Daily TEA – Fintechs Become Banks, Agents Eat Commerce, and Zoom’s AI Levels Up

PayPal Bank, agentic commerce, Zoom AI, Musk chips, ChatGPT apps

Dec 16, 2025

Hello, dear TEA-mates—here’s what you need to know today.

1.💳PayPal Moves to Create Its Own Bank

PayPal has filed applications with the Utah Department of Financial Institutions and the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation to establish “PayPal Bank,” an industrial loan company charter that would let it offer small-business loans and interest-bearing savings accounts directly. The company says the bank would expand access to capital for U.S. small businesses, reduce its reliance on third-party banks, and allow it to seek direct membership with card networks to streamline processing and settlement. Executives frame the move as a way to strengthen PayPal’s core lending operations and improve efficiency as fintechs deepen their push into regulated banking. Read More

🫖 TEA For Thought: Who would have thought that a payment app would one day become a bank—especially one that first won by positioning itself as an alternative to traditional banking; “PayPal Bank” feels like a concession to regulation in a world where, over time, AI, blockchain, and decentralized infrastructure could render banks, middlemen, and agencies obsolete.

2.🛒Klarna Unveils Open Agentic Product Protocol for AI Commerce

Klarna has launched its Agentic Product Protocol, an open standard that makes more than 100 million products and 400 million prices across 12 markets machine-readable and instantly discoverable by AI agents. The protocol gives participating merchants a standardized, real-time feed of product data, while AI agents that support the standard can tap into this feed to find, compare, and recommend items with live pricing and availability across retailers. Klarna is positioning the protocol as a foundational “common language” for agentic commerce, inviting merchants, developers, and AI platforms to integrate via its hosted API and help build a broader ecosystem around AI-driven shopping. Read More

🫖 TEA For Thought: This is a real milestone: by opening the Agentic Product Protocol to everyone, Klarna standardizes merchant data so any supporting AI agent can access the freshest product information—paving the way for a full agentic commerce ecosystem where whoever controls the protocol effectively sets the rules of the game.

3.🤝Zoom’s “Federated AI” Sets New Benchmark on Humanity’s Last Exam

Zoom announced that its AI system has achieved a 48.1% score on Humanity’s Last Exam, a demanding benchmark designed to test expert-level knowledge and multi-step reasoning, marking a new state-of-the-art result. Instead of relying on a single massive model, Zoom uses a “federated AI” approach, orchestrating multiple models—including smaller in-house systems and third-party models—and selecting the best response for each task. The company argues this strategy not only improves benchmark performance but also leads to more accurate summaries, better action-item extraction, and more reliable automation in real-world workplace tools. Read More

🫖 TEA For Thought: Zoom is showing other companies that you don’t need to own the biggest model to win—you just need to be the smartest at choosing which model to use for each job.

4.🏭Elon Musk to Have Office Inside Samsung’s US Chip Fab

Elon Musk is set to have his own office at Samsung’s new semiconductor facility in Taylor, Texas, underscoring Tesla’s deepening partnership with Samsung on advanced AI chips. The on-site presence is meant to enable tighter, real-time coordination on chip design and production for Tesla’s autonomous driving and robotics efforts, as the company leans harder into securing cutting-edge, U.S.-based semiconductor capacity. The arrangement highlights how critical custom AI hardware has become to Tesla’s roadmap and reflects Musk’s hands-on style in overseeing key technology programs. Read More

🫖 TEA For Thought: This is classic Elon Musk—living at the office, obsessing over one critical problem, and refusing to leave until it’s solved.

5.📱How to Build Your First ChatGPT App Inside the OpenAI Ecosystem

A new guide from High Growth Engineer walks developers through building a first ChatGPT app, outlining how to combine a React-based frontend component with an MCP (Model Context Protocol) backend server so apps can run directly inside ChatGPT. The tutorial covers defining tools on the server, bundling the UI as a resource, and letting ChatGPT decide when to invoke the app based on user conversations, using an example restaurant search app to illustrate the end-to-end flow. Framed as a practical on-ramp for engineers and founders, the piece positions the emerging ChatGPT app ecosystem as a distribution platform where AI-native apps can be discovered, embedded, and orchestrated by the model itself. Read More

🫖 TEA For Thought: This is a great read, and it helps explain why Sam Altman says Google Gemini is not OpenAI’s real competitor—the true rivalry is Apple, because ChatGPT wants to become the Apple App Store of AI.