Good morning, AI enthusiasts. One of journalism’s last major AI holdouts just fell — with the New York Times officially signing its first-ever AI licensing deal with Amazon.

Despite ongoing lawsuits against OpenAI and Microsoft, a change in user habits (and financial streams for editorial outlets) may be forcing a decisive new chapter in the industry’s uneasy AI embrace.

In today’s AI rundown:

• NYT signs AI licensing agreement with Amazon

• Black Forest Labs’ new image editing model

• Automate patient consultation documentation

• AI achieves first peer-reviewed paper acceptance

• 4 new AI tools & 4 job opportunities

LATEST DEVELOPMENTS

THE NEW YORK TIMES & AMAZON

📰 NYT signs AI licensing agreement with Amazon

Image source: Gemini / The Rundown

The Rundown: The New York Times just struck its first-ever AI licensing deal with Amazon, allowing the company to use NYT editorial content across its platforms and to train its AI models.

The details:

• The multi-year deal covers licensed content, including articles from the Times, recipes from NYT Cooking, and sports content from The Athletic.

• Amazon will incorporate the content into products like Alexa smart speakers, which will attribute NYT content and provide links for a full reader experience.

• The deal is the NYT’s first AI licensing deal, and comes amidst ongoing lawsuits against OpenAI and Microsoft over the use of its content for training.

Why it matters: One of the last major holdouts in journalism is finally giving in to the AI wave — but is notably (though unsurprisingly, at least in OpenAI’s case) going with Amazon over stronger AI rivals. The tech has quickly changed how and where users consume content, and even the staunchest detractors are now changing course.

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BLACK FOREST LABS

🎆 Black Forest Labs’ new image editing model

Image source: Black Forest Labs

The Rundown: Black Forest Labs just launched FLUX.1 Kontext, a new AI system that understands both text and images — enabling users to edit and transform images with simple text commands while maintaining character consistency across iterations.

The details:

• Unlike other text-to-image models, Kontext processes visual and text inputs together, enabling targeted editing at speeds up to 8x faster than rival models.

• The system excels at character preservation, local editing, style transfer, and maintaining consistency across multiple steps and versions of an image.

• BFL released two versions: Kontext [pro] for fast multi-step editing and [max] for higher quality, better prompt following, and enhanced typography.

• The company also introduced Playground, a web-based platform for businesses to test models before integrating them via APIs.

Why it matters: OpenAI’s 4o / gpt-image-1 release was a major step forward in editing via text prompts, but often appears to recreate its own rendering of an image rather than preserving important details for specific characters. BFL’s latest release looks to be a step up in maintaining consistency at much faster speeds.

AI TRAINING

🏥 Automate patient consultation documentation

The Rundown: In this tutorial, you will learn how to build an automated system that transcribes your patient consultations, generates medical summaries, extracts treatment plans, and compiles everything into a document.

Step-by-step:

1. Visit Zapier Agents, click the plus button, and create a “New Agent”

2. Configure your agent to trigger when new (anonymized) audio files are uploaded to a specified folder in Google Drive

3. Add three essential tools: ChatGPT to transcribe the audio, ChatGPT again to create a medical summary and extract treatment recommendations, and Google Docs to compile everything into a structured clinical document

4. Test your setup with simulated data and activate your agent

Note: Always obtain patient consent before recording, remove identifiable info before processing, and ensure storage methods comply with healthcare privacy regulations.

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INTOLOGY AI

🧪 AI achieves first peer-reviewed paper acceptance

Image source: Intology

The Rundown: Intology AI's Zochi just became the first AI to independently achieve peer-reviewed publication at ACL 2025, an A* natural language processing conference, showing the ability to conduct scientific research at the highest academic standards.

The details:

• Zochi autonomously completed the entire research process, from analyzing thousands of papers to designing experiments and writing the manuscript.

• The system's "Tempest" paper on multi-turn jailbreaking achieved a 4.0 meta-review score, placing it in the top 8.2% of all ACL submissions.

• Operating without human intervention except for formatting fixes, Zochi identified research gaps, implemented new methods, and validated results.

• Intology plans to release Zochi in beta as a collaborative research tool, starting with a general copilot before expanding to full autonomous capabilities.

Why it matters: We’ve seen plenty of competition in the AI scientist arena, but ACL’s selective acceptance rate and the paper’s score reflect one of the most impressive publications to date from an agentic system. As AI begins contributing original research alongside humans, the pace of discovery is about to exponentially increase.

QUICK HITS

🛠️ Trending AI Tools

• 🤖 DeepSeek R1 - New upgraded reasoning and overall improvements

• 🖥️ Neon - Opera’s new agentic web browser

• 🎥 Gemini in Drive - Summarize and ask questions about Google Drive videos

• 🛠️ Retool Agents - Turn your APIs & data into tools AI workers can use

💼 AI Job Opportunities

• 🤖 Scale AI - Field Engineering Manager, Robotics

• 💻 Captions - Software Engineer, Backend

• 📊 Cresta - Revenue Operations Data Analyst

• 🧠 Grammarly - Strategic Programs Lead

📰 Everything else in AI today

DeepSeek’s new update to its R1 model moved into the No. 3 slot on the Artificial Analysis leaderboard, now behind only OpenAI’s o3 and o4-mini.

Tencent’s Hunyuan released HunyuanVideo-Avatar, an open-source model that turns still images into short videos with sound.

Perplexity launched Labs, a new feature for Pro users that enables content creation like analytical reports, through multi-tool integrations for more complex tasks.

Hume released EVI 3, a new speech language model that creates custom voices through speech-to-speech interaction and outperforms OpenAI's GPT-4o in testing.

Resemble AI open-sourced Chatterbox, a free new voice cloning model that the company claims surpasses leaders like ElevenLabs in testing.

Manus introduced Manus Slides, a new feature allowing the agentic system to create tailored slide decks autonomously.

COMMUNITY

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See you soon,

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