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AI

Disney's billion-dollar AI bet on OpenAI

Zach Mink • 6 minutes

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Good morning, AI enthusiasts. Disney just did what every media company has been reluctant to do — hand over the keys to its kingdom to AI.

With a new licensing deal and $1B investment into OpenAI, the Mouse is making its first (legal) appearance in Sora — and hitting the AI leader’s rivals with cease-and-desists in the process to completely shift the IP landscape.

Reminder: Our next live workshop is today at 4 PM EST. Attend and learn how to leverage Google’s Workspace Studio to create practical AI automations for tasks like email inbox triage, template building, and more. RSVP here.

In today’s AI rundown:

  • OpenAI, Disney lock in $1B licensing deal

  • OpenAI drops GPT-5.2, hits back at Google

  • Create and deploy voice agents for your business

  • Google opens upgraded Deep Research agent to devs

  • 4 new AI tools, community workflows, and more

LATEST DEVELOPMENTS

OPENAI & DISNEY

🤝 OpenAI, Disney lock in $1B licensing deal

Image source: Reve / The Rundown

The Rundown: Disney just announced a three-year licensing deal with OpenAI, giving Sora users access to over 200 characters from Disney, Marvel, Pixar, and Star Wars — alongside a $1B equity investment into the AI leader.

The details:

  • Fans will be able to use Disney-owned IP like Mickey Mouse, Darth Vader, and the Avengers in video generations, with select creations streaming on Disney+.

  • Disney is also deploying OpenAI’s APIs across products and rolling out ChatGPT internally as part of a broader enterprise push.

  • The deal specifically excludes talent likenesses and voices, sidestepping the more complex IP battles still playing out across Hollywood.

  • Disney also sent a cease-and-desist to Google on the same day, accusing the OAI rival of generating unauthorized Disney content at “massive scale”.

Why it matters: CEO Bob Iger made waves last month when he said AI was coming to Disney+, but this is a bigger move than anyone imagined. For OAI, the deal gives them a unique leg up on utilizing popular IPs without legal trouble — and leads to an even more aggressive enforcement against rival generators as they protect that advantage.

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 drops GPT-5.2, hits back at Google

Image source: OpenAI

The Rundown: OpenAI released its GPT-5.2 model family, calling it the company’s “most capable series yet for professional knowledge work”, arriving just weeks after an internal memo warned the company was losing ground to Google’s Gemini lineup.

The details:

  • The release comes in three tiers: Instant for quick queries, Thinking for complex reasoning tasks, and Pro for maximum accuracy on hard problems.

  • 5.2 is an upgrade across benchmarks from 5.1, showing notable gains in hallucination rate, vision, coding, long-context reasoning, and tool use.

  • On GDPval, GPT-5.2 Thinking beat or matched industry professionals 71% of the time across real-world tasks like spreadsheets and presentations.

  • 5.2 was reportedly released despite internal requests to delay for more polish, with OAI pushing ahead as Gemini 3 topped most public leaderboards.

Why it matters: OpenAI’s codenamed ‘Garlic’ model is here, and it packs an impressive counter-punch to Gemini 3 despite feeling like a rushed production. This month felt like one of the first times OAI has been on its heels — but in addition to 5.2, it likely has some buzzy Christmas drops up its sleeve in the coming weeks.

AI TRAINING

🗣️ Create and deploy voice agents for your business

The Rundown: In this tutorial, you will learn how to use Cartesia to build and deploy AI voice agents that can handle calls, take orders, or answer customer questions using natural, human-like speech.

Step-by-step:

  1. Go to Cartesia, click "Start for Free", explore the dashboard, and test voices in "Text to Speech" using Sonic 3.0 for best latency and clarity

  2. Scroll to "Voice Agents", click "Text to Agent", describe your agent (e.g., "Pizza order assistant that greets customers, takes orders, confirms details, calculates totals")

  3. Select voice preference, click "Generate", then test using the dialer at +1 (515) 800-8360 - verify response speed, order handling, and voice clarity

  4. Click "Promote to Production" to get a working number, publish it on the site, and monitor performance in "Metrics" (calls handled, duration, credit usage)

Pro tip: Refine prompts as needed based on customer interactions.

PRESENTED BY MATILLION

🔧 95% of AI projects fail — here’s the fix

The Rundown: Fact – most AI projects stall before delivering value. Leading CDOs are turning to Maia, the agentic data team, to cut manual work by 90%, launch initiatives 10x faster, and finally clear backlog bottlenecks.

Download this ebook to learn how to:

  • Cut delivery times

  • Scale data work without extra hires

  • Take AI projects from PoC to production

Get the ebook.

GOOGLE

🧠 Google opens upgraded Deep Research agent to devs

Image source: Google

The Rundown: Google just released a significantly upgraded version of its Deep Research agent, now available to developers through a new Interactions API — with consumer rollouts coming soon to Search, NotebookLM, and the Gemini app.

