The Rundown AI / Articles / AI / Simo sounds alarm on OpenAI's 'side quests'

Simo sounds alarm on OpenAI's 'side quests'

PLUS: Generate a cohesive e-commerce product shoot

Zach Mink

March 18, 2026

Good morning, AI enthusiasts. While OAI was launching a video app, building a web browser, designing hardware, and adding shopping to ChatGPT, Anthropic quietly took control of the enterprise market.

Now, Applications CEO Fidji Simo is reining the company back in — telling staff they "cannot miss this moment because we are distracted by side quests" and refocusing on two key pillars: coding tools and business customers.

In today’s AI rundown:

OpenAI scrapping ‘side quests’ to catch Anthropic
Mistral opens its model-training playbook
Generate a cohesive e-commerce product shoot
Microsoft redraws its AI org chart
4 new AI tools, community workflows, and more

LATEST DEVELOPMENTS

OPENAI

🎯 OpenAI scrapping ‘side quests’ to catch Anthropic

Image source: Lovart / The Rundown

The Rundown: OpenAI is overhauling its product strategy to focus on coding tools and businesses after CEO of Applications, Fidji Simo, called Anthropic's enterprise dominance a "wake-up call" in a company-wide meeting, according to the WSJ.

The details:

Powerful Claude Code and Cowork releases grabbed the lead with business customers, with Simo telling staff OAI is treating the gap as a "code red."
Simo said OAI “can’t miss the moment because we are distracted by side quests”, coming amid efforts including hardware, adult mode, ads, and more.
OAI’s 2025 launches included Sora, the Atlas browser, e-commerce features, and more, which insiders said led to confusion and constant compute shuffling.
It did claw back in coding, with Codex quadrupling its weekly users to 2M+ since January — alongside a new GPT 5.4 model targeting business workflows.

Why it matters: The Pentagon drama may still be fresh in consumer minds in the battle between OpenAI and Anthropic, but where the real war is being fought is on the enterprise side. OAI is pulling in a million different directions, and Simo saying so out loud to the whole company tells you how real the Anthropic gap has gotten.

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MISTRAL

🏗️ Mistral opens its model-training playbook

Image source: Mistral

The Rundown: Mistral launched Forge, a platform that hands enterprises the same training recipes and infrastructure the French AI lab uses internally — allowing companies to build custom models on proprietary data without ever sharing it.

The details:

Rather than basic fine-tuning, Forge offers full pre-training, post-training, and RL pipelines that mirror how Mistral builds its own flagship models.
Training can run entirely on a company's own servers with zero data exposure to Mistral, a hard requirement for defense, finance, and government buyers.
Early partners include ASML, Ericsson, and the European Space Agency, with use cases from legacy code migration to ancient manuscript restoration.
Forge comes during a busy week of Mistral releases that includes Small 4 and Leanstral, with the French startup also joining Nvidia’s Nemotron Coalition.

Why it matters: Most major enterprise AI boils down to the same thing: take a general model and hope it's close enough. Mistral is making a different bet — that companies sitting on tons of proprietary data, compliance rules, and internal codebases need models trained on that knowledge, not just prompted with it.

AI TRAINING

📸 Generate a cohesive e-commerce product shoot

The Rundown: In this guide, you will learn how to generate a full set of product photos using Grok's Aurora model, building each image off the last one so they all look like they came from the same session.

Step-by-step:

Go to grok.com, upload a product photo, and prompt: “Product photo of [your product] on a matte black surface, soft box lighting from the upper left, shot on 85mm lens, f/2.8, shallow depth of field, commercial product photography”
Build more shots from the first output by keeping the same studio description and changing only the angle or crop — a 3/4 angle, a close-up, or a white BG
Add a lifestyle shot. Describe the product in use: being worn, held, or placed in a real environment. Include the setting, lighting, and mood
Lay out all your images. They should look like they came from the same shoot

Pro tip: Try picking a themed studio shoot, like basketball-themed, nature-themed, etc. Grok might surprise you here.

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MICROSOFT

♻️ Microsoft redraws its AI org chart

Image source: Microsoft AI

The Rundown: Microsoft just overhauled its AI org chart, announcing the merge of its fragmented Copilot teams and shifting Microsoft AI CEO Mustafa Suleyman’s focus squarely towards its five-year mission to build superintelligence in-house.

The details:

Former Snap exec and new Microsoft AI EVP Jacob Andreou will run the combined Copilot org, which will span across design, product, and engineering.
Suleyman said the move will “enable me to focus all my energy on our Superintelligence efforts”, with a focus on enterprise systems.
A reworked OAI partnership cleared the way for Microsoft to build toward AGI on its own, lifting a ban on solo development that ran through 2030.
Copilot is still struggling for traction, with 6M daily users in February vs. ChatGPT's 440M — and its enterprise add-on reaching just 3% of Office subs.

Why it matters: Microsoft stock is down this year, the legacy software companies are under pressure to prove AI ROI, and Copilot adoption is a fraction of the big players. This reorg is Nadella betting that the fix starts at the model layer just as much as the product one — and that the company needs its own frontier systems to compete.

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📰 Everything else in AI today

OpenAI launched GPT-5.4 mini and nano, two smaller, faster versions of its flagship model built for coding assistants and multi-agent systems.

Mistral released Small 4, an open-source model that merges its reasoning, coding, and vision capabilities into one system.

Anthropic unveiled Dispatch, a Claude Desktop feature that lets users message the assistant from a phone as it works on a PC, running code, browsing, and managing files.

Sam Altman's proof-of-personhood company World launched AgentKit, a tool that lets websites verify a real human is behind an AI shopping agent's purchases.

Google announced that its Personal Intelligence feature is now rolling out to free-tier users across its AI Mode in Search, the Gemini app, and Chrome in the U.S.

Gamma introduced Imagine, an AI design tool baked into its presentation platform that generates logos, infographics, and social graphics with automatic brand styling.

COMMUNITY

🤝 Community AI workflows

Every newsletter, we showcase how a reader is using AI to work smarter, save time, or make life easier.

Today’s workflow comes from reader Dmitry K. in Livonia, MI:

"I have two vehicles and found it challenging to keep meticulous maintenance records over the years. Recently, I set up a Claude project to create a Vehicle Maintenance Logbook. Every time I have a service appointment, I take a picture of the receipt, including the work performed, and upload it to Claude.

It then enters all relevant information into my logbook, while keeping me informed of manufacturer-recommended maintenance and giving me an overall health score for each vehicle. Now I have better maintenance clarity and a fully digital record, which will come in handy when selling either car!”

How do you use AI? Tell us here.