Happy New Year, AI enthusiasts! 2025 is in the books, and it was another wild year of technological advances, scientific breakthroughs, worldwide adoption, eye-popping investments, and reality-TV-level drama across the AI world.

To ring in 2026, we’re recapping some of the biggest stories and milestones from the past twelve months. Thanks to all our readers for coming along for the AI ride with us!

In today’s AI rundown:

• The Rundown’s 2025 year-in-review

• The AI moments that defined 2025

• Use Claude for Chrome to book business trips

• 4 new AI tools, community workflows, and more

LATEST DEVELOPMENTS

THE RUNDOWN

🎉 The Rundown’s 2025 year in review

Image source: Nano Banana Pro / The Rundown

The Rundown: 2025 was a monumental year for The Rundown, marked by interviews with some of the biggest names in AI, rapid growth across our community, and the expansion of both our education platform and AI, Tech, and Robotics newsletters.

Our 2025 year in review:

• Hit our 1M subscriber milestone for The Rundown AI in February, with the overall community growing to over 2M+ readers across publications.

• Interviews with Sam Altman (OAI), Mark Zuckerberg (Meta), Satya Nadella (Microsoft), Demis Hassabis (Google), & Dharmesh Shah (HubSpot).

• Scaled our AI University live workshops with brands like Canva, Zapier, and Windsurf, and launched dozens of new certificate course tracks.

• Expanded our coverage across industries with The Rundown Robotics and The Rundown Tech, growing to nearly 800k combined subscribers.

• Launched new sections for our AI newsletter including “Community AI workflows” and Monday “Rundown Roundtable“

A look into 2026: Next year, we’re putting a big focus on driving more value through community. Expect more free live workshops, deeper integrations with social platforms, and more opportunities to connect and discuss with likeminded AI enthusiasts. We’ll also be scaling up more exclusive Q&As with AI leaders and video content!

TOGETHER WITH LIGHTFIELD

📊 The CRM that updates itself

The Rundown: Lightfield is an AI-native CRM designed for startups. It captures every email, call, and meeting automatically, so nothing stays stuck in your head. 1,000+ startups have used Lightfield to automate CRM data entry, so they can spend more time on selling and less time on admin.

Lightfield gives founders:

• Automated meeting prep built from your full history with the account

• Suggested post-call tasks and follow-ups after every meeting

• An AI agent that researches accounts and drafts emails

• A generative chat experience to answer any question about your business

Try Lightfield for free — just connect your email and calendar and watch your CRM build itself.

AI IN 2025

🗓️ The AI moments that defined 2025

Image source: Nano Banana Pro / The Rundown

The Rundown: From trillion-dollar infrastructure bets to market-shaking efficiency breakthroughs, 2025 was another year of non-stop news in the AI world. Below is our recap of some of the most impactful stories that shaped the industry over the past year.

2025’s biggest headlines included:

• The “DeepSeek Moment”, Jan.: China's R1 model release shook both the AI world and U.S. financial markets, triggering a $600B single-day loss for Nvidia.

• The Stargate Project, Jan.: OpenAI, SoftBank, and Oracle launched a $500B AI infrastructure initiative — now nearing $1.4T in total commitments.

• Claude Code, Feb.: Anthropic released its agentic coding tool, which became the launch that helped set the stage for the CLI agent movement.

• Meta’s talent war, June: Zuck and co.’s poaching spree was the talk of the summer, snagging elite researchers from top labs with massive pay packages.

• Nano Banana, Aug.: OpenAI started the Ghibli trend with gpt-image-1, but Google’s Nano Banana marked a new era of image editing and consistency.

• AI Video Breakthroughs, Sept.: OpenAI’s Sora 2 and Google’s Veo 3.1 went viral and raised major questions on the future of media.

AI TRAINING

🏨 Use Claude for Chrome to book business trips

The Rundown: In this tutorial, you will learn how to set up Claude to control your browser and automate hours of travel research, pulling together a list of recommended hotels with up-to-date pricing and availability in a Google Sheet.

Step-by-step:

1. Install the "Claude in Chrome" extension from Chrome webstore, then navigate to it and type /shortcuts → "Create Shortcut" named /hotel-picker

2. Prompt: "When searching hotels on Booking.com: (1) Filter 'Hotels' only, (2) Apply distance/star rating filters (default 4+ stars), (3) Find top 10 based on criteria AND reviews (8.5+ Booking.com, 4+ TripAdvisor), (4) Prioritize modern properties with amenities. Return the top 10 sorted by value"

3. Create a Google Sheet with headers: Hotel Name, Price per Night, Rating, Distance to Downtown, Amenities, Booking Link—then copy the sheet’s URL

4. Test: "I'm traveling to [location] from [date]. Find hotels within 1 mile of downtown under [price per night]. Navigate to [YOUR SPREADSHEET URL] and add a row for each hotel. Sort by best value"

Pro tip: Create a Chrome profile for Claude to control which logins it has access to.

PRESENTED BY YOU.COM

💪 Start 2026 right with the AI training your team needs

The Rundown: AI implementation can go sideways due to unclear goals and a lack of skills. Ensure your team is ready to harness the full potential of your AI investment with this AI Training Checklist from You.com. Set your team—and your AI initiatives—up for success in the new year.

Get the checklist to learn:

• Key steps for building successful AI Training programs

• Guidance on overcoming employee resistance and fostering adoption

• A structured worksheet to monitor progress and share across your organization

Get the checklist and set yourself up for success.

QUICK HITS

🛠️ Trending AI Tools

• 🖼️ Qwen Image-2512 - Alibaba’s image AI with better realism, text rendering

• 🖥️ Claude in Chrome - Agentic extension that brings Claude to Google Chrome

• 🧮 GPT 5.2 Pro - OpenAI’s most advanced frontier model

• 🤖 MiniMax 2.1 - Improved coding for mobile and web app development

📰 Everything else in AI today

The AI Futures Project updated its timeline model from its AI 2027 paper to now predict full AI coding automation by 2031-2032, pushing back forecasts by 3-4 years.

OpenAI’s GPT-5.2 Pro achieved a 29% on Epoch AI’s FrontierMath Tier 4 benchmark, surging a full 10% ahead of the previous record set by Gemini 3 Pro.

Alibaba’s Qwen team introduced Qwen-Image-2512, an updated text-to-image model with upgraded realism and improved text rendering.

South Korean giant Naver open-sourced HyperCLOVA X Seed Think, a reasoning model featuring strong agentic performance and topping benchmarks for the country.

OpenAI’s stock compensation hit an average of $1.5M per employee in 2025, according to the WSJ — the highest figure of any major tech startup in history.

COMMUNITY

🤝 Community AI workflows

Every newsletter, we showcase how a reader is using AI to work smarter, save time, or make life easier.

Today’s workflow comes from reader Ryan H. in Colorado Springs, CO:

"Last year, I leased a new EV, but the battery died after 10 months. The car sat in the shop for months waiting on parts, so I asked Copilot to help get me out of my lease.

The chat quickly found emails at the manufacturer, the lease company, and the dealership, then drafted an email to formally start a buyback reinforced by CO law. Better yet, Copilot found and guided me through a niche program from the BBB to force manufacturers to respond. 10 days later, and I am in arbitration, having navigated the corporate and federal bureaucracy with only a few minutes of effort!"

How do you use AI? Tell us here.

🎓 Highlights: News, Guides & Events

• Read our last AI newsletter: Meta’s next big AI bet: Manus

• Read our last Tech newsletter: Nvidia, Samsung test AI hardware at CES

• Read our last Robotics newsletter: World’s smallest autonomous robots

• Today’s AI tool guide: Use Claude for Chrome to book business trips

• Watch our last live workshop: NotebookLM for Work

See you soon,

Rowan, Joey, Zach, Shubham, and Jennifer — the humans behind The Rundown

Good morning, AI enthusiasts. Meta’s AI shopping spree continues — this time with Manus, a fast-rising AI agent startup that could soon power end-to-end automation across Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp.

