
THINKING MACHINES
Mira Murati’s Thinking Machines Loses Two Co-Founders to OpenAI
Thinking Machines Lab, the AI startup founded by former OpenAI CTO Mira Murati, is losing two of its co-founders as key members of its leadership team return to OpenAI.
Details:
Barret Zoph, co-founder and CTO of Thinking Machines, has left the company, with Soumith Chintala stepping in as the new CTO. Murati announced the change but did not reference any other departures.
Shortly after, OpenAI confirmed that Zoph, along with Luke Metz and Sam Schoenholz, would be rejoining the company. Both Metz and Schoenholz were also part of Thinking Machines and previously worked at OpenAI.
Zoph had earlier served as OpenAI’s VP of research and before that spent six years at Google as a research scientist. Murati co-founded Thinking Machines with Zoph and Metz after leaving OpenAI in 2024.
Reports suggest the split with Zoph may not have been smooth, though neither company has publicly commented beyond the announcements.
The departures follow other losses, including co-founder Andrew Tulloch, who left for Meta.
Thinking Machines raised a massive $2 billion seed round last year, led by Andreessen Horowitz and supported by Nvidia, AMD, Accel, and Jane Street, giving the startup a $12 billion valuation. Much of this investment was driven by confidence in the assembled talent, but the sudden departures of key figures less than a year after launch are raising questions about the company’s leadership and long-term direction.
TOGETHER WITH NEURONS
How Your Ads Will Win in 2026
Great ads don’t happen by accident. And in a world flooded with AI-generated content, the difference between “nice idea” and “real impact” matters more than ever.
Join award-winning creative strategist Babak Behrad and Neurons CEO Thomas Z. Ramsøy for a practical, science-backed webinar on what actually drives performance in modern advertising.
They’ll break down how top campaigns earn attention, stick in your target’s memory, and build brands people remember.
You’ll see how to:
Apply neuroscience to creative decisions
Design branding moments that actually land
Make ads feel instantly relevant to real humans
In 2026, you have to earn attention. This webinar will show you exactly how to do it.
OPENAI
OpenAI Signs $10B Computing Deal With Nvidia Rival Cerebras
OpenAI has struck a massive new computing agreement with chipmaker Cerebras, securing huge amounts of AI processing power as demand for ChatGPT and advanced reasoning models continues to surge.
Details:
OpenAI will buy up to 750 megawatts of compute over three years, in a deal worth more than $10 billion, using Cerebras systems to run inference and reasoning for ChatGPT and other AI products.
The agreement follows tests showing OpenAI’s open-source models could run more efficiently on Cerebras chips than on traditional GPUs.
Cerebras will build or lease data centers filled with its own hardware, while OpenAI will pay for access to Cerebras’ cloud services as new capacity comes online through 2028.
OpenAI says adding Cerebras to its compute mix will help make its AI systems respond much faster, especially for models that take time to think before generating answers.
Cerebras, founded in 2015, is known for its wafer-scale AI chips, and OpenAI CEO Sam Altman is an early investor in the company.
The deal strengthens Cerebras ahead of a planned IPO, helping it reduce reliance on a small number of large customers and compete more directly with Nvidia.
AI Tutorial
How to Use Claude Cowork: The "Claude Code" for Non-Technical Tasks
Claude Cowork turns Claude into a hands-on assistant that can read, organize, and edit files inside a folder you choose, all through simple chat commands. Here’s how to set it up and run your first task.
Note: Cowork requires the Claude macOS desktop app (currently Mac-only, not available on web or mobile) and is only available to Max plan subscribers.
Open Claude Desktop
Look for the mode selector that includes "Chat" and the Cowork tab.
Click the Cowork tab to switch modes to “Tasks”.
You can create a folder just for Cowork, for example:
~/Documents/ClaudeWork/Click New Cowork Session and choose the folder you created.
Describe what you want Claude to do in plain English.
Example tasks
“Help me organize all of the files in my folder by type and date.”
“Extract data from 50 PDF invoices into one Excel file.”
“Sort these photos into year and month folders.”
“Find all Word files and convert them to PDFs.”
“Create a slide deck from my notes and meeting transcripts.”
Before touching your files, Claude will ask clarifying questions to ensure it understands your goal and carries out the task the way you want.
Review the results and ask for any adjustments if needed.
AI Tools to check out
👉 Modor: A free online mockup generator to create professional product mockups.
⭐ Domer: Professional AI-powered creative studio for content creators.
🔊 Invoce: An AI invoice generator for freelancers and small businesses.
🦾 OpenAgents: An open-source project for building Agent Networks and connecting AI Agents at scale.
🚀 Gridfy: Turn raw data into live, interactive widgets for your site.
TOGETHER WITH NEURONS
Creativity + Science = Ads that perform
Join award-winning strategist Babak Behrad and Neurons CEO Thomas Z. Ramsøy for a strategic, practical webinar on what actually drives high-impact advertising today. Learn how top campaigns capture attention, build memory, and create branding moments that stick. It’s all backed by neuroscience, and built for real-world creative teams.
AI Findings/Resources
📚 Generative AI for educators with Gemini: Learn to use generative AI to save time, personalize instruction, and enhance lessons.
🤔 AI has supercharged scientists—but may have shrunk science
🔮 True agentic AI is years away - here's why and how we get there
🤖 A user created a plugin with Claude Code that visualizes its work as agents in an office, doing tasks and sharing information
The latest in AI and Tech
The “Interstellar” star Matthew McConaughey has secured multiple U.S. trademarks covering short video clips, his image, and his famous line “Alright, alright, alright” to stop unauthorized AI versions of his voice and likeness.
His legal team says the trademarks are meant to give him stronger tools to challenge AI-generated impersonations in federal court, even when they are not tied to advertising or product sales.
The company has launched a new version of its Trends Explore page that uses Gemini to automatically surface and compare related search topics, making trend research faster and easier. The updated side panel suggests relevant terms and Gemini prompts, while the main graph can now auto-populate up to eight related searches for quick comparison. The new experience is rolling out on desktop starting this week.
Airbnb has hired Ahmad Al-Dahle, the former head of generative AI at Meta, to lead its technology team as the company pushes deeper into AI-powered travel services. CEO Brian Chesky said Al-Dahle will help turn Airbnb into a full-time travel companion that can guide users from search to the entire trip.
According to OpenAI, this is their “most cyber-capable model yet,” designed for long-running, real-world software engineering tasks such as building features, refactoring large codebases, and tracking down bugs.
Chinese AI firm Zhipu AI says its new GLM-Image model was trained entirely on Huawei’s Ascend chips and MindSpore software, marking a major step away from reliance on U.S. technology.
Zhipu claims GLM-Image delivers industry-leading results among open-source models for text rendering and Chinese characters, though it still trails ByteDance’s proprietary Seedream model.
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Gina 👩🏻💻