The details:

  • The agent runs on the new Gemini 3 Pro, iteratively planning searches, reading results, identifying gaps, and querying again until reaching an answer.

  • A new Interactions API unifies access to Gemini models and agents, with native support for MCP connections to external tools and data sources.

  • Google also open-sourced DeepSearchQA, a 900-task benchmark designed to test multi-step web research more rigorously than existing evaluations.

  • Google claims SOTA scores on Humanity's Last Exam (46.4%) and the DeepSearchQA benchmark (66.1%), outpacing the Gemini 3 Pro base model.

Why it matters: There’s no shortage of competition in the Deep Research category, but Google’s updated agent builds nicely on top of the already powerful Gemini 3 releases. It also provides devs with the opportunity to leverage the tool in their own apps for the first time, bringing an upgrade to the research layer of third-party builds.

QUICK HITS

🛠️ Trending AI Tools

*Sponsored Listing

📰 Everything else in AI today

TIME Magazine named “the architects of AI” as its 2025 Person of the Year, spotlighting leaders Jensen Huang, Sam Altman, Dario Amodei, and Elon Musk.

Cursor unveiled a new visual editor that lets developers drag, drop, and rearrange interface elements while AI agents automatically update the underlying code.

Shopify dropped new Winter '26 AI features, including SimGym for simulating shopper behavior and Agentic Storefronts that surface products in AI platforms.

Runway introduced GWM-1, its first "General World Model" that can simulate interactive, explorable environments in real time.

Google Labs launched Disco, an experimental browser that uses Gemini 3 to generate custom web applications based on your open tabs and browsing tasks.

ElevenLabs announced a new partnership with Meta, bringing its audio and voice tech to creators on Instagram, Horizon, and more.

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 Jyothi V. in India:

"I used AI as an unexpected consumer-rights strategist. When a store refused returns on a 13-item order, I simply asked how to contact them. The AI analyzed the situation, identified that the policy was buried, and suggested a negotiation strategy referencing consumer rights. It drafted a firm escalation message, and the store ended up accepting my returns. It felt like having a built-in advocate who sees angles I miss."

How do you use AI? Tell us here.

🎓 Highlights: News, Guides & Events

See you soon,

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

Robotics

Skild eyes $14B for robot brains

Jennifer Mossalgue • 5 minutes

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Good morning, robotics enthusiasts. SoftBank and Nvidia are reportedly in talks to drop more than $1B into Skild AI, a fast-rising startup building a universal brain for robots.

The deal would push Skild’s valuation to $14B, nearly tripling it overnight. Whether foundation models can actually deliver general-purpose robots remains unproven, but it looks like investors aren’t waiting for proof.

In today’s robotics rundown:

  • Skild’s robot brain draws mega investment

  • Tether pours stablecoin profits into humanoids

  • MIT-backed robot moves 1.6K boxes an hour

  • The next phase of Ukraine’s drone warfare

  • Quick hits on other robotics news

LATEST DEVELOPMENTS

SKILD AI

🧠 Skild’s robot brain draws mega investment

Image source: Skild AI

The Rundown: SoftBank Group and Nvidia are reportedly in advanced talks to lead a massive round in Skild AI, a startup developing a foundational AI model for robotics. The deal, if closed, will triple the company’s valuation to nearly $14B.

The details:

  • Reuters reports that SoftBank and Nvidia are negotiating a $1B+ investment that would put Skild AI among the best-funded embodied AI startups.

  • Skild is building a general-purpose robotics “brain” designed to control many robot types, from robot arms to humanoids, not just a single bespoke platform.

  • Founded in 2023 by Carnegie Mellon’s Deepak Pathak and Abhinav Gupta, Skild has raised hundreds of millions of dollars, including a $300M Series A.

  • That capital is going into training its omni-bodied “Skild Brain” on massive datasets powered by NVIDIA’s simulation and AI stack.

Why it matters: Skild is racing to solve robotics’ holy grail — a universal AI brain that works across any hardware — while rivals like Physical Intelligence and Figure pursue similar moonshots. The bet reflects growing belief that foundation models can break robots out of narrow, task-specific applications and into general-purpose deployment.

TETHER/GENERATIVE BIONICS

💵 Tether pours stablecoin profits into humanoids

Image source: Generative Bionics (Daniele Pucci, CEO and co-founder)

The Rundown: Stablecoin heavyweight Tether is muscling into the humanoid race with an investment in Generative Bionics, an Italian startup building next-gen bipedal machines in the mold of Tesla and Nvidia-backed efforts.

The details:

  • Tether is investing in Genoa-based startup Generative Bionics as part of a €70M ($81M) round to build humanoids designed for real industrial work.

  • The funding will also help the startup build its first production facility ahead of planned deployments as soon as 2026.

  • For Tether, the deal adds robotics to a growing portfolio that already spans AI data centers, media platforms, agriculture, and brain-computer interfaces.

  • Launched in 2024, Generative Bionics emerged from the Italian Institute of Technology, where researchers built more than 60 humanoid prototypes.