As the AI race moves past model one-upmanship toward tools that actually get work done, does this signal a more grounded phase of Zuckerberg’s AI strategy, and a broader reset in how Big Tech plans to win the next phase of AI?

In today’s AI rundown:

• Meta acquires AI agent startup Manus for $2B+

• SoftBank completes $40B OpenAI investment

• Design better websites with Cursor’s new editor

• Satya Nadella: AI to shift from ‘spectacle’ to ‘substance’

• 4 new AI tools, community workflows, and more

LATEST DEVELOPMENTS

MANUS & META

💰 Meta acquires AI agent startup Manus for $2B+

Image source: Manus

The Rundown: Meta just announced the acquisition of AI agent startup Manus for a reported figure of over $2B, adding a top-performing agentic system and revenue-generating product to its aggressive AI expansion.

The details:

• Manus offers autonomous agents for tasks like deep research and coding, with the startup crossing $100M in annual revenue just 8 months post-launch.

• The startup was founded in Beijing in 2022, relocated to Singapore this year, and will now cut all China operations and ownership ties.

• Manus tops Scale’s RLI benchmark, which measures the ability to handle real-world, valuable work — though scores haven’t been updated since October.

• Manus CEO Xiao Hong will join Meta’s leadership under COO Javier Olivan, bringing roughly 100 employees with him.

Why it matters: After a period of quiet, Zuck is making another big AI swing. With Manus topping benchmarks running Claude (and after Meta’s own model struggles), the move gives Meta a profitable, production-ready agent platform now, with the option to swap in its new rumored internal systems if they can make the leap to the frontier.

TOGETHER WITH GOFUNDME GIVING FUNDS

🎁 Make year-end giving easy

The Rundown: The year-end giving deadline is today. Open a free Giving Fund in seconds, get an immediate tax deduction, and decide where to donate later — or invest your fund to grow your impact over time.

With GoFundMe Giving Funds, you can:

• Contribute cash today for tax benefits

• Streamline year-end giving with one receipt

• Support your favorite nonprofits

Start your year-end giving now.

OPENAI & SOFTBANK

💸 SoftBank completes $40B OpenAI investment

Image source: Reve / The Rundown

The Rundown: SoftBank has reportedly completed its $40B investment in OpenAI, according to CNBC — wiring the final $22B+ last week after months of asset sales and fundraising to pull together the largest single bet on the AI race.

The details:

• To fund the deal, Masayoshi Son sold SoftBank’s entire $5.8B Nvidia stake, $4.8B of T-Mobile shares, and also slowed his Vision Fund dealmaking.

• The initial investment in February valued OpenAI at $260B, though recent IPO rumors have pushed potential valuations as high as $1T.

• OpenAI is also reportedly in talks for additional funding from Amazon, and recently finalized a $1B licensing and investment deal from Disney.

Why it matters: OpenAI and Anthropic are both reportedly eyeing a 2026 IPO in a race to define how public markets value frontier AI. SoftBank’s $40B is a belief that OpenAI gets there first — and that Sam Altman and co. can hold off the competition to continue to be the industry-defining moneymaker that Son loves to bet big on.

AI TRAINING

🎨 Design better websites with Cursor’s new editor

The Rundown: In this tutorial, you will learn how to quickly set up and use Cursor’s new visual design editor to refine your frontend design without having to switch back and forth with a design tool like Figma.

Step-by-step:

1. Open a new project in Cursor with an HTML and CSS file (update required) — ask the Cursor agent to build a simple index.html + styles.css, or use a template

2. Install the live server extension: hit CMD+Shift+P, search “Open with Live Server,” then copy the URL and paste it into the Cursor browser (CMD+Shift+B)

3. Toggle on the element selector, click any element to edit properties in the Design pane, or tell the agent what changes you want in the active chat

4. Hit Apply for the agent to make changes — click “Keep” or “Keep All” to save (agent auto-updates classes so changes apply to all matching elements)

Pro tip: Make sure you’re saving progress with Git as you go. Git will make it easier to roll back any unwanted style changes.

PRESENTED BY BLAND AI

📞 Voice AI, what CIOs should know

The Rundown: In San Francisco, there’s a company called Bland AI that replaces IVRs with AI voice agents that accurately represent your brand, understand your customers, and resolve calls end-to-end. No phone trees. No hold music. Just faster, smarter customer conversations.

Here’s what CIOs love about Bland agents:

• Always on, always improving – agents that learn from every call

• Built for first-touch resolution – handles complex, multi-step conversations

• Enterprise-ready control – own your AI while protecting your data

Want to explore for your company? Book a demo today.

2026 OUTLOOK

✨ Satya Nadella: AI to shift from ‘spectacle’ to ‘substance’

Image source: Gemini / The Rundown

The Rundown: Microsoft’s CEO Satya Nadella just shared his 2026 outlook, arguing that AI is entering a phase where we can see between “spectacle” and “substance,” and success will be measured less by model breakthroughs and more by real outcomes.

The details:

• Nadella said AI is shifting from discovery to diffusion, with capabilities outpacing our ability to turn them into real impact, creating a “model overhang.”

• He noted that AI should function as scaffolding for human potential, with teams pushing toward a new equilibrium that accounts for AI-equipped colleagues.

• The next wave of progress, he argued, will come from systems rather than standalone models, with orchestration being the key to real-world value.

• Nadella also framed AI as a socio-technical test, where societal permission to the tech will be earned only by solving real problems for people and the planet.

Why it matters: As model capabilities continue to accelerate — led by Google and OpenAI, Nadella’s outlook is a breath of fresh air. It shifts the conversation away from raw performance numbers and back to outcomes, grounding AI’s next phase in value for people and the planet rather than another race for capability alone.

QUICK HITS

🛠️ Trending AI Tools

• 🤖 Manus - SOTA general AI agent, newly acquired by Meta

• 🗣️ Chatterbox Turbo - Resemble AI’s fast, expressive, open-source TTS model

• 🏃‍♂️ Hunyuan Motion 1.0 - Open-source text-to-3D character animation model

• 📱 MAI-UI - Alibaba’s AI agent to autonomously control smartphone apps

📰 Everything else in AI today

dbt Labs released a new O’Reilly report on building AI applications with governed, discoverable, and AI-ready analytics infrastructure.*

Elon Musk announced that xAI has acquired a building for MACROHARDRR, its third supersized data center, which will increase xAI’s training compute to nearly 2GW.

Zhipu AI launched a $560M share sale in Hong Kong with an estimated $6.6B valuation, with the IPO listing coming on the heels of its GLM-4.7 launch.

Alibaba introduced MAI-UI, an AI agent that can autonomously control smartphone apps and complete multi-step tasks on mobile devices.

Tencent open-sourced Hunyuan Motion 1.0, a 1B parameter model that generates 3D character animations from text prompts for use in games and animation pipelines.

Adobe announced a partnership with AI video startup Runway, bringing its technology and models — including the latest Gen-4.5 release — to the Adobe Firefly AI studio.

*Sponsored Listing

COMMUNITY

🤝 Community AI workflows

Every newsletter, we showcase how a reader is using AI to work smarter, save time, or make life easier.

Today’s workflow comes from reader Vic V. in the U.K.:

“I needed to create a fairly large workshop program meant to cover six months. I asked ChatGPT to help me build it by feeding in the email conversation between the organizer and me, and the program it came up with saved me hours of slogging through possibilities. It also gave me the marketing tools to help promote the workshops, saving me even more time.”

How do you use AI? Tell us here.

