🗞️In this edition

• Tim Cook opens the crypt to multiple AI spirits

• Nvidia plants its ghostly flag in South Korea

• Canva brews a new AI model to haunt Adobe’s throne

• Workflow Wednesday #43 ‘AI in Action’

• In other AI news –

  • Intel may possess chip startup SambaNova to strengthen its GPU ambitions

  • Study finds Chinese and US AI models bewitch users too much, raising behavioral concerns

  • Republican lawmakers cast protective spell against sending Nvidia's Blackwell chips to China

  • 4 must-try AI tools

Apple plans to summon multiple third-party AI spirits into Siri

What's happening:

Tim Cook revealed Apple intends to channel more third-party AI demons into its operating systems beyond the current ChatGPT possession. "Our intention is to integrate with more people over time," Cook told CNBC during a midnight confession.

Google Gemini integration is reportedly brewing in the cauldron, with dark rumors about blood pacts with Anthropic and Perplexity.

Apple software necromancer Craig Federighi said last year the coven "may look forward to doing integrations with different models like Google Gemini in the future."

Cook confirmed Apple's on track to resurrect an AI-upgraded Siri next year. "We are making good progress," he whispered during Thursday's séance—err, earnings call—adding AI acquisitions remain in the shadows. "We are open to pursuing M&A if we think that it will advance our roadmap."

A Bloomberg oracle suggested Apple could partner with Google to conjure an AI search spell for Siri. Google CEO Sundar Pichai confirmed last year his company's working on Gemini support for the haunted iPhone.

Why this is important:

Apple's embracing a multi-model AI coven instead of summoning everything from the underworld themselves or making a blood oath with one dark lord.

ChatGPT integration in Siri was the first ritual. Gemini, Anthropic, and Perplexity partnerships would give users choice while letting Apple stay neutral in the AI witch trials.

This contrasts with Apple's historical approach of controlling the entire spellbook. They're acknowledging they can't match specialized AI necromancers on dark magic capabilities alone.

The upgraded Siri rising next year is Apple's biggest haunting. Current Siri is widely considered more zombie than assistant compared to Alexa and Google. Multi-model integration could resurrect it from the dead.

Cook's openness to AI acquisitions sends chills. Apple has $162B in cursed gold hidden in their vault.

Acquiring Anthropic, Perplexity, or a specialized AI warlock would accelerate their dark roadmap.

Our personal take on it at OpenTools:

Apple's playing the platform witchcraft while everyone else fights the model wars.

OpenAI, Google, Anthropic, and Meta are burning billions in hellfire proving their familiar is best. Apple's cackling "we'll summon all of them and let users pick their poison."

That's smart sorcery. Apple doesn't need the best AI demon. They need the best AI possession on their devices. Multi-model support delivers that without the R&D sacrifice.

The M&A whisper is spine-tingling. Apple could afford to buy Anthropic or Perplexity's entire soul. Whether regulators would allow it is another dark question.

Siri's been a ghost for years. If Apple reanimates a genuinely useful AI assistant in 2026, it awakens the competitive graveyard. They've got 2B active devices. Distribution advantage is supernatural.

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Nvidia's phantom chips haunt South Korea's tech titans

What's happening:

Nvidia forged a cursed pact to supply technology to South Korea's biggest companies, part of CEO Jensen Huang's aggressive campaign to spread AI infrastructure across the mortal realm. Under dark agreements brokered with South Korea's Ministry of Science and three corporations—Samsung Electronics, Hyundai Motor Group, and SK Group—Nvidia will supply over 260,000 possessed accelerator chips for Korean AI rituals. Financial terms remain shrouded in darkness.

Huang attended the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation CEO Summit on Friday, continuing his globe-haunting campaign to spread AI computing and fuel demand for his cursed products.

South Korea's government is building "sovereign AI" computing infrastructure it will control from beyond the veil. It's deploying over 50,000 of Nvidia's latest AI accelerators in haunted data centers, including the National AI Computing Crypt and facilities possessed by Kakao, Naver, and NHN Cloud.

