Third ChatGPT default this year

gm legends, happy Thursday.

Luma's new reasoning model says it understands what you want before it generates anything; reMarkable shipped a $399 tablet with fewer features than its own Pro on purpose; OpenAI swapped ChatGPT's default model again.

P.S. Don't forget to schedule your launch by midnight tonight for a chance to nab a YC interview

Luma Uni 1.1 API is a reasoning model from Luma AI — the team behind Dream Machine and Photon — that runs a dedicated intent-interpretation step before generation, so it reasons about what you actually want (style, mood, constraints) before producing the first output.

🔥 Our Take: Most image and video models treat your prompt as a string and start generating immediately — you iterate until it's close. Luma's claim is that there's a reasoning step first: it works out what "feels like a 1970s science textbook" actually means before touching a pixel. If that's real, it changes how you prompt creative AI — less iteration, fewer hacks to get what you meant. Worth testing against the models you already use.

The Pitch by Deel hit Tel Aviv today — 46 founders pitched live for a $50,000 SAFE investment, with the top performers across all cities advancing to the Global Finale on May 18–19 for a shot at $1M. By the time you're reading this, the pitches are done.

The leaderboard is still live. Every startup that competed today launched on our special Pitch by Deel leaderboard — 46 products across fintech, healthtech, AI, and deep tech. Go give them some love.

Next up: Singapore on May 12, Dubai on May 14, then the Global Finale on May 18–19.

reMarkable Paper Pure is a $399 E Ink writing tablet replacing the reMarkable 2 — deliberately stripped back from the Paper Pro: monochrome display, no backlight, 10.3-inch screen, 360 grams — shipping June 2026 as the company's entry-level position in a market it helped define.

🔥 Our Take: They have a color, backlit, 11.8-inch Pro at $629. They chose to sell a monochrome, no-backlight, smaller device at $399 anyway. That's either disciplined segmentation — there are genuinely people who prefer monochrome for focus — or a margin play dressed as product philosophy. Engadget's verdict was "great hardware held back by bad philosophy," which suggests the hardware itself isn't the question.

GPT-5.5 Instant is OpenAI's new default model for ChatGPT — replacing the previous default as the standard response engine for all users as of May 7, the third model OpenAI has shipped in this series in under three months.

🔥 Our Take: "Instant" in the name is doing work — this is a latency bet, not a capability leap. The interesting question isn't whether it's better. It's whether the free tier is now good enough that the case for upgrading gets harder to make, which is a problem OpenAI created for itself.