🎓 Highlights: News, Guides & Events

• Read our last AI newsletter: YouTube’s AI slop takeover

• Read our last Tech newsletter: Meta buys AI startup Manus

• Read our last Robotics newsletter: World’s smallest autonomous robots

• Today’s AI tool guide: Design better websites with Cursor’s new editor

• Watch our last live workshop: NotebookLM for Work

See you soon,

Rowan, Joey, Zach, Shubham, and Jennifer — the humans behind The Rundown

Good morning, tech enthusiasts. Meta is reportedly acquiring Manus, a Singapore-based AI startup that rocketed from a viral demo to $100M+ in ARR in under a year, in a deal worth about $2B.

The prize is revenue-generating AI agents that can handle end-to-end digital tasks across Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp — but Manus’s Chinese-rooted past risks turning a splashy AI acquisition into a geopolitical stress test.

In today’s tech rundown:

• Meta snaps up AI startup Manus for $2B

• OpenAI hunts ‘head of preparedness’

• Nest co-founder’s Mill snags Whole Foods deal

• Nvidia and Samsung test AI hardware at CES

• Quick hits on other tech news

LATEST DEVELOPMENTS

META

🤖 Meta snaps up AI startup Manus for $2B

Image source: Ideogram

The Rundown: Meta is acquiring Manus, a red-hot Singapore-based AI startup that builds task-running agents, for approximately $2B — one of the first major acquisitions of a generative AI company with substantial revenue.

The details:

• Manus rocketed from a viral demo to over $100M in annual recurring revenue in eight months, claiming millions of users for its AI agents.

• Meta reportedly plans to keep Manus operating independently while integrating its agents into Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp, running alongside Meta AI.

• Manus sells task-running AI agents that can handle white-collar tasks end-to-end, from screening job candidates to planning trips.

• To preempt regulatory blowback, Meta is pledging to eliminate all Chinese ownership stakes and shut down Manus’s services in China.

Why it matters: Meta gets a revenue-generating AI product to justify its eye-watering infrastructure spend and a new automation layer for its social empire. But the deal also drags Meta deeper into the U.S.-China tech war, testing whether Washington will accept a Chinese-rooted acquisition, even one that Meta plans to separate from Beijing.

OPENAI

🔎 OpenAI hunts ‘head of preparedness’

Image source: TechCrunch/Wikimedia Commons

The Rundown: OpenAI is hiring a senior “head of preparedness” at a roughly $550K salary plus equity to stress-test its most advanced models and game out how they could be weaponized or spiral beyond human control.

The details:

• Sam Altman has billed the role as “stressful,” positioning it as frontline work anticipating harmful AI behavior, from rogue agents to large-scale misuse.

• The hire will lead OpenAI’s internal watchdog efforts, probing catastrophic risk scenarios the company’s preparedness team has studied since 2023.

• Microsoft AI chief Mustafa Suleyman told the BBC that anyone who isn’t at least a little afraid of where AI is right now “isn’t paying attention.”

• OpenAI’s last head of preparedness moved into an AI reasoning role in 2024, and several senior safety leaders left the company or shifted to other positions.

Why it matters: OpenAI is hiring someone to stress-test catastrophic risks, from phishing attacks to bioweapons to the possibility of AIs that could “turn against us.” Yet AI safety remains voluntary and mostly unregulated, and the company’s Preparedness Framework now lets it “adjust” requirements if rivals ship riskier models first.

MILL/WHOLE FOODS

🗑️ Nest co-founder’s Mill snags Whole Foods deal

Image source: Mill

The Rundown: Mill, the food-waste startup from Nest co-founder Matt Rogers, just signed Whole Foods as its first major enterprise customer, with the grocer set to deploy Mill’s commercial bins chainwide in 2027.

The details:

• The bins grind and dehydrate produce scraps to slash landfill costs while converting leftovers into chicken feed for Whole Foods’ egg suppliers.

• Mill’s systems track data on what gets tossed, helping Whole Foods spot waste patterns, reduce shrinkage, and keep sellable items on shelves longer.

• The partnership is part of Mill’s push beyond households into commercial and, eventually, municipal customers.

• Mill launched its sleek, Nest-grade household food-waste bins a few years ago and began talks with Whole Foods about a year ago.

Why it matters: Mill is proving you can parlay a polished consumer gadget into enterprise contracts, then layer in AI to turn waste bins into diagnostic tools that don’t just process trash but help prevent it. The Whole Foods deal shows how a startup can leverage modern design and data analysis to crack a massive, low-tech market.

CES

 🎰 Nvidia and Samsung test AI hardware at CES

Image source: CES

The Rundown: Nvidia, Samsung, Lenovo, and other tech giants are descending on CES in Las Vegas with a show floor full of laptops, wearables, and smart glasses where on-device AI is pushed front and center, Bloomberg reports.

The details:

• Nvidia is expected to showcase new PC chips aimed at turning laptops into portable AI workstations, while Samsung leans on AI across TVs and phones.

• Lenovo is rolling out AI-focused PCs built to run local copilots and personalization, betting that extra privacy and lower latency will hook buyers.

• LG is debuting a Dolby-powered modular home audio system and showing off CLOiD, a humanoid designed for household chores.

• Robotics gets its own dedicated hall this year, packed with humanoid and service bots pitched for home companionship, elder care, and factory floors.

Why it matters: CES is where the industry will learn whether consumers actually want to pay for a new wave of AI gadgets, robots, and “smarter” TVs, or if AI remains just a free software layer on existing devices. The answer could shape how aggressively tech giants pour money into dedicated AI hardware, robots, and wearables.

QUICK HITS

📰 Everything else in tech today

DigitalBridge shares jumped after news that Japan’s SoftBank has agreed to acquire the AI data-center investment firm for about $4B in cash.

The AI boom has fueled about $70B in data center deal talks this year, as investors race to lock up infrastructure for compute-hungry models.

Samsung will add a native Google Photos app to its TVs in 2026, starting with an exclusive six-month Memories experience and later layering on AI-powered tools.

Google is letting users change their @gmail.com address while keeping the old address as an alias that still works for sign‑in and receives mail in the same inbox.

India’s startups raised about $11B in 2025 as deal volume dropped nearly 40% and investors became choosier, tilting toward early-stage, application-led AI and deep tech.

New York Governor Kathy Hochul approved a law forcing social platforms to flash warning labels to young users before hooking them with features like infinite scroll.

Novo Nordisk’s stock has been hammered as investors doubt it can keep turning its blockbuster GLP-1 drug semaglutide into long-term profits beyond weight loss.

Russia and Kazakhstan postponed the debut launch of their new Soyuz-5 rocket under the joint Baiterek project, citing the need for additional checks.

COMMUNITY

🎓 Highlights: News, Guides & Events

• Read our last AI newsletter: YouTube's 'AI slop' takeover

• Read our last Tech newsletter: OpenAI eyes $830B mega valuation

• Read our last Robotics newsletter: World’s smallest autonomous robots

• Today’s AI tool guide: Automate pre-meeting research with Perplexity

• Watch our last live workshop: NotebookLM for Work

See you soon,

Rowan, Jennifer, and Joey—The Rundown’s editorial team

Good morning, AI enthusiasts. AI’s internet takeover has already spread through text and on social media, but new research shows it’s happening on video platforms, too.

With over 20% of videos being served to new YouTube accounts classified as “AI slop” and the top channels pulling in millions in revenue, the low-effort AI video economy is going global — and users are apparently eating it up.

In today’s AI rundown:

• 21% of YT videos shown to new users are “AI slop”

• Claude’s shopkeeping experiment heads to the WSJ

• Automate pre-meeting research with Perplexity

• Meta researchers train AI to find and fix its own bugs

• 4 new AI tools, community workflows, and more

LATEST DEVELOPMENTS

AI & YOUTUBE

🗑️ 21% of YT videos shown to new users are “AI slop”

Image source: Kapwing

The Rundown: Video editing company Kapwing just published research on AI-generated YouTube content, finding that over 20% of videos shown to fresh users are “AI slop” — with top channels pulling billions of views and millions in ad revenue.