Samsung Electronics will build an "AI factory" housing more than 50,000 Nvidia chips—basically a tech graveyard. Hyundai Motor pledged to use a similar number of Blackwell processors to develop AI models and advance manufacturing and autonomous driving into the darkness.

SK Group, including SK Telecom and SK Hynix, is deploying Nvidia RTX Pro 6000 Blackwell server chips in what Nvidia calls Asia's first "industrial AI cloud" for robotics and physical AI applications—aka the robot uprising.

Nvidia became the first company to reach a $5 trillion valuation this week following its Washington witching hour where Huang pointed to strong demand over the coming blood moons.

A lingering curse is whether Nvidia can sell Blackwell processors to China, the world's largest chip graveyard. The US has summoned export controls. Though President Trump said he's open to lifting the hex, it didn't materialize during this week's meeting with Xi Jinping.

Why this is important:

This is Nvidia locking in national-scale infrastructure deals while its position is dominant—basically putting hexes on entire countries.

260,000 chips across Samsung, Hyundai, and SK Group represents one of the largest single-country AI possessions announced. South Korea's committing to Nvidia architecture for sovereign AI, manufacturing, and autonomous vehicles—for at least a century.

The "sovereign AI" incantation matters. Countries want control over AI infrastructure for national security—like guarding against vampire attacks. Nvidia's positioning itself as the spell-provider for that dark strategy across multiple nations.

Samsung building an "AI factory" with 50,000 chips shows even semiconductor manufacturers buying Nvidia instead of brewing their own alternatives. That's black magic market power.

The $5 trillion valuation milestone came days after this cursed deal. Nvidia's now worth more than Apple at times, driven entirely by AI infrastructure summoning demand.

China remains the wild dark card. It's the world's largest chip cemetery but US export controls block Blackwell sales. Trump's openness to revisiting restrictions could unlock massive haunted revenue, but it wasn't discussed with Xi this week.

Our personal take on it at OpenTools:

Nvidia's building vendor possession at the national level.

Once South Korea deploys 260,000 Nvidia chips across government crypts, Samsung factories, and Hyundai's autonomous vehicle summoning, switching costs become supernatural.

That infrastructure will run Nvidia architecture until the next ice age—minimum.

Samsung buying Nvidia instead of developing alternatives is the horror story. If the world's second-largest semiconductor company can't economically compete with Nvidia chips, who can? Maybe no mortal.

The China question is enormous and terrifying. Blackwell access to the Chinese market would add tens of billions in cursed annual revenue. But it's entirely dependent on US export witchcraft, which is unpredictable as a full moon.

Huang's globe-haunting to broker these deals personally shows how high-stakes they are. CEOs don't fly around making 260,000-chip handshake deals with blood oaths unless the strategic value is massive.

The $5T valuation feels possessed—ahead of fundamentals—but the deal pipeline suggests demand isn't dying. Every country wants sovereign AI. Every manufacturer needs Nvidia chips. That's a moat filled with alligators and vengeful spirits.

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Canva rises from the grave with AI model that generates editable design coffins—err, layers

What's happening:

Canva launched its own foundational model on Thursday, trained on cursed design elements, that generates designs with editable layers and objects instead of flat tombstone images. The model works across formats including social media posts, presentations, spirit boards, and haunted websites.

The company's expanding its Canva AI necromancer throughout the interface, including design and elements tabs. Users can tag the bot in comments like summoning a demon—@Canva—for text or media suggestions while collaborating with other ghouls.

The AI now generates 3D specters and copies art styles from any design like a creative vampire.

Canva's connecting its possessed spreadsheet product with its app-building dark magic, letting users create data visualization widgets from spreadsheet data—basically digital Ouija boards.

The company launched Canva Grow, an all-in-one marketing platform using AI for asset creation and performance analytics. It acquired ad analytics company MagicBrief earlier this year. Marketers can publish ads directly to platforms like Meta—spreading their curse far and wide.

