Our first ASPIRE AI Workshop of 2026 is a wrap.
On Saturday, participants came in with a wide range of experience. Some were brand new to AI, while others had already started experimenting with it. By the end of the day, they had moved from learning the fundamentals to building and pitching practical business ideas and solutions.
That is the core of the ASPIRE model: treating AI fluency as a practical skill. It is not about technical jargon or passive consumption. It is about learning how to use these tools with intention, communicate clearly, and create something useful.
Our next ASPIRE Workshop is June 27. If you are looking to build your AI fluency, or if your organization wants to equip a team with practical, hands-on training, learn more at blacktechstreet.com.
PC: @mikecreefproductions
“A game changing win for Black Wall Street.”
@blacktechstreet has signed a landmark deal with global tech giant @nvidia to advance Tulsa as a model for AI innovation, education and economic empowerment.
Through this collaboration, Black Tech Street and NVIDIA will partner with Tulsa’s Tech Hub, the local community, and the State of Oklahoma to integrate NVIDIA’s cutting-edge technologies and expertise. The partnership will expand AI education across the region, empowering learners through comprehensive programs with @langstonuniversity , @okstate , @tulsacc , and community organizations.
It will also catalyze economic growth in the Greenwood District by supporting tech startups and creating high-paying jobs in the AI sector. And on a national scale, it will establish Tulsa—through Greenwood—as a model for how communities can integrate and lead in the AI era.
For Black Tech Street founder @tyrancebillingsleyii (pictured), the partnership represents a turning point: “To have them standing with us in Greenwood, committing to help our community harness and lead this revolution, means more than I can articulate. A game-changing win for Black Wall Street.”
*Hub meaning a relationship where resources will be shared and collaboration to reach our shared goals. Not physical space*
Is ChatGPT back on top?
OpenAI just dropped ChatGPT Images 2.0 with sharper textures, better lighting, and complex prompts that actually land without the weird artifacts we’ve all been clowning on for years.
Midjourney and Firefly have been setting the bar.
This update puts ChatGPT back in that conversation.
The gap between AI and real visuals just got a lot smaller.
OpenAI just dropped GPT-5.5 and this might be the one. Same speed, but better results with fewer tokens. It handles coding research, data anal, without having to swap between models, so everything runs in one flow.
Benchmarks have it ahead of Claude Opus 4.7 and Gemini 3.1 Pro across most categories. The only area it doesn’t fully pull away is browsing, and that gap is narrow.
If you’ve been sleeping on upgrading your AI stack, this is your sign.
OpenAI just closed a funding round that values the company at $852 billion. They also rolled out a redesigned ChatGPT that pulls chat, coding, search, and agents into one place.
Not just a chat tool anymore, it’s a full productivity platform. 900 million people are using it every week. View the slides for full details.
ASPIRE AI Workshop is in 12 days.
If you’ve been saying “I need to learn AI” for the past year, this is your chance to actually do it.
April 18th. Greenwood. Everything you need; laptops, food, and even childcare is provided.
Link in bio
Big things happening at Black Tech Street. We’re excited to welcome AItoine Johnson as the new Head of ASPIRE.
His hobbies include generating images with six fingers, hallucinating statistics, and responding “As an AI language model...” in casual conversation.
He starts Monday. Please be patient. He’s still loading.
Happy April Fools. The real ASPIRE team is very much human. Come meet them April 18th.
blacktechstreet.ai/aspire
the scariest thing about AI isn’t AI. it’s watching everyone else figure it out while you’re still frozen. April 18th fixes that. blacktechstreet.ai/aspire
AI is changing everything right now.
Not next year. Right now.
And most people are watching from the sidelines because nobody showed them how to actually use it.
That’s what ASPIRE is for. April 18th. Hands on. You walk out building, not wondering.
blacktechstreet.ai/aspire
#BlackTechStreet #ASPIRE #AIWorkshop #Greenwood
Black Tech Street just hit the floor at NVIDIA GTC 2026. If I had to sum up the entire experience in one word, it’s this: infrastructure.
Between the new AI factories, massive data center upgrades, and enterprise applications driven by NVIDIA, Microsoft, and Google Cloud, the shift is undeniable.
AI is no longer just a feature it’s the foundation.
A few major takeaways from the floor:
Autonomous mobility is moving at lightspeed.
Hardware setups are being built for massive, real-time compute.
Cloud + AI integrations are making elite-level tech genuinely accessible.
The industry is pivoting from building isolated products to massive, interconnected ecosystems.
Seeing this shift firsthand reinforces exactly why we do what we do.
Through our ASPIRE program, we’re doing way more than just teaching people how to write a prompt.
We’re getting our community ready to understand this tech at a structural level, apply it, and actually lead the industry.
Because the communities that get fluent first are the ones who get to build what's next.
Perplexity just announced something that essentially turns a dedicated Mac into an AI employee.
They’re calling it “Personal Computer.” It’s an always-on AI system running locally (think: sitting on a dedicated Mac mini) that actually has access to your files, apps, and sessions.
The pitch is pretty wild: you give it a task, walk away, and it just keeps working in the background.
It’s a big step up from their standard cloud agent. Because it has local access to your machine, it can handle the heavy lifting—like deep research, drafting documents, or juggling messy, multi-step workflows with real context.
They did build in some guardrails. You still have to approve the sensitive stuff, every action gets logged, and there is a hard kill switch if things go off the rails. Still, this definitely feels less like a chatbot and way more like a true AI operating layer.