The details:

• The study defined 'AI slop' as low-quality, auto-generated content made to farm views, distinct from quality AI-assisted videos.

• Researchers created a new YouTube account and found 21% of the first 500 recommended videos pushed by the platform’s algorithm were ‘AI slop’.

• The top ‘slop’ channel was India's Bandar Apna Dost, an anthropomorphic monkey that totaled over 2B views and an estimated $4.25M in yearly earnings.

• S. Korea led ‘slop’ viewership at 8.45B views, followed by Pakistan (5.34B) and the U.S. (3.39B), with channels from Spain earning the most subscribers.

Why it matters: The ‘Dead Internet Theory’ that the web is increasingly AI/ bots keeps getting harder to dismiss, and is seeping into the video arena as well. But the data shows users either can't tell, are bots themselves, or are unbothered by it — and as long as slop racks up engagement, the incentive remains to keep producing.

TOGETHER WITH STACK AI

⌛️ Will your AI pilot ever make it to production?

The Rundown: StackAI is the drag-and-drop platform for enterprise AI agents. Connect your tools and systems to AI without code. Built-in governance, analytics, and white-glove support from AI experts.

Trusted by finance, risk, and ops teams who:

• Integrate with 100+ enterprise tools

• Deploy agents as chatbots, forms, or APIs

• Manage access, roles, and usage centrally

Book a no-commitment AI strategy call today.

ANTHROPIC

🏪 Claude’s shopkeeping experiment heads to the WSJ

Image source: WSJ

The Rundown: Anthropic expanded its experiment testing Claude as a vending machine operator, deploying the system in the Wall Street Journal newsroom — with workers manipulating the AI into giving away everything for free (including a PS5).

The details:

• "Claudius" was given $1K and told to stock inventory, set prices, and respond to requests via Slack, finding itself $1K in debt at the end of the experiment.

• One reporter convinced Claudius it was a Soviet-era machine, prompting it to declare an "Ultra-Capitalist Free-For-All" with zero prices.

• When Anthropic added a CEO bot for discipline, journalists staged a fake board coup with forged documents that both Claudius and the CEO bot accepted.

• Anthropic's internal Phase 2 tests showed improved results with better tools and prompts, but models still remained vulnerable to social engineering.

Why it matters: Claudius’ adventures in shopkeeping first started this summer, and this next phase still results in some hilarious failures despite an upgrade in model quality. AI’s quest for helpfulness over all else makes for an easy mark for crafty and persistent users, making a human-in-the-loop still very much needed (for now).

AI TRAINING

📞 Automate pre-meeting research with Perplexity

The Rundown: In this tutorial, you will learn how to generate pre-call briefs on any person/company by connecting Perplexity to your Google Calendar, including news, conversation starters, and smart questions, so you can stop scrambling before calls.

Step-by-step:

1. Log in to Perplexity.ai, click Account → Connectors in the bottom left, and enable Gmail with Calendar

2. Create an upcoming call in Google Calendar with the person's full name in the title and their work email as a guest (click "don't send invite" if testing)

3. Prompt Perplexity: "It’s [current time + date]. Look at my calendar and prep a pre-call memo: (1) What the company does (2) Recent news/funding (3) Key background/interests/posts with public icebreakers (4) smart questions to ask"

4. Click "Spaces", create a "Call Prep" space, and paste your custom instructions—now before meetings, navigate here and say "Prep for my next call"

Pro tip: Ask Perplexity to interview you to refine starting prompts. Tell it you want a better prompt by answering 3-5 questions on your role and the call’s key outcomes.

PRESENTED BY YOU.COM

📕 New Year, New Metrics: Evaluating AI Search

The Rundown: Most teams pick a search provider by running a few test queries and hoping for the best—a recipe for hallucinations and unpredictable failures. This technical guide from You.com gives you access to an exact framework to evaluate AI search and retrieval.

What you’ll get:

• A four-phase framework for evaluating AI search

• How to build a golden set of queries that predicts real-world performance

• Metrics and code for measuring accuracy

Go from “looks good” to proven quality. Learn how to run an eval.

AI RESEARCH

🔄 Meta researchers train AI to find and fix its own bugs

Image source: Reve / The Rundown

The Rundown: Meta’s FAIR just published research on Self-play SWE-RL, a training method where a single AI model learns to code better by creating bugs for itself to solve with no human data needed.

The details:

• The system uses one model in two roles: a bug injector that breaks code, and a solver that fixes it while both learn together.

• On the SWE-bench Verified coding benchmark, the approach jumped 10+ points over its starting checkpoint and beat human-data baselines.

• The method uses "higher-order bugs" from failed fix attempts, creating an evolving learning curriculum that scales with the model's skill level.

Why it matters: Most coding agents today learn from human-curated GitHub issues, a finite resource that limits improvement. Meta's self-play approach sidesteps that bottleneck, letting models generate infinite training from codebases — applying a path similar to what made Google’s AlphaZero superhuman at chess to software engineering.

QUICK HITS

🛠️ Trending AI Tools

• ⚡ Semrush One - Measure, optimize, and grow visibility from Google to ChatGPT, Perplexity, and more*

• 🧑‍💻 MiniMax 2.1 - Powerful capabilities for programming and app development

• ⚙️ Antigravity - Google's agentic AI development platform

• 🤖 GLM-4.7 - Z.ai's new SOTA open-source model

*Sponsored Listing

📰 Everything else in AI today

Anthropic’s Claude Code creator Boris Cherny revealed that in the last month, “100% of contributions” to the agentic tool were written by Claude Code itself.

OpenAI founding member Andrej Karpathy posted that he has “never felt this much behind as a programmer” and that “the profession is being dramatically refactored.”

SimilarWeb shared statistics on AI web traffic for 2025, with ChatGPT’s share falling from 87% to 68% and Google’s Gemini tripling its share to 18% in the past year.

Liquid AI released LFM2-2.6B-Exp, a tiny experimental model for on-device use with strong performance in math, instruction following, and knowledge benchmarks.

Chinese regulators issued new draft rules to oversee AI services that simulate human personalities, requiring safety monitoring for addiction and emotional dependence.

Epoch AI published results from mathematics benchmark testing on open-weights Chinese models, finding them to be around 7 months behind frontier models.

COMMUNITY

🤝 Community AI workflows

Every newsletter, we showcase how a reader is using AI to work smarter, save time, or make life easier.

Today’s workflow comes from reader Rachell W. in Kansas City, KS:

"I’ve built two passion projects by vibe-coding in Cursor, but I quickly learned I hate marketing — not the strategy, the constant execution. So instead of forcing it, I built a system. Using Airtable as the backbone, with ChatGPT and Airtable’s AI fields, I designed an automated content engine aligned to my brand guidelines. It generates static posts, carousels, reels, and captions — all stored in a structured social media bank.

Will it work? I don’t know yet. But I’ve built the resources to try: a year’s worth of planned content, with a daily prompt telling me exactly what to post and where — so I can focus on building while the system handles the rest."

How do you use AI? Tell us here.

🎓 Highlights: News, Guides & Events

• Read our last AI newsletter: Nvidia strikes largest deal in company history

• Read our last Tech newsletter: OpenAI eyes $830B mega valuation

• Read our last Robotics newsletter: World’s smallest autonomous robots

• Today’s AI tool guide: Automate pre-meeting research with Perplexity

• Watch our last live workshop: NotebookLM for Work

See you soon,

Rowan, Joey, Zach, Shubham, and Jennifer — the humans behind The Rundown

Good morning, robotics enthusiasts. Researchers at Penn and Michigan have unleashed what they say is an entirely new breed of microbot — smaller than a grain of salt, costing just a penny, fully untethered, and with no moving parts.