Why it matters: Tether is backing Generative Bionics’ plan to deploy humanoids in warehouses, factories, and defense-adjacent sites by 2026 — a timeline that puts the startup on a collision course with better-known players like Figure. The company plans to unveil its first ‘complete’ humanoid at CES in Las Vegas.

PICKLE ROBOT COMPANY

🥒 MIT-backed robot moves 1.6K boxes an hour

Image source: Pickle Robot Company

The Rundown: MIT alumni-founded Pickle Robot Company is automating the warehouse’s worst job — unloading trailers at breakneck speed. Its pneumatic-suction arms move 1,600 boxes per hour, clearing 75K pounds of cargo.

The details:

  • The Boston-area startup builds one-armed, AI-enabled robots that roll into truck trailers, grab boxes up to 50 lb., and feed them onto conveyor belts.

  • Their systems use cameras, depth sensors, and AI-powered perception to understand messy, floor-loaded trailers for maximum efficiency.

  • Instead of redesigning warehouses from scratch, Pickle’s aim is “drop-in” automation that works with existing infrastructure and software.

  • Pickle says its robots are already working with major customers, including UPS, Yusen Logistics, and Randa Apparel.

Why it matters: Pickle is one of several startups — including Contoro, Boston Dynamics, and Dexterity — racing to automate trailer unloading, but claims to move twice as fast as rivals. They also just raised $50M to build a software platform that can plug into third-party hardware, including humanoids and autonomous forklifts.

DRONES

🪖 The next phase of Ukraine’s drone warfare

Image source: Ideogram / The Rundown

The Rundown: Ukraine is moving beyond kamikaze drones to battlefield swarms where one soldier commands dozens of autonomous units at once, according to Ukrainian defense tech firm Ark Robotics — a shift that could redefine modern warfare.

The details:

  • Ark Robotics CEO, Achi, told Business Insider that future warfare hinges on flipping to one pilot commanding drone swarms — for “total drone warfare.”

  • He argued that one-operator-per-drone systems cannot scale because you can ramp drone production far faster than you can train and field pilots.

  • Ark Robotics says it’s developing Frontier, a system designed to coordinate thousands of aerial drones and ground robots with minimal human oversight.

  • Officials across Europe, including Sweden’s defense minister, are exploring tech that could let a single soldier autonomously control up to 100 drones.

Why it matters: Ukraine is banking on autonomous drone swarms to counter Russia’s sheer numbers, accelerating a shift toward warfare with minimal human oversight — something NATO is watching closely. The promise is a new battlefield economy, but for now, true large-scale autonomous swarms remain theory, not practice.

QUICK HITS

📰 Everything else in robotics today

Tesla Optimus toppled backward mid-demo at a Miami event, seemingly mirroring a teleoperator removing a VR headset — a moment that quickly went viral online.

South Korea launched a $102B fund to spur investment in high-tech sectors such as AI and robotics.

Samsung, which refreshed its adorable Ballie home robot design two years ago and promised a launch before the end of 2025, has now officially delayed the rollout.

MIT and Stanford researchers built plant-inspired “robo-tendrils” that curl, tighten, and lift with enough finesse to grip both fragile glass and heavy watermelons.

Texas A&M engineering students designed a robotic dog that uses voice commands, AI, and cameras to map, remember, and recognize its surroundings.

A new study describes a hybrid robot that rolls like tumbleweed but can also switch on quadcopter-style control, making ground exploration much more energy-efficient.

Mercado Libre, Latin America’s leading e-commerce and fintech platform, signed a deal to deploy Agility Robotics’ Digit humanoids at its San Antonio, Texas, facility.

NASA picked Lunar Outpost’s Mobile Autonomous Prospecting Platform (MAPP) to be the first robotic rover to work alongside astronauts on the moon.

COMMUNITY

🎓 Highlights: News, Guides & Events

See you soon,

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

AI

Open-source AI crushes elite math exam

Zach Mink • 6 minutes

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Good morning, AI enthusiasts. Remember when AI couldn't handle basic arithmetic? Now, a small open-source model is crushing one of the world’s hardest math exams.

After achieving top scores in the Putnam Contest, Nous Research’s Nomos-1 joins a long list of AI-driven math advances this year that show the field may be about to move into a whole new territory of discovery.

In today’s AI rundown:

  • Nous Research's AI takes on elite math exam

  • Microsoft maps how people use Copilot

  • Fix bugs and ship features from Slack with Claude Code

  • AI ring gives ‘external memory’ for your brain

  • 4 new AI tools, community workflows, and more

LATEST DEVELOPMENTS

NOUS RESEARCH

📈 Nous Research's AI takes on elite math exam

Image source: Nano Banana Pro / The Rundown

The Rundown: Nous Research just open-sourced Nomos 1, a new 30B parameter reasoning system that scored 87 out of 120 on the 2025 Putnam Contest — crushing rivals like Qwen 3 on one of the most prestigious collegiate math competitions.

