Hi tech & AI enthusiasts, this week's highlights:
OpenAI Just Launched a Codex Built for Office Work
Claude Plugs Directly Into Adobe, Blender, and Ableton
Harvard Study: AI Beat ER Doctors at Diagnoses
The Lab: How to Design a Website With Codex, GPT-5.5, and ChatGPT Images 2.0
AI Image of the Week for: Agency portfolio owners
Let’s get into it.
▲ AI MODELS
OpenAI released Codex for Work, an AI assistant pitched as a personal assistant for teams. It researches, drafts, analyses, and automates recurring tasks across your existing tools.
What you need to know
Turns scattered work into finished output: Point it at your docs, spreadsheets, messages, notes, and screenshots and it produces decks, summaries, emails, and reports.
Automates anything recurring: Set it to run a weekly brief from your calendar and Slack, draft replies for unanswered emails, or pull themes from survey feedback every Monday.
You stay in control: It asks for permission before taking action, cites its sources, and leaves drafts unsent for review.
Key Ideas
▲ Why it matters: Codex was originally a developer tool. This version is for everyone else: ops, finance, sales, marketing, HR. The idea is most of the work that fills a working week (status updates, follow-ups, weekly reports, attendee lists) is repetitive and prompt-shaped. If Codex can take 10 hours of admin off a team's plate each week, that adds up fast.
▲ AI TOOLS
Anthropic launched Claude for Creative Work, a set of new connectors that let Claude operate inside the creative tools designers, 3D artists, and music producers already use.
What you need to know
Direct connections to major creative tools: Adobe Creative Cloud (Photoshop, Premiere, Express), Affinity by Canva, Autodesk Fusion, Blender, SketchUp, Ableton Live, Resolume, and Splice.
Acts on the software, not just talks about it: You can describe a 3D model and open it directly in SketchUp, batch-rename layers in Affinity, or have Claude write custom shaders and procedural animations in Blender.
Backed by partnerships with art schools: Anthropic is rolling Claude into programmes at the Royal College of Art, Goldsmiths, and Rhode Island School of Design.
Key Idea
▲ Why it matters: Anthropic is moving Claude inside tools creatives use daily. For agencies and creative teams, that closes the gap between describing what you want and actually getting it made. Adobe and Canva tying themselves to Claude here is also worth noting; both have been hedging across multiple AI partners.
▲ AI MODELS
A Harvard study published in Science put OpenAI's older o1-preview model through 76 real ER cases. It diagnosed patients more accurately than two attending physicians, working only from raw electronic health-record text.
What you need to know
The model beat the doctors at every stage: At initial triage, the AI got the correct diagnosis 67.1% of the time, against 55.3% and 50.0% for the two physicians.
Reviewers couldn't tell the AI's diagnoses from the doctors': Two separate physician reviewers scored the cases blind and found no clear difference in quality.
It caught what the doctors missed: In one case, the AI flagged a rare flesh-eating infection in a transplant patient 12 to 24 hours before the treating doctor did.
Key Idea
▲ Why it matters: Millions of people already use AI for health questions; this study shows the value can flow back the other way to the clinicians themselves. The model tested was o1-preview from 2024, two generations behind today's frontier. If a model that old already beats ER doctors on raw text alone, the question is no longer whether AI belongs in the diagnostic process, but how fast it gets there.
▲ EVEN MORE NEWS
Other big ideas from the past week.
Rocky is my personal favourite and choice
▲ Codex Now Has Animated Desktop Companions: OpenAI shipped Codex Pets, small animated characters that float on your desktop and show whether your AI agent is running, waiting, or ready for review. Type /pet to summon one.
▲ Japan Airlines Trials Humanoid Robots at Haneda: JAL began a two-year trial of humanoid robots at Tokyo's Haneda Airport for baggage loading and cabin cleaning. Driven by a 31% projected drop in Japan's working-age population by 2060.
▲ OpenClaw Now Works With Your ChatGPT Subscription: Sam Altman announced that OpenClaw users can use their existing ChatGPT subscriptions inside the agentic tool, undercutting Anthropic's preferred billing model.
The Lab
▲ AI EDUCATION
How to Design a Website With Codex, GPT-5.5, and ChatGPT Images 2.0
Three OpenAI tools released this month now stack into a single workflow: Codex for the research and structure, GPT-5.5 for the copy, and ChatGPT Images 2.0 for the visuals. The result is a complete website design generated from a single brief, with custom imagery for every section.
What you'll learn:
How to brief Codex on your business and audience to get a strong site structure
How to write a single image prompt that produces eight section-specific visuals
How to push beyond standard layouts (full-bleed, fullscreen, motion-led)
How to use the same workflow for any niche, from construction to creative agencies
🔬 Interested in learning about AI for business? Join The Lab waitlist.
▲ AI IMAGE SHOWCASE
Create this type of image with Midjourney
panning shot of a mysterious female figure, studio light, solid golden yellow background, motion blur, matte faded film effectImage Usage Suggestion: Editorial campaigns, fashion brand social, perfume and beauty marketing, music album covers, agency portfolio openers, or any content that wants to feel deliberately cinematic and a little bit unresolved.
💌 Reply to this email with your AI image generation or suggestion of what you’d like to see and I'll feature it in a future newsletter.
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Thanks for reading, until next time.
Stay curious,
Matt Lok, Editor
Brought to you by Metalabs. Digital marketing consulting specialising in AI.