These tiny bots shatter a 40-year barrier in sub-millimeter autonomy, opening doors to feats that physics once deemed impossible.

In today’s robotics rundown:

• Robots that are barely visible to the naked eye

• AgiBot’s new robot-for-hire platform

• U.S. bans new foreign drones, hitting DJI

• LG teases humanoids for household chores

• Quick hits on other robotics news

LATEST DEVELOPMENTS

MICROBOTS

🦠 Robots that are barely visible to the naked eye

Image source: Marc Miskin, University of Pennsylvania

The Rundown: Researchers at Penn and Michigan just built what they say are the world’s smallest fully programmable, autonomous robots — microscopic swimming machines that are smaller than a grain of salt.

The details:

• Costing only a penny each, these light-powered microbots can sense, think, and act independently for months without tethers or external control.

• Each robot carries an onboard computer, temperature sensor, and solar panels that generate just 75 nanowatts of power.

• The robots propel themselves by generating electric fields that nudge ions in the surrounding liquid, creating thrust without any moving parts.

• Researchers program the robots with light pulses, giving each an identifier for individualized instructions, and retrieve data through a “waggle dance” motion.

Why it matters: These microbots crack a 40-year barrier by achieving true autonomy below one millimeter, where drag turns water into tar and conventional propulsion fails. Eventually, they could monitor individual cells or assemble microscale devices, opening medical and manufacturing applications that were physically impossible.

AGIBOT

🔥 AgiBot’s new robot-for-hire platform 

Image source: AgiBot

The Rundown: Chinese robotics firm AgiBot just launched Qingtian Rent — a multi-vendor platform that turns humanoids into hired help for weddings, conferences, and trade shows across 50 cities. Welcome to the new robot gig economy.

The details:

• AgiBot is bringing in more than 10 robot manufacturers, including Unitree and Accelerated Evolution, rather than limiting rentals to its own robots.

• AgiBot’s Yuanzheng A2 runs at $1,380 per day; Unitree’s U2 costs $690, and its Go2 Air robot dog goes for $138.

• The platform already has 600 service providers managing over 1K robots, with expansion to 200+ cities planned for 2026.

• Rented bots can greet guests, guide attendees, deliver scripted speeches, and handle light interactive duties tailored to each gig.

Why it matters: China’s robot-rental market hit $140M in 2025 and could surge toward $1.4B next year. While U.S. offerings remain scattered and small-scale, China is rolling out a much more coordinated, nationwide push designed to normalize robot rentals and speed up large-scale humanoid deployment.

DRONES

🛑 U.S. bans new foreign drones, hitting DJI

Image source: DJI

The Rundown: The Trump administration’s FCC banned all new foreign-made drones from U.S. distribution last week, citing national security threats. Americans who already own older foreign drone models can still use them, but no new imports will be allowed.

The details:

• The FCC added all foreign-made drones and components to its Covered List — products deemed to pose “unacceptable risk to national security.”

• The ban hits Chinese drone giant DJI hardest, the dominant global player and one of the most popular brands among American consumers.

• DJI pushed back, calling its products “among the safest and most secure on the market” and said it remains committed to the U.S. market.

• The move follows Trump’s June executive order aimed at boosting domestic drone production and securing the U.S. supply chain “against foreign control.”

Why it matters: The ban effectively kills the pipeline of new DJI drones into the U.S. markets, forcing users to shift toward U.S.-made alternatives that currently lack DJI’s market dominance and feature set. It’s the Trump administration’s most aggressive move yet to decouple U.S. tech infrastructure from Chinese manufacturing.

LG

👊🏼 LG teases humanoid for household chores

Image source: LG

The Rundown: South Korean tech giant LG Electronics says it will unveil LG CLOiD at CES 2026 — a home assistant humanoid designed to tackle household chores and reflect the company’s “Zero Labor Home” vision.

The details:

• The robot features two seven-axis arms with five-fingered hands for dexterous manipulation, powered by LG’s Affectionate Intelligence system.

• Its head-mounted chipset acts as the robot’s brain, equipped with sensors and a camera, display, and speaker for navigation and interaction.

• LG says its Affectionate Intelligence AI adapts to users’ moods, habits, and routines by analyzing real-time data from connected LG appliances.

Why it matters: Unlike industrial robots or single-purpose assistants, CLOiD represents LG’s first big push toward general-purpose home automation — testing whether consumers will embrace humanoid helpers that learn their preferences and operate across multiple chores rather than just vacuuming floors or playing music.

QUICK HITS

📰 Everything else in robotics today

Hyundai Motor Group says Boston Dynamics will publicly debut its new all-electric Atlas humanoid for the first time at CES 2026 in Las Vegas.

A viral clip shows a Unitree humanoid, mirrored by a human operator wearing a motion-capture suit, taking a direct hit to the groin.

TARS Robotics hit a world-first in embodied AI, demoing a humanoid that uses both hands to thread a needle and stitch embroidery with sub-millimeter precision.

Waymo is experimenting with a Gemini-powered in-car assistant for its robotaxis that can talk with riders, tweak select cabin settings, and offer reassurance during trips.

Chinese researchers found that a single voice command could hijack a humanoid and spread the attack wirelessly to connected units, creating a rapid botnet-style infection.

Kawasaki unveiled its ninth-gen Kaleido disaster-response humanoid, adding that it is also moving forward on its CORLEO quadruped ‘wolf robot’ concept.

Amazon-owned Zoox issued a voluntary software recall after its robotaxis were found to occasionally cross center lane lines or block crosswalks near intersections.

Uber and Lyft will begin testing Baidu’s Apollo Go RT6 robotaxis in London in 2026, pending approval, joining Waymo and Wayve on the city’s autonomous streets.

Physical Intelligence fine-tuned its foundation model to tackle “Robot Olympics” household-manipulation challenges, achieving gold medals in most categories.

COMMUNITY

🎓 Highlights: News, Guides & Events

• Read our last AI newsletter: Nvidia strikes largest deal in company history

• Read our last Tech newsletter: OpenAI eyes $830B mega-valuation

• Read our last Robotics newsletter: Top 5 robotics trends this year

• Today’s AI tool guide: Perform real-time market research using Grok

• Watch our last live workshop: NotebookLM for Work

See you soon,

Rowan, Jennifer, and Joey—The Rundown’s editorial team

Good morning, AI enthusiasts. Hope you had a happy holiday — and as expected, there was no shortage of AI news over our week-long break.

It was a particularly sweet one for Jensen Huang, with Nvidia dropping $20B to license Groq’s speedy AI chips, while also bringing the creator of Google’s rival TPUs on board in the process.

In today’s AI rundown:

• Nvidia licenses Groq tech in $20B deal

• The Rundown Roundtable: Our AI use cases

• Perform real-time market research using Grok

• Z.ai’s GLM-4.7 tops open-source benchmarks

• 4 new AI tools, community workflows, and more

LATEST DEVELOPMENTS

NVIDIA & GROQ

💰 Nvidia licenses Groq tech in $20B deal

Image source: Reve / The Rundown

The Rundown: Nvidia just struck a licensing deal reportedly worth $20B with AI chip startup Groq, with the company's CEO and president also joining the chip giant to help integrate and scale the tech.

The details:

• The deal targets Groq's LPU chips, which specialize in running AI models quickly and cheaply — claiming 10x speed at a fraction of GPU energy use.

• Groq was valued at $6.9B just 3 months ago after raising $750M from investors like BlackRock, Samsung, and Cisco.

• Groq CEO Jonathan Ross and President Sunny Madra will join Nvidia as the startup continues independently under CFO Simon Edwards.