The details:

  • The system uses a two-phase approach: AI ‘workers’ solve and self-critique responses, with a tournament-style bracket then selecting the best submission.

  • Nomos’ score would have placed second among nearly 4,000 human competitors last year, with the model earning eight perfect problem scores.

  • Nous also released and open-sourced a reasoning harness — orchestration code that manages how the model solves problems.

  • Running Qwen3 through the same harness and setup scored just 24/120, with the result showing gains coming from model training rather than the harness.

Why it matters: Not too long ago, even simple math problems were an issue for top AI systems —  and now, a small, open model is taking down a notoriously difficult exam. Between Nomos, AI helping conquer unsolved problems, and labs coming with gold medal-winning math models, the entire field looks ready for an AI-driven boom.

TOGETHER WITH VANTA

🔐 Get AI compliance ready for 2026

The Rundown: AI has unlocked new velocity for startups — and new visibility, too. The faster you grow, the sooner you’ll need to prove you’re secure enough to play with enterprise customers. Join Vanta for a live session on how to make compliance work at your pace, without slowing momentum, stalling deals, or putting revenue at risk.

You’ll walk away with:

  • Tips on identifying the right framework(s) for your startup

  • Advice on how to work security into your budget

  • Security best practices to implement now so you’re audit-ready next year

  • Essential steps to earn customer trust (and deals)

Register today.

AI RESEARCH

🗺️ Microsoft maps how people use Copilot

Image source: Microsoft

The Rundown: Microsoft just published new research analyzing 37.5M Copilot conversations from the past year, revealing distinct behavioral patterns in how users engage with the AI assistant across different devices, time periods, and topics.

The details:

  • Health and wellness queries dominated mobile use regardless of hour or month, positioning phones as around-the-clock personal wellness companions.

  • Advice-seeking grew throughout the year, with users increasingly treating AI as a guidance source rather than just a pure search tool.

  • Late-night sessions saw philosophical, religious, and existential topics climb in popularity, while relationship chats spiked specifically around Valentine's Day.

  • Programming dominated in January, while social topics rose later in the year, reflecting a shift from early adopters toward a broader, mainstream audience.

Why it matters: There has been a wealth of data from major labs on how users are leveraging AI, but this Microsoft study gives an interesting look at the shifting dynamics that occur based on both the time of day and year, and the device being used — insights that can shape how next-gen assistants adapt and optimize for context.

AI TRAINING

👨‍💻 Fix bugs and ship features from Slack with Claude Code

The Rundown: In this tutorial, you will learn how to add Claude Code to your Slack and task the autonomous coding assistant with fixing bugs or implementing new features, without ever opening a code editor.

Step-by-step:

  1. Connect Claude Code to GitHub here and add the Claude app to your Slack workspace here.

  2. You should see it in the bottom left of your Slack now. Click “Connect Account” and give Claude access to Slack.

  3. Add Claude to an existing channel or to a new one by typing “@claude” and hitting enter. It will ask you to add Claude to the channel. Approve it.

  4. You can now @Claude and give it coding tasks, with the assistant building context based on recent messages.

Pro tip: Start a Slack thread on a particular issue for the best performance. Additionally, you can also now access Claude Code on mobile via the Slack app.

PRESENTED BY GURU

🧠 Your AI source of truth

The Rundown: Guru is the AI Source of Truth that connects all of your company’s tools and delivers cited, permission-aware answers everywhere you work. With one governed knowledge layer powering both your people and your AIs, teams move faster — with fewer blind spots and mistakes.

Guru allows you to:

  • Connect all knowledge with permission-aware access

  • Get trusted, cited answers in chat and everywhere else you work

  • Experience knowledge that improves and verifies itself

Learn more about Guru. 

AI WEARABLES

💍 AI ring gives ‘external memory’ for your brain

Image source: Core Devices

The Rundown: Pebble maker Core Devices just introduced the Index 01, a new $75 AI smart ring voice recorder that captures spoken ideas and uses on-device AI to turn them into notes, reminders, or calendar entries, without subscriptions or internet.

The details:

  • The ring fits on a user’s index finger with a thumb-activated button, allowing for hands-free recording while on the move.

  • Recordings sync to a user’s phone, where a local LLM transcribes and processes the voice note via an open-source speech-to-text system.

  • The ring requires no charging, with batteries lasting up to two years of typical use, and can record up to five minutes of continuous audio.

Why it matters: After wearables like the Humane Pin and Rabbit R1 stumbled trying to replace phones with AI hardware, Index 01 is taking a narrower approach — a single, simple task executed reliably. It’s certainly no guaranteed success, but it might reveal whether the device market has room for focused tools vs. mass-market moonshots.