New products include forms for collecting souls—err, responses—email design tools for marketing and transactional spells, and tight integration with Affinity, the professional design suite Canva possessed last year.

Affinity is now free forever for Canva users—like a vampire's gift that keeps on taking. The company's redesigning Affinity's interface to merge vector, pixel, and layout tools under one cursed interface. Designers can create objects in Affinity and move them into Canva, or use Canva AI to generate images within Affinity.

Why this is important:

Editable layers solve a fundamental problem with AI-generated designs—they're usually dead on arrival.

Current tools like Midjourney or DALL-E produce flat corpses. Want to change text color or move an element? You resurrect the entire image. Canva's model outputs structured designs where every element is editable—like a design that refuses to die.

That's the difference between a tool designers use once (then stake through the heart) versus one they integrate into their eternal workflow.

The Affinity integration is Canva's direct hex at Adobe. Affinity competes with Photoshop, Illustrator, and InDesign. Making it free for Canva users while tightly integrating both platforms creates a complete design underworld.

Canva Grow with MagicBrief analytics positions Canva beyond creation into measurement—basically necromancy meets analytics. That's attacking Adobe's Creative Cloud plus tools like Sprout Social in a coordinated haunting.

Our personal take on it at OpenTools:

The layer-based generation is genuinely bewitching.

Most AI design tools are parlor tricks for designers—nice for a midnight séance but useless for real work. You get a pretty ghost, then rebuild it manually because nothing's editable. Canva's solving that by training models that understand design structure, not just haunted pixels.

Making Affinity free is aggressively cursed. Adobe charges $60/month for Creative Cloud. Canva's giving away professional-grade tools to trap users' souls in its ecosystem—classic vampire strategy.

The spreadsheet-to-widget pipeline is niche but dark magic. No-code tools that connect data sources to visualizations without summoning developers are valuable for small covens.

Canva Grow is the sleeper haunting. If they nail creation plus analytics plus direct ad publishing to the spirit realm, that's a complete marketing necromancy stack. Canva becomes the operating system for marketing teams possessed by deadlines, not just a design tool.

The risk is feature bloat—like a zombie that keeps adding limbs. Forms, emails, spreadsheets, apps, analytics, professional design tools. That's a lot of cursed surface area. Adobe's struggled with this for years and they're already undead.

But if Canva can keep the interface simple while adding power user features through Affinity, they've threaded the needle Adobe never could—without selling their soul.

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This Week in Workflow Wednesday #43: AI in Action – Real-World Workflow Transformations

This week, I’ll show you how to use ProWritingAid to take customer-facing text and actually see where readers might lose attention. It’s like running a usability test—on your writing.

Workflow #1: Transform Customer Communication with AI-Powered Writing (ProWritingAid, free trial).

Step 1: Sign up, upload your text, or paste it straight into the editor.
Step 2: Head to the top bar and click the Summary Report (4th from the left). You’ll see a breakdown across grammar, readability, sticky sentences, engagement score—basically the hotspots where readers…We dive into this ProWritingAid workflow and 2 more real-world AI transformations in this week’s Workflow Wednesday.

🧛‍♀️ What Else Lurks in the Shadows…

• Intel eyes chip startup SambaNova — possibly to resurrect its AI GPU dreams that never quite lived.

• AI models flatter users too much, according to a new study — maybe they’re just trying to charm their way into our hearts (or data).

• Lawmakers warn against shipping Nvidia’s chips to China — saying it would drain America’s AI advantage like a vampire at midnight.

👩🏼‍🚒Discover mind-blowing AI tools

1. Wave.video - Live streaming studio, video editor, thumbnail maker, video hosting, video recording, and stock library combined in one platform

2. Verbalate - A video translation and lip sync software designed to help businesses reach a global audience

3. SlangThesaurus - Allows you to effortlessly turn basic text into trendy internet slang, with customizable slang levels from 1 to 5

4. ChefGPT - An AI-powered recipe recommendation tool that suggests recipes based on the ingredients and tools you have