• Ross previously helped create Google's TPU chips before founding Groq in 2016, with the $20B deal becoming the largest in Nvidia’s history.

Why it matters: Groq’s Ross left Google after helping create the TPU chips that now compete directly with Nvidia's GPUs — and a decade later, Nvidia is bringing him back into the fold. As custom silicon from Google and Amazon chip away at its lead, Nvidia seems to now be playing defense by stockpiling the talent behind it.

TOGETHER WITH WEIGHTS & BIASES

📙 Practitioner’s guide to post-training LLMs with RL

The Rundown: Need to get caught up quickly on how to post-train LLMs on agentic tasks using reinforcement learning (RL)? This practitioner's guide covers RL's origins, benefits teams can realize by incorporating RL for post-training, and how to get started.

Get the guide to learn:

• The role of RL in post-training agents and how it compares to SFT

• How LoRA makes fine-tuning more efficient

• Key benefits and use cases of RL in production workloads

• Using Serverless RL from Weights & Biases to kickstart your RL jobs in minutes

Download the Practitioner's guide to reinforcement learning.

THE RUNDOWN ROUNDTABLE

💡 The Rundown Roundtable: Our AI use cases

Image source: Ideogram / The Rundown

The Rundown: The Rundown Roundtable is a weekly feature in which we poll members of The Rundown staff about how we use AI in our work and daily lives.

Jennifer, Tech & Robotics Writer: I live in Europe, but I love using American recipes for Christmas cookies and some desserts. So I paste recipes into ChatGPT and ask it to convert all the measurements from cups to grams and ounces to milliliters, etc. I used to do this all manually, which took literally forever.

Shubham, Editor: I skipped the expensive travel agency playbook and planned my Singapore–Malaysia trip for these holidays with ChatGPT instead — with a broad layout at first and then detailed versions day-by-day. It mapped out complete plans, transport routes, ticket logic, food options (preferred Indian), and pacing without pushing generic packages or wasting time on filler attractions.

Jason, Developer: ChatGPT helped me find a perfect Magic: The Gathering card for $50 with historical significance for my brother, who is into that thing. He loved it. I got to pretend like I did a bunch of research when it actually took 15 seconds. Win-win.

AI TRAINING

🧪 Perform real-time market research using Grok

The Rundown: In this tutorial, you will learn how to track Twitter trends and news stories from the last 24 hours with xAI's Grok, then automate daily research memos in Notion using Make for any trend or competitor.

Step-by-step:

1. Copy the Notion Database Template, then go to console.x.ai, create an API key, and fund your xAI account with at least $5

2. Download the Make blueprint file, log in to Make.com, create a new scenario, click the three dots → Import Blueprint, upload the JSON file, and save

3. Connect accounts: click the xAI Module 2 and add your API key, then click the Notion Module 3 and authorize access to your page from step 1

4. Set up the webhook: copy the webhook URL from Make's Webhook Module 1, go to Notion, click the lightning bolt → "Webhook trigger on new," replace the URL, and set it to trigger when Status = "Start Research"

5. Test by creating a new database row, filling out Research Topic, Date, Industry/Competitor, and Sources, then setting Status to "Start Research”

Pro tip: Set up a trigger that creates a new research memo on the same topic each day. You can send the webhook from this trigger, or manually flip it on to save tokens.

PRESENTED BY RETOOL

🏆 Can AI actually ship production apps?

The Rundown: Retool's Holiday Shipping Spree challenges you to build a real, deployable app using AI-assisted development — and compete for a year of Retool Business plus thousands in builder gear.

Here's how it works:

• Get a free month of Retool Business with unlimited AI prompting credits

• Build production-ready apps using natural language with AI AppGen

• Win a MacBook Air, Apple Studio Display, AirPods Max, and more

Enter the competition by Jan. 8.

Z AI

🇨🇳 Z.ai’s GLM-4.7 tops open-source benchmarks

Image source: Z.ai

The Rundown: Chinese AI startup Z.ai just released GLM-4.7, a coding-focused model that tops benchmarks for open-source systems and matches models from top Western rivals — launching just days before its expected Hong Kong listing.

The details:

• GLM-4.7 achieves a 73.8% on SWE-bench, making Z AI the first Chinese lab to break 70% on the real-world coding benchmark.

• 4.7 surpasses open rival DeepSeek-V3.2 across a range of agentic, reasoning, and coding benchmarks, also topping Kimi K2 and Claude Sonnet 4.5.

• Z open-sourced the model weights on Hugging Face, with GLM-4.7 also available to use with coding agents like Claude Code.

• The Alibaba-backed startup passed Hong Kong IPO hearings last weekend, with a raise of $300M expected next month.

Why it matters: China continues to release highly competitive open-source models at a pace that’s hard to ignore. With those companies also getting an injection of funding and potentially opening access to more advanced AI chips, 2026 may be the year we see a Chinese frontier-level open release catch the top Western leaders.

QUICK HITS

🛠️ Trending AI Tools

• 🤖 GLM-4.7 - Z.ai's new SOTA open-source model

• 🚀 MiMo-V2-Flash - Xiaomi's powerful open-weights reasoning model

• ⚙️ GPT-5.2-Codex - OpenAI’s new top agentic coding model

• 🔊 SAM Audio - Meta’s model to separate sounds using text prompts

📰 Everything else in AI today

Honeycomb examines how accurate AI Agents really need to be. Read the blog to learn why speed, iteration, and self-correction matter more than perfection.*

AI evaluation firm METR posted a new analysis of Claude Opus 4.5, finding it capable of tasks requiring nearly 5 hours of work — the longest duration of any model to date.

Cursor announced the acquisition of code review platform Graphite, with plans to integrate the tool into its AI-powered code editor.

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman posted a job listing for a ‘Head of Preparedness’ to plan for and secure increasingly advanced models, including “systems that can self-improve”.

Alibaba-backed MiniMax released M2.1, a model with powerful capabilities across a variety of programming languages and for mobile and web app development.

Poetiq published an analysis of its system on the ARC-AGI-2 benchmark running GPT 5.2 X-High, surpassing 70% and scoring the highest of any model by around 15%.

*Sponsored Listing

COMMUNITY

🤝 Community AI workflows

Every newsletter, we showcase how a reader is using AI to work smarter, save time, or make life easier.

Today’s workflow comes from reader Mike in Appleton, WI:

"I am using Windsurf to code an inventory tracking app for a non-profit organization. I am donating my time, and am a back-end developer who only dabbled in front-end development until 2023, when OpenAI released ChatGPT. I can now code professional full-stack apps in days instead of months. This is really a game-changer to all of us devs that only dreamed of creating this stuff without having to spend months and even years getting up to speed."

How do you use AI? Tell us here.

🎓 Highlights: News, Guides & Events

• Read our last AI newsletter: AI giants join forces on Genesis Mission

• Read our last Tech newsletter: OpenAI eyes $830B mega-valuation

• Read our last Robotics newsletter: Top 5 robotics trends this year

• Today’s AI tool guide: Perform real-time market research using Grok

• Watch our last live workshop: NotebookLM for Work

See you soon,

Rowan, Joey, Zach, Shubham, and Jennifer — the humans behind The Rundown

Good morning, tech enthusiasts. OpenAI is reportedly lining up a funding round that could hit $830B, dropping the ChatGPT maker near Apple and Microsoft territory — despite way smaller revenues and a business model still figuring itself out.

As public AI stocks slide and bubble warnings flare, CEO Sam Altman is racing to lock in cash for compute, outrun Google, and lock down OpenAI as AI’s foundational layer.