QUICK HITS

🛠️ Trending AI Tools

  • 🧑‍💻 Devstral 2 - Mistral’s next-gen family of coding-focused models

  • 💡 Stitch - Google’s tool to turn ideas into UI designs, now using Gemini 3

  • 🧮 Nomos 1 - Nous Research’s powerful AI math reasoning system

  • 🧠 Purpose - AI mentor for deep, personalized guidance on demand

📰 Everything else in AI today

Just launched: Coder now provides full-stack infrastructure for governed AI development at scale. Learn more about AI Bridge, Agent Boundaries, and Coder Tasks.*

The U.S.’ annual defense bill reportedly mandates the creation of a committee to study the military impacts of AGI and countermeasures to adversaries pursuing it.

Chinese AI startup DeepSeek is reportedly developing its next AI model using thousands of illegally imported Nvidia chips, according to The Information.

McDonald’s Netherlands pulled an AI-created Christmas ad after facing backlash, saying the reaction “serves as an important learning as we explore effective use of AI.”

Amazon and Microsoft both announced major AI and cloud infrastructure investments in India, collectively pledging over $52B.

*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 Courtney P. in Sylvan Lake, MI:

"My daughter is a freshman in high school and has big dreams of playing field hockey at the collegiate level. I created a GPT in ChatGPT that acts as a college recruiting coach for her that can give her everything from coaching, training workouts, nutrition tips, mindset coaching, to which clinics are the best to be at to get in front of coaches.

We’ve saved thousands of dollars at this point from having to hire an outside recruiter coach just by me spending a few hours to create this knowledge base for her!"

How do you use AI? Tell us here.

🎓 Highlights: News, Guides & Events

See you soon,

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

AI

Microsoft's cancer-mapping AI

Zach Mink • 6 minutes

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Good morning, AI enthusiasts. Advanced tumor mapping used to cost thousands and take days of lab work. Microsoft just figured out how to do it with AI and a $10 tissue slide.

With the company’s new open-source GigaTIME model drawing insights from 40M cell samples in seconds, cancer research may have just gotten a serious accessibility upgrade.

In today’s AI rundown:

  • Microsoft AI turns tissue samples into cancer maps

  • Mistral’s Devstral 2 and new coding assistant

  • Create a brand kit with Nano Banana Pro

  • OpenAI, Anthropic, Block team up on agent standards

  • 4 new AI tools, community workflows, and more

LATEST DEVELOPMENTS

MICROSOFT

🔬 Microsoft AI turns tissue samples into cancer maps

Image source: Reve / The Rundown

The Rundown: Microsoft just released and open-sourced GigaTIME, a new AI model that can extract thousands of dollars worth of tumor insights from a basic $10 tissue slide — analysis that previously required expensive lab work and days of processing.

The details:

  • The model learned from 40M cell samples provided by Providence Health, matching simple slides with advanced immune system scans.

  • Researchers tested it on over 14,000 cancer patients, creating a virtual library of 300,000 detailed tumor images across 24 different cancer types.

  • The ‘virtual population’ analysis surfaced over 1,200 patterns linking immune activity to factors like cancer stage and patient survival.

Why it matters: Cancer research is entering a new phase where AI can unearth meaningful insights from routine data that would have required costly, time-intensive lab work just years ago. GigaTIME is part of an AI-led shift towards models that make population-scale analysis affordable and fast enough to influence treatment decisions.

TOGETHER WITH HUBSPOT

⏰ Save 10+ hours weekly with an AI personal assistant

The Rundown: Stop drowning in tasks and start delegating like top performers who use AI to handle 80% of their routine work. HubSpot’s free kit provides the exact templates, prompts, and systems that 10,000+ professionals use to complete a full day's work by lunch.

The AI Assistant Kit includes:

  • Ready-to-use "AI Assistant Command Center" for managing all your AI tools

  • Step-by-step implementation guide to master AI delegation in under 60 minutes

  • Built-in ROI calculator to track your time savings and productivity gains

  • Advanced prompts and templates to turn ChatGPT into a 24/7 productivity partner

Download your free AI Assistant Kit now.

MISTRAL

🚀 Mistral’s Devstral 2 and new coding assistant

Image source: Mistral

The Rundown: French AI startup Mistral just launched Devstral 2, the next-gen version of its coding-focused model family — alongside Vibe CLI, the company’s first move into autonomous coding agents.

The details:

  • Mistral’s 123B Devstral 2 scores a 72.2% on the SWE-bench Verified, nearly matching the top open-weight model (Deepseek V3.2) while being 5x smaller.

  • The Small 2 variant challenges other open-weight rivals despite being just 24B parameters and able to run on a single GPU or laptop CPU.

  • Devstral 2 is notably released with a ‘modified’ MIT license that puts restrictions on use for companies with $20M+ in monthly revenue.

  • Mistral’s Vibe CLI is a terminal-native coding agent that can scan codebases and handle multi-file changes, free to use under an Apache 2.0 license.

Why it matters: Mistral is shipping this month, with a strong Devstral release coming just days after the Mistral 3 launch. While the main model moves near the open frontier for coding, the small variant looks to be a real development upgrade for models able to be deployed locally and offline on consumer devices.

