Good morning, AI enthusiasts. Marketing is already undergoing some drastic changes in the AI era, but Mark Zuckerberg’s latest push aims to take the entire advertising process out of human hands.

With just a product photo and a budget, Meta’s rumored 2026 system would handle everything from visuals, copy, user targeting, and deployment — potentially upending social media marketing as we know it.

In today’s AI rundown:

• Meta’s fully automated AI ad platform

• Microsoft offers free Sora access on Bing

• How to automate coding tasks with async development

• Sakana’s AI learns to upgrade its own code

• 4 new AI tools & 4 job opportunities

LATEST DEVELOPMENTS

META

🤖 Meta’s fully automated AI ad platform

Image source: o3 / The Rundown

The Rundown: Meta aims to release tools that eliminate humans from the advertising process by 2026, according to a report from the WSJ — developing an AI that can create ads for Facebook and Instagram using just a product image and budget.

The details:

• Companies would submit product images and budgets, letting AI craft the text and visuals, select target audiences, and manage campaign placement.

• The system will be able to create personalized ads that can adapt in real-time, like a car spot featuring mountains vs. an urban street based on user location.

• The push would target smaller companies lacking dedicated marketing staff, promising professional-grade advertising without agency fees or skillset.

• Advertising is a core part of Mark Zuckerberg’s AI strategy and already accounts for 97% of Meta’s annual revenue.

Why it matters: We’re already seeing AI transform advertising through image, video, and text, but Zuck’s vision takes the process entirely out of human hands. With so much marketing flowing through FB and IG, a successful system would be a major disruptor — particularly for small brands that just want results without the hassle.

TOGETHER WITH UNSTRUCTURED

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The Rundown: Building your own data processing pipeline starts simple, but scaling it is another story — with a few scripts and connectors quickly turning into a tangled mess of never-ending fixes and updates.

Unstructured replaces the DIY rat’s nest with:

• Coverage across 35+ data sources and 64+ file types with zero maintenance overhead

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Get started today!

MICROSOFT

🎥 Microsoft offers free Sora access on Bing

Image source: Microsoft

The Rundown: Microsoft just announced Bing Video Creator, integrating OpenAI’s Sora video generation model into the Bing mobile app and allowing users to create five-second outputs from text descriptions with no subscription required.

The details:

• Users get 10 fast video generations and unlimited slower generations, and can earn more fast credits through Microsoft's rewards program.

• The feature launches on Bing’s iOS and Android mobile apps, with desktop and Copilot Search releases coming soon.

• Videos are currently limited to vertical format and 5-second clips, with up to three videos able to be created simultaneously.

Why it matters: Sora was one of the more hyped products in AI, but failed to live up to expectations and was quickly surpassed by rival models. But most generators have been stowed behind subscriptions — meaning a new user base may be exposed to a free (albeit limited) video creation option for the first time.

AI TRAINING

🤖 How to automate coding tasks with async development

The Rundown: In this tutorial, you will learn how to use Google’s async development agent Jules to automatically fix bugs, add features, and handle software engineering tasks in your GitHub repositories.

Step-by-step:

1. Visit Jules and connect your GitHub account to access your repositories

2. Select your specific repository and branch from the dropdown menus

3. Describe your task in the chat: “Write me a README file” or “Fix the authentication bug”

4. Review the plan, click “Approve,” let it work asynchronously, and then “Publish Branch” when done! 🚀

Pro tip: You get 60 daily tasks that refresh every 24 hours, so you can use Jules completely free of charge for your most repetitive coding work.

PRESENTED BY HACKERRANK

😵 AI broke the technical interview

The Rundown: Hiring managers report candidates acing assessments with answers they later can’t explain. HackerRank’s new interview features close this gap by giving deeper insight into how candidates think and solve problems in realistic, controlled settings.

With HackerRank, you can:

• Enforce AI-use with real-time integrity alerts

• Watch candidates prompt built in AI

• Test skills in live code repos

Learn more.

SAKANA AI

🧠 Sakana’s AI learns to upgrade its own code

Image source: Sakana AI

The Rundown: Researchers from Sakana AI and the University of British Columbia just introduced the Darwin Gödel Machine, an AI agent that rewrites its own code to get better at tasks, achieving up to 150% performance improvements without intervention.

The details:

• DGM starts as a coding assistant, but autonomously discovers improvements like editing tools, error memory, and peer review capabilities.

• It significantly boosted its performance in coding benchmarks, jumping from 20% to 50% on SWE-bench and 14% to over 30% on Polyglot.

• Inspired by Darwinian evolution, DGM tries out changes to its code, keeps what works, and archives promising "mutations" for future improvements.

• The self-taught improvements also made the AI perform better when the underlying model was swapped out, showing it wasn’t unique to a single model.

Why it matters: While most AI models are frozen post-training and reliant on manual new version releases, DGM is a shift toward AI that can learn and improve itself over time. This self-evolution could accelerate AI far beyond initial training, but also introduces risks of maintaining control as systems become increasingly autonomous.

QUICK HITS

🛠️ Trending AI Tools

• 🗣️ Conversational AI 2.0 - ElevenLab’s updated AI voice agent platform

• ⚙️ Google Edge Gallery - Deploy AI across mobile, web, and embedded apps

• 🔌 Circuit Tracing - Anthropic's open source tools to see how AI thinks

• 🔬 Zochi — Intology’s PhD-level AI agent

💼 AI Job Opportunities

• 📞 The Rundown - Account Manager

• 😊 UiPath - Customer Success Manager

• 🤝 Writer - Engagement Manager

• 🎯 OpenAI - Executive Programs Lead

📰 Everything else in AI today

Samsung is reportedly in talks with AI startup Perplexity to integrate the platform’s app, assistant, and search features across new Samsung devices.

PlayAI open-sourced PlayDiffusion, an audio inpainting model capable of precise voice output modifications without disrupting natural flow.

Captions launched Mirage Studio, a platform that generates hyper-realistic videos with AI actors from audio or scripts for UGC and marketing content.

Character AI unveiled multimodal creation tools, including AvatarFX image-to-video, interactive Scenes, Streams for character interactions, and animated chat sharing.

IBM announced watsonx AI Labs, an innovation hub in New York City aimed at increasing enterprise AI adoption — also acquiring data analysis startup Seek AI.

The U.S. Food & Drug Administration launched Elsa, an agency-wide AI platform to help speed clinical reviews and scientific evaluations.

COMMUNITY

🎥 Watch our last live workshop

Check out our last workshop with Dr. Alvaro Cintas, The Rundown’s AI professor. By the end of the workshop, you’ll confidently be able to use AI coding agents to improve your development workflow.

Watch here. Not a member? Join The Rundown University on a 14-day free trial.

See you soon,

Rowan, Joey, Zach, Alvaro, and Jason—The Rundown’s editorial team