In today’s tech rundown:

• OpenAI eyes massive $830B valuation

• TikTok’s long saga ends with sale

• Trump goes nuclear in $6B fusion deal

• Japan creates a near ‘perfect plastic’

• Quick hits on other tech news

LATEST DEVELOPMENTS

OPENAI

🤑 OpenAI eyes massive $830B valuation

Image source: Ideogram / The Rundown

The Rundown: OpenAI is negotiating a funding round at an $830B valuation that would vault the ChatGPT maker into the ranks of tech’s mega-cap giants, according to the Wall Street Journal.

The details:

• The round aims to raise up to $100B by Q1 2026, with SoftBank already committed for $30B.

• The funding push comes as OpenAI vows to spend trillions of dollars and signs massive cloud and data center deals across Japan, Europe, and the U.S.

• Timing’s dicey: public AI stocks are stumbling as bubble warnings get louder and skeptics say valuations have drifted far from actual earnings.

• OpenAI recently declared “code red” to counter Google’s moves, cranking up pressure to show that massive infrastructure spending will actually deliver.

Why it matters: This $100B would add a hefty amount to OpenAI’s coffers, which currently have more than $64B, while buying runway to compete with Google and other rivals while the race to profitable AI remains wide open. The tension: can valuations this stratospheric hold up before anyone proves the underlying business actually works?

TOGETHER WITH KLUTCH

💳 Code your credit card with Klutch

The Rundown: Klutch is a developer platform that lets you programmatically design, issue, and manage your consumer credit card. Whether you’re prototyping side projects or validating payment flows, Klutch gives you RESTful endpoints, sandbox environments, and secure infrastructure to issue cards and move money from your personal developer account.

In the platform, you’ll explore:

• Instant card issuing and management

• Flexible APIs for seamless integrations

• Secure, scalable payment infrastructure

Start customizing your card experience with Klutch.

TIKTOK

💃🏻 TikTok’s long saga ends with sale

Image source: Ideogram / The Rundown

The Rundown: TikTok has officially signed a deal to sell its U.S. operations to Oracle, Silver Lake, and UAE-backed MGX, closing January 22 and ending years of legal limbo over the bipartisan ban.

The details:

• Oracle, Silver Lake, and MGX will each own 15% stakes, with ByteDance retaining 20% and another 30% held by affiliates of ByteDance investors.

• The new venture gets a majority-U.S. board, with user data stored locally in Oracle’s systems.

• The algorithm will also be retrained on U.S. data to keep feeds “free from outside manipulation.”

• Trump signed four executive orders total this year to delay the ban while negotiating, even as the White House launched its own TikTok account.

Why it matters: This ends years of legal limbo after a divest-or-ban order nearly killed the app — TikTok briefly went dark in January 2025 before Trump started brokering a deal. ByteDance still owns the underlying algorithm, but U.S. auditors have signed off on the arrangement, betting that American oversight of operations and data is enough.

ENERGY TECH

💥 Trump goes nuclear in $6B fusion deal

Image source: TAE Technologies

The Rundown: Trump’s social media and crypto company is merging with TAE Technologies, a privately held nuclear fusion developer, in a $6B deal creating one of the first publicly traded fusion companies in the U.S.

The details:

• Shareholders from both companies will each own roughly 50% of the combined entity, with Trump Media providing $200M at signing and $100M at close.

• The combined company plans to site and begin construction on a 50-megawatt utility-scale fusion power plant in 2026.

• Trump Media reported a $54.8M net loss in Q3 2025, though it’s sitting on $3.1B in assets, mostly crypto holdings and short-term investments.

• TAE has raised $1.3B from investors including Google, but commercial fusion remains unproven despite decades of research and recent breakthroughs.

Why it matters: The deal bets that capital can fast-track fusion tech that’s still years from commercial viability — raising conflict-of-interest questions about a president-owned company chasing federal subsidies and approvals. It also marks Trump Media’s latest pivot away from its flailing social platform into crypto, AI, and now nuclear energy.

TECH FOR GOOD

⚡️ Japan creates a near ‘perfect plastic’

Image source: Ideogram / The Rundown

The Rundown: Japanese researchers say they’ve engineered what amounts to a near-perfect plastic: a plant-based material that behaves like conventional plastic in use, but dissolves completely in seawater within hours leaving no microplastics behind.

The details:

• Scientists have developed a plant-based plastic that behaves like conventional plastic in use but fully degrades in natural environments.

• It’s derived from cellulose and uses salt-based bonds that remain stable during use but break apart in seawater within hours and in soil within days.

• As it decomposes, the plastic breaks down into benign components that can even return nutrients such as nitrogen and phosphorus to the ecosystem.

• The bioplastic can be reheated, reshaped, and recycled, making it suitable for packaging and products that currently rely on petrochemical plastics.

Why it matters: Plastics are everywhere — 11M metric tons hit the oceans yearly, microplastics turn up in human blood and food chains, the whole mess. Japan’s new plant-based plastic — and similar materials from RIKEN — that dissolves in seawater could offer one of the first real shots at cutting pollution at the source.

QUICK HITS

📰 Everything else in tech today

Meta is reportedly developing a new image- and video-focused AI model code-named Mango alongside its next text-based LLM; both are expected to launch in early 2026.

The Marshall Islands has launched a national universal basic income scheme offering quarterly $200 payments as a cryptocurrency stablecoin or in traditional currency.

Eric Schmidt and Xavier Niel are backing a $1B plan to build a new physics and deep-tech innovation hub near CERN in Geneva to commercialize fundamental research.

A Starlink satellite appears to have exploded in orbit, creating a cloud of debris that has raised fresh concerns about the risks of SpaceX’s massive broadband constellation.

Apple’s new developer agreement lets it claw back unpaid commissions and fees by deducting them directly from developers’ in‑app revenue and related accounts.

Jeff Bezos–backed Slate Auto has racked up more than 150K reservations for its low-cost electric pickup due in late 2026, defying waning enthusiasm for EV trucks.

The U.S. Senate has confirmed billionaire entrepreneur and private astronaut Jared Isaacman, founder of Shift4, as NASA’s next administrator under Trump.

Pickle Robot has hired former Tesla vice president Jeff Evanson as its first CFO, as the startup reportedly expands a UPS deal worth $120M for 400 unloading robots.

COMMUNITY

🎓 Highlights: News, Guides & Events

• Read our last AI newsletter: AI giants join forces on Genesis Mission

• Read our last Tech newsletter: The AI boom’s phone problem

• Read our last Robotics newsletter: The top 5 robotics trends this year

• Today’s AI tool guide: Make Claude Code smarter with the Context7 MCP

• RSVP to next workshop @ 4PM EST today: Google NotebookLM For Work

See you soon,

Rowan, Jennifer, and Joey—The Rundown’s editorial team

Good morning, AI enthusiasts. The U.S. government just assembled the AI equivalent of the Avengers — and the nation’s science moonshot is taking shape in a big way.

With 24 tech giants from OpenAI to xAI joining forces with 40K government researchers, the Genesis Mission may be the most ambitious scientific collaboration since the atomic age.

Reminder: Our next live workshop is today at 4 PM EST! Join and learn how to incorporate Google’s free NotebookLM tool into your workflows across a variety of use cases. RSVP here.

P.S.: The Rundown will be taking a break next week. Wishing all of our readers a very happy holiday, and we’ll be back in your inbox on Monday, Dec. 29!

In today’s AI rundown:

• U.S. DOE signs on 24 tech giants for Genesis Mission

• OpenAI opens ChatGPT app marketplace to developers

• Make Claude Code smarter with the Context7 MCP

• Figure CEO Brett Adcock launches new AI lab

• 4 new AI tools, community workflows, and more

LATEST DEVELOPMENTS

GENESIS MISSION

🏛️ U.S. DOE signs on 24 tech giants for Genesis Mission

Image source: Reve / The Rundown

The Rundown: The U.S. Dept. of Energy just announced partnerships with 24 organizations to power the Trump administration’s Genesis Mission effort to accelerate scientific research with AI — including OpenAI, Google, Anthropic, and Nvidia.