AI TRAINING

🎨 Create a brand kit with Nano Banana Pro

The Rundown: In this tutorial, you will learn how to create a full brand kit PFD, logo variations, and social media templates using Google’s Nano Banana Pro, customized to your business, target audience, or company guidelines.

Step-by-step:

  1. Go to AI Studio and prompt: "I need a complete brand kit. Business: [NAME]. What we do: [ONE SENTENCE]. Target: [WHO + PAIN]. Personality: [3 ADJECTIVES]. Interview me with 3-5 questions, include tagline ideas"

  2. Answer the questions, then prompt: "Use Nano Banana Pro to generate 4 logo options in a 2x2 grid" — pick the best and request variations (secondary, monochrome black/white, icon-only)

  3. Prompt: "Generate the logo system slide for my brand kit deck," then ask it to outline remaining slides and generate each one at a time

  4. Assemble slides in Google Slides and export as PDF

Pro tip: Use the prompt pattern to get consistent outputs from Nano Banana every time: “interview me → generate one asset → outline remaining assets → generate”

PRESENTED BY INVISIBLE

🚀 From AI pilots to production

The Rundown: AI won’t run your company in 2026, but it could let ten people do the work of a thousand if you fix adoption. Invisible’s 2026 Agnetic Field Report reveals insights from both sides – inside the labs training over 80% of leading models and inside enterprises making them work at scale.

Invisible’s 2026 predictions:

  • How enterprise agents get better through multimodal reasoning, not just more features

  • What AI safety looks like when agents are touching money, contracts, and customers

  • How RL environments leap from Atari games to an enterprise test bed

Download the 2026 AI Trends Report to see what's next for enterprise AI.

AI RESEARCH

🤝 OpenAI, Anthropic, Block team up on agent standards

Image source: AAIF

The Rundown: OpenAI, Anthropic, and Block just co-founded the Agentic AI Foundation, a neutral entity governed under the Linux Foundation — with each company pooling open-source tools to build standards across the AI agent ecosystem.

The details:

  • Each founding company is donating a core project — Anthropic's Model Context Protocol, OAI's AGENTS.md, and Block's Goose agent framework.

  • The MCP has already been adopted by ChatGPT, Cursor, Gemini, and VS Code, with over 10,000 active public servers since its launch last year.

  • Supporting members include Google, Microsoft, AWS, Bloomberg, and Cloudflare, expanding industry alignment for the AI agent framework.

  • The Linux Foundation will provide neutral governance, drawing on experience hosting other tech infrastructure projects like PyTorch and Kubernetes.

Why it matters: The AAIF is an important development to avoid AI agents being built across the industry behind walled gardens, with the commitment to shared standards helping both accelerate adoption and allow the tech to work more efficiently on the same rails for a better experience for users and developers.

QUICK HITS

🛠️ Trending AI Tools

  • 🗺️ Unwrap Customer Intelligence - Turn unstructured customer feedback into data-backed insights that inform your product roadmap*

  • 🚀 Vibe CLI - Mistral’s new open-source CLI powered by Devstral

  • ⚙️ GLM-4.6V - Zhipu AI's open-source multimodal family with native tool use

  • 🧑‍💻 Claude Code - Deep-context AI coding assistant with new Slack integration

*Sponsored Listing

📰 Everything else in AI today

Meta is reportedly planning to drop a new frontier model codenamed “Avocado” in Q1 2026, which “could be a proprietary model,” unlike its previous open-source launches.

The U.S. War Department introduced GenAI.mil, a new AI platform for the U.S. military, with Google's Gemini debuting as the first AI model available for use.

Microsoft announced a $19B CAD investment to expand AI infrastructure across Canada through 2027, alongside a plan to keep Canadian user data within the country.

The EU opened a new investigation into Google over whether its AI search summaries and AI Mode improperly use content from websites and videos without compensation.

Anthropic is partnering with Accenture to train 30,000 of the firm’s consultants on Claude to help enterprises move AI pilot projects forward.

The U.S. DOJ detained two men for allegedly running a smuggling network to ship Nvidia chips to China, part of an investigation that has seized more than $50M in GPUs.

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 Laura L. in Minneapolis, MN:

"My daughter recently turned 18. We fed into AI meaningful locations around our house and asked it to generate scavenger hunt clues leading from spot to spot, ending at the treasure - a college-ready laptop. AI and I went through a couple of iterations together, with the results ranging from way too obvious "look in your boots" clues to elaborately-worded hints in Victorian English before we landed on clever rhyming clues."

How do you use AI? Tell us here.

🎓 Highlights: News, Guides & Events

See you soon,

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

Tech

Neuralink cofounder's wild next act

Jennifer Mossalgue • 5 minutes

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Good morning, tech enthusiasts. The Neuralink cofounder and engineer who helped Elon Musk wire brains to machines is now building hardware for the human eye.

Max Hodak’s next act: a grain-sized retinal implant that restores sight when paired with smart glasses. And his future plans push neurotech into even wilder territory.

