Good morning, AI enthusiasts. Former OpenAI CTO Mira Murati has kept her new startup quiet since launching in February — but that didn’t stop investors from betting a fresh $2B on whatever she's building.

With Thinking Machine Labs now valued at $12B and promising multimodal AI with a “major open-source component” in the coming months, the countdown to their first product has become one of the AI world's most anticipated reveals.

Member note: The Rundown has secured 500 private invitations for Perplexity Comet. Unique codes are available now for full members of The Rundown University.

In today’s AI rundown:

• Thinking Machine Labs raises $2B, nears product launch

• Runway’s Act-Two for AI motion capture

• Automate personalized sales outreach at scale

• AI researchers unite on reasoning transparency

• 4 new AI tools & 4 job opportunities

LATEST DEVELOPMENTS

THINKING MACHINES LAB

💰 Thinking Machine Labs raises $2B, nears product launch

Image source: Getty Images

The Rundown: Former OpenAI CTO Mira Murati just announced a new $2B seed raise for her startup, Thinking Machines Lab AI, also revealing that the secretive company will share its first product in “the next couple of months.”

The details:

• The $2B seed round brings the company’s value to $12B, less than a year after its creation, with no product and little public information on direction.

• Murati said the startup’s first product will feature “a major open-source component” for researchers and startups building custom models.

• She also revealed the lab is building multimodal AI that collaborates with users in natural interactions via conversation and sight.

• The Information recently reported that TML is planning to develop custom AI models to help businesses increase profits.

Why it matters: With fierce competition among the current AI leaders, it’s easy to forget the two former OpenAI heavyweights in TML and SSI are still in stealth mode. Despite little info or product, Murati has had no shortage of investor (and acquisition) interest — making the startup’s first release a big one to watch in the coming months.

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RUNWAY

🎬 Runway’s Act-Two for AI motion capture

Image source: Runway

The Rundown: Runway just launched Act-Two, the company’s next-gen motion capture model that translates single performance videos into fully animated characters with head, face, body, and hand tracking across artistic styles and outputs.

The details:

• The system captures subtle facial expressions, upper body movements, hands, and backgrounds from a single driving performance video.

• Requiring just a single character reference photo, Act-Two animates and maps the driving video while maintaining backgrounds and art styles.

• Runway claims the model delivers major performance gains over October 2024’s Act-One release, particularly in consistency, fidelity, and movement.

• The company has inked partnerships with Hollywood players like Lionsgate and AMC Networks, pushing to further infuse AI into filmmaking workflows.

Why it matters: While AI adoption in Hollywood is publicly frowned upon, it’s privately being adopted en masse — and few companies are pushing that shift harder than Runway. With creative models continuing to evolve at a wild pace, AI’s use in the industry is coming, whether fans and actors want it or not.

AI TRAINING

📧 Automate personalized sales outreach at scale

The Rundown: In this tutorial, you will learn how to create a Zapier AI agent that automatically researches companies from your spreadsheet and drafts personalized sales emails, saving hours of manual outreach.

Step-by-step:

1. Create a new Zapier agent and set the trigger to “On demand”

2. Write detailed instructions: research company → populate contact info → draft personalized email → generate subject and body

3. Connect the Google Sheets tool and select your leads spreadsheet with company, name, and email columns

4. Add Gmail integration with “Create Draft” option (not send) for review control

5. Test with a small batch, review generated drafts, then scale to the full lead list.

Pro tip: Always use “Create Draft” instead of “Send Email” so you can review and refine each message before it goes out.

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• Let AI handle design, validation, and deployment to Code Engine automatically

• Manage standards and cut manual steps for fast API delivery

• Harness agentic AI to turn your API ideas into secured, production-ready reality

Try API Agent today.

AI RESEARCH

🧠 AI researchers unite on reasoning transparency

Image source: Ideogram / The Rundown

The Rundown: Leading researchers from OpenAI, DeepMind, Anthropic, and other major institutions published a paper calling for deeper investigation into monitoring the "chains of thought" in AI reasoning models, arguing it could be a vital safety tool.

The details:

• The paper highlights “chain-of-thought” (CoT) traces, the model’s step-by-step problem-solving paths, as a rare window into model decision-making.

• The researchers call for a deeper study of tracking these reasoning processes, warning that transparency could erode as models evolve or training shifts.

• Notable signatories include OpenAI's Mark Chen, SSI's Ilya Sutskever, Nobel laureate Geoffrey Hinton, and DeepMind co-founder Shane Legg.

• Researchers propose developing standardized evaluations for "monitorability" and incorporating these scores into deployment decisions for frontier models.

Why it matters: This rare moment of industry consensus highlights a critical inflection point where we can still see AI's decision-making process — and the concern that competitive pressures may eventually lead to that window being closed if AI labs don’t act to preserve it.

QUICK HITS

🛠️ Trending AI Tools

• 🤗 AI Companions - xAI’s new Grok-powered interactive avatars

• 🗣️ Voxtral - Mistral’s first open-source voice model for speech understanding

• 📓 NotebookLM - New featured notebooks for expert advice on specific topics

• 📚 Claude Directory - A new directory of tools that connect to Claude

💼 AI Job Opportunities

• 🗂️ Deepmind - Administrative Business Partner

• 💡 Cresta - Demo Engineer

• 🤝 Databricks - Associate Account Executive

• 🏗️ Glean - Solutions Architect

📰 Everything else in AI today

Mistral unveiled Voxtral, a low-cost, open-source speech understanding model family that combines transcription with native Q&A capabilities.

Google revealed that its AI security agent, Big Sleep, discovered a critical security flaw that allowed Google to stop the vulnerability before it was exploited.

U.S. President Donald Trump announced over $92B in AI and energy investments at a Pennsylvania summit, saying America’s destiny is to be the “AI superpower.”

Google is investing $25B in data centers and AI infrastructure across the PJM electric grid region, including $3B to modernize Pennsylvania hydropower plants.

Anthropic launched Claude for Financial Services, a solution that integrates Claude with market data and enterprise platforms for financial institutions.

Nvidia plans to resume sales of its H20 AI chip to China after CEO Jensen Huang received assurances from U.S. leadership, with AMD also resuming sales in the region.

COMMUNITY

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See you soon,

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