The details:

• The initiative unites 17 national labs with 40K researchers, targeting breakthroughs in nuclear energy, quantum computing, and manufacturing.

• Google DeepMind will grant lab scientists early access to tools, including its AI co-scientist agent, AlphaEvolve coding system, and AlphaGenome DNA model.

• AWS pledged up to $50B in government AI infrastructure, with OAI already deploying models on Los Alamos National Laboratory’s Venado supercomputer.

• Additional signatories include xAI, Microsoft, Palantir, AMD, Oracle, Cerebras, and CoreWeave.

Why it matters: This feels like an Avengers collaboration for U.S. AI, with everyone from frontier labs, chipmakers, cloud providers, and other industry titans teaming up to tackle AI advances that have been compared to the Manhattan Project. What comes out of it is anyone’s guess, but this group of collaborators is a very strong first step.

TOGETHER WITH ATLASSIAN ROVO

👋 Meet Rovo, AI that knows your business

The Rundown: Discover Atlassian Rovo — AI that knows your business. Rovo connects teams, knowledge, and tools so you can move faster and work smarter — together.

Why Rovo?

• Rovo connects to all your favorite SaaS apps.

• Rovo brings organizational knowledge and context into every workflow.

• It’s already built into Jira, Confluence, and more.

• And it’s built on Atlassian’s enterprise-grade security & privacy.

Try Rovo today.

OPENAI

📱 OpenAI opens ChatGPT app marketplace to developers

Image source: OpenAI

The Rundown: OpenAI just unveiled an expansion of its dedicated app directory inside ChatGPT, opening submissions for third-party developers while giving users a browsable hub to discover and connect integrated services.

The details:

• The new directory organizes offerings across Featured, Lifestyle, and Productivity categories, accessible via the tools menu or apps page.

• Developers can build using OAI’s beta SDK, with resources like sample code, interface libraries, and step-by-step submission guides now available.

• Current apps include Photoshop, Canva, DoorDash, Spotify, and Zillow, with users able to use the external tools directly in ChatGPT conversations.

• Revenue options are currently limited to external website links, though OpenAI says it’s exploring digital goods and broader monetization paths.

Why it matters: OpenAI continues to position ChatGPT as an ‘everything’ interface over a standalone assistant, and opening itself to third-party apps can continue to broaden that experience for consumers. But as we previously saw with the GPT Store struggles, just because an app is built doesn’t necessarily mean the users will come.

AI TRAINING

🤓 Make Claude Code smarter with the Context7 MCP

The Rundown: Learn how to give Claude Code the context it needs to make far fewer mistakes and successfully pull the latest coding documentation instantly by connecting it to the Context7 MCP.

Step-by-step:

1. Create a new project folder in Cursor, open a new terminal, type “Claude” to start Claude Code, then open a second terminal for your Context7 install script

2. Create a free Context7 account, click the “Claude Code” tab, copy the “Remote” installation script, create an API key, and paste it where it says YOUR_API_KEY

3. Paste the installation script into your regular terminal (not Claude Code), then create a Claude.md file with rules: “Always use context7 when I need code generation, setup, configuration steps, or library/API documentation” — specify doc sources like <https://pokeapi.co/docs/v2>

4. Test Context7 by sending a planning prompt: “Build a simple html site that creates random teams of 6 pokemon with lock/reshuffle features using pokapi docs” — approve tool use and select “Yes, and never ask again for Context7”

Pro tip: Hit ctrl+o in a Claude Code terminal to see its full thoughts. It’s good practice to understand how it thinks.

PRESENTED BY SINTRA

👥 Meet your new 12-person AI team

The Rundown: Sintra gives solopreneurs and small teams a full AI workforce, with 12 specialized helpers supporting your business 24/7 for social media, copywriting, SEO, sales, customer support, and more — all trained on your brand.

With Sintra, you can:

• Delegate to AI helpers like Soshie for social, Penn for copy, and Seomi for SEO

• Keep brand voice consistent across channels with shared Brain AI memory

• Connect to Gmail, Notion, and your favorite tools from one dashboard

Discover how Sintra can help you grow — start today.

FIGURE AI

🚀 Figure CEO Brett Adcock launches new AI lab 

Image source: Reve / The Rundown

The Rundown: Robotics startup Figure AI CEO and founder Brett Adcock is reportedly starting a new AI lab called Hark, backed entirely by $100M in personal funding, according to The Information.

The details:

• The venture will pursue “human-centric AI” capable of proactive reasoning, continuous self-improvement, and designed to “care deeply about humans.”

• Hark’s first GPU cluster reportedly came online this week, though the company hasn’t disclosed the scale or specs of the infrastructure.

• Adcock will still run Figure, which has secured nearly $2B in funding at a $39B valuation, alongside the new AI lab.

Why it matters: Despite vicious competition between the top labs, there is no shortage of competitors still spinning up — showing there is still plenty of belief that frontier AI has unexplored directions the major players may be missing. With Figure’s robotics success, Hark could also follow the integrated path being paved by Tesla/xAI.

QUICK HITS

🛠️ Trending AI Tools

• ⚡ Lightfield - CRM that auto-updates from email, calendar, and built-in call recording — so you never waste time logging notes again*

• 📜 Mistral OCR 3 - SOTA model for extracting text and images from documents

• ⚙️ GPT-5.2-Codex - OAI’s new top-ranked agentic coding model

• 🎬 Ray3 Modify - Edit and reimagine videos with precise keyframe and character reference controls

*Sponsored Listing

📰 Everything else in AI today

Angular just released: v21, modernizes Angular apps with signal-powered forms, Vitest as the default test runner, new headless components, and MCP-powered AI workflows.*

OpenAI rolled out GPT-5.2-Codex, an updated coding-focused model with strengthened cybersecurity abilities.

Mistral launched OCR 3, a document-reading model that converts notes, scanned forms, and tables into clean text — claiming the top spot across OCR benchmarks.

Vibe coding platform Lovable announced a new $330M Series B funding round that values the company at $6.6B.

Hollywood actors and filmmakers started the Creators Coalition on AI, a new advocacy group backed by over 500 artists pushing for industry standards around consent, compensation, and deepfake protections.

Elon Musk reportedly told employees in an all-hands meeting that xAI may reach AGI as early as 2026, saying it can beat out rivals if they can “survive the next 2-3 years.”

*Sponsored Listing

COMMUNITY

🤝 Community AI workflows

Every newsletter, we showcase how a reader is using AI to work smarter, save time, or make life easier.

Today’s workflow comes from reader Mike in Haddonfield, NJ:

“My furnace died and my Nest went dark, so I tried using Gemini as a DIY field guide. I uploaded a photo of the error code, and it immediately walked me through getting power back to the unit. When I shared a photo of the HVAC setup, Gemini spotted a ‘hidden’ safety switch on the condensate pump and correctly guessed the drainage hose was blocked.

It even suggested a MacGyver-style fix: using a turkey baster to clear the line. 15 minutes later, the heat was back on, and I’d saved myself an emergency service call. This is a total game-changer for real-world troubleshooting.”

How do you use AI? Tell us here.

🎓 Highlights: News, Guides & Events

• Read our last AI newsletter: Google’s Flash-y new Gemini 3 release

• Read our last Tech newsletter: The AI boom’s phone problem

• Read our last Robotics newsletter: The top 5 robotics trends this year

• Today’s AI tool guide: Make Claude Code smarter with the Context7 MCP

• RSVP to next workshop @ 4PM EST today: Google NotebookLM For Work

See you soon,

Rowan, Joey, Zach, Shubham, and Jennifer — the humans behind The Rundown