In today’s tech rundown:

  • A rice-sized implant to restore vision

  • Google wants another crack at your face

  • Mark Manson now has an AI app

  • Uber’s airport kiosks ditch the app

  • Quick hits on other tech news

LATEST DEVELOPMENTS

BIOTECH INNOVATIONS

👁️ A rice-sized implant to restore vision

Image source: Ideogram / The Rundown

The Rundown: Max Hodak, the engineer who helped Elon Musk turn Neuralink from sci-fi pitch into an FDA-approved brain implant, now has his own startup — building a rice-sized retinal implant that can restore vision.

The details:

  • Hodak’s neurotech company, Science Corp, built after his split from Neuralink, aims to turn cutting-edge brain-computer interfaces into real medical products.

  • Its first product is a retinal chip that pairs with camera glasses and a battery pack to restore “form vision” in people with advanced macular degeneration.

  • Science Corp finished clinical trials, submitted data in Europe, and is targeting a launch next summer at around $200K per procedure, TechCrunch reports.

  • The company is developing optogenetic gene therapies and “waffle grid” brain implants seeded with lab-grown neurons that can grow into the cortex.

Why it matters: Backed by $260M in funding, Hodak’s startup is now competing directly with Neuralink, Microsoft’s BCI research program, Apple’s partnership with Synchron, and Sam Altman’s reported Neuralink rival — raising the stakes over who will control the platforms that literally interface with the human nervous system.

GOOGLE

👓 Google wants another crack at your face

Image source: Google

The Rundown: Google has announced that it is returning to smart glasses with AI-powered eyewear set for 2026 — its most serious challenge yet to Meta’s surging dominance in consumer AI hardware.

The details:

  • The lineup will include two models: an audio-only version with the Gemini AI assistant and another featuring an in-lens display for visual information.

  • Google is teaming up with Samsung, Gentle Monster, and Warby Parker — backed by a $150M partnership — to co-develop the hardware design.

  • Meta’s partnership with EssilorLuxottica has helped turn its AI-infused smart glasses into an unexpected hit with consumers.

  • Google’s new glasses reflect its broader strategy to extend Gemini’s presence beyond phones and computers into everyday, ambient computing tools.

Why it matters: Google Glass flopped a decade ago — too expensive, too early, and hobbled by shaky supply chains. Now co-founder Sergey Brin says the company has learned its lesson, and this Gemini-powered bet is Google’s chance to prove it can compete with Meta’s surprise hit in the smart eyewear market.

MARK MANSON

👉🏽 Mark Manson now has an AI app

Image source: YouTube

The Rundown: Bestselling author and anti-guru Mark Manson just teamed up with AI entrepreneur Raj Singh to launch Purpose, an AI coaching app that promises to actually push you toward change, not just serve up another inspirational quote to scroll past.

The details:

  • Manson, author of The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck, has launched Purpose with a mission to “reinvent” personal growth coaching.

  • Purpose bills itself as AI that remembers your progress and tailors advice, unlike chatbots that can lack long-term memory and default to generic answers.

  • Singh last sold his AI hotel concierge service, GoMoment (which served 100M+ guests), to Revinate, a direct booking platform for the hospitality industry.

  • The new a is available at $19.99/month, positioning itself as the antidote to generic AI tools that reinforce rather than challenge users’ existing beliefs.

Why it matters: AI “mentors” like Purpose are emerging in a crowded landscape of digital companions, from emotional-support bots such as Replika and Wysa to platforms like BetterUp, all vying to own the intimate space where people vent and self-optimize. Manson is hoping his personal brand will help push this one to the front.

UBER

🚖 Uber’s airport kiosks ditch the app

Image source: Uber

The Rundown: Uber is rolling out ride-booking kiosks in airports so travelers can order rides without the app or even a smartphone — targeting less tech-savvy passengers and international arrivals who land without data service.

The details:

  • The first kiosk launches at LaGuardia’s Terminal C, with expansion to hotels, ports, and international airports coming in the next few months.

  • Users enter trip details on a touchscreen, get fare estimates, and confirm a driver — no app required.

  • The move captures demand from travelers who currently default to taxis or shuttles because app-based booking is inconvenient or inaccessible.

  • This isn’t Uber’s first experiment with airport kiosks: it piloted phone-free ride-booking kiosks at Toronto Pearson International Airport back in 2019.

Why it matters: Uber’s move puts pressure on rivals like Lyft and local taxi operators, which still lean heavily on curbside queues and phone apps rather than kiosks inside terminals. Waymo’s robotaxi service at Phoenix’s Sky Harbor airport shows a parallel playbook: lock in airport partnerships early so your brand becomes the default option.

QUICK HITS

📰 Everything else in tech today

Paramount’s Skydance has gone hostile with a $108.4B all-cash bid for all of Warner Bros. Discovery, topping Netflix’s $82.7B studios-and-streaming deal.

Elon Musk denied reports that SpaceX is seeking an $800B valuation in a new secondary share sale.

Apple chip chief Johny Srouji told staff in a Monday memo that he has no plans to leave the company, after Bloomberg reported he was considering stepping down.

Reddit is tightening global teen safety settings as it braces for Australia’s looming ban on social media for under-16s, kicking off December 10.

France is asking a Paris court to block Shein’s website for 3 months, accusing the fast-fashion giant of violating EU rules on sustainability, transparency, and labor practices.

SoftBank CEO Masayoshi Son is exploring a deal with Trump to pour some $500B of Japanese funds into Trump-branded industrial parks in the U.S., reports the WSJ.

The EU opened a formal antitrust probe into whether Google’s AI Overviews and its treatment of YouTube content in search illegally favor the company’s own services.

The New York Times and the Chicago Tribune filed separate lawsuits accusing Perplexity of scraping and reproducing their journalism without permission.

Meta reportedly delayed its Phoenix mixed reality glasses, shifting their launch from the second half of 2026 to the first half of 2027.

Andrew Yang, who has long warned of an automation crisis, now says advances in AI could eliminate as many as 40M U.S. jobs over the next decade.

Meta announced that it has acquired Limitless, the startup (formerly known as Rewind) behind an AI-powered conversation-recording pendant.

The European Commission fined X $140M for deceiving users with its blue checkmark system; Musk has since pulled an EU institutional ad campaign from X.

COMMUNITY

🎓 Highlights: News, Guides & Events

See you soon,

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

AI

OpenAI reveals who's winning with AI at work

Zach Mink • 6 minutes

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Good morning, AI enthusiasts. OpenAI's first-ever enterprise report is out, and one stat stands out: 75% of workers say they're now handling tasks they literally couldn't do before.

With AI unlocking entirely new capabilities across the workforce, the productivity playbook is being rewritten in real-time — and power users and organizations are reaping the rewards.

In today’s AI rundown:

  • OpenAI details enterprise AI wins in new report

  • Google to enter the AI glasses market in 2026

  • Use ChatGPT to improve your thinking patterns

  • Anthropic brings Claude Code to Slack

  • 4 new AI tools, community workflows, and more

LATEST DEVELOPMENTS

OPENAI

📊 OpenAI details enterprise AI wins in new report

Image source: OpenAI

The Rundown: OpenAI just released its first ‘State of Enterprise AI’ report, revealing insights from its over 1M workplace accounts — including massive productivity gains being seen across business users on the platform.

The details:

  • OpenAI pulled anonymized data from its real-world enterprise customers, as well as an AI adoption survey conducted across 100 enterprises.

  • 75% of surveyed workers said AI improved their output speed or quality, with another 75% also reporting they can now handle tasks they couldn't before.

  • The data showed major gaps between the top 5% performers, who send 6x more messages than the median, and top coders, who show a 17x difference.

  • ChatGPT business users saved 40-60 minutes daily on average, with power users reporting productivity gains of over 10 hours per week.

Why it matters: It’s no surprise to see adoption and productivity increasing, and OAI’s report shows what many suspected — AI is already reshaping the workplace on a massive scale. One of the biggest unlocks is the 75% of users doing tasks they literally couldn’t previously — enabling more cross-functional productivity than ever before.

TOGETHER WITH LOVART

🍌 Lovart upgrades Nano Banana Pro

The Rundown: Lovart is unlocking the full power of NanoBanana Pro with Touch Edit — a canvas-first control system that makes AI design precise, predictable, and actually controllable without rewriting prompts or regenerating full images.

With Lovart, you can:

  • Point-and-edit specific regions by circling and tapping objects directly on canvas, removing ~70% of descriptive prompt wording

  • Combine exact parts from multiple reference images

  • Keep people, products, and styles consistent through long multi-round revisions

  • Make composition-safe edits across iterations, including high-accuracy text updates

Try Lovart today and experience full creative control with Nano Banana Pro.

GOOGLE

🕶️ Google to enter the AI glasses market in 2026

Image source: Google

The Rundown: Google just announced that its AI-powered smart glasses will launch in 2026, with the tech giant partnering with Samsung, Warby Parker, and Gentle Monster to take on Meta’s currently dominant position in the sector.

The details:

  • Two styles are in development: audio-only frames for hands-free AI access, and display versions with in-lens screens for navigation and translations.

  • Hardware partners include Samsung, Warby Parker (via a $150M deal from May), and Korean fashion brand Gentle Monster.

  • The frames will reportedly offload processing to a connected smartphone, keeping the design lightweight enough to pass as regular eyewear.

Why it matters: Meta’s AI struggles have been well-documented, but it has been one of the few to successfully break into the wearables space with its Ray-Ban and Oakley partnerships. But Google’s combination of top models, sprawling app ecosystem, and advanced Gemini-infused tech could make for a major rival entry into the market.

AI TRAINING

🤔 Use ChatGPT to improve your thinking patterns

The Rundown: In this tutorial, you will learn how to break out of circular thinking and generate creative solutions for any business problem by using ChatGPT’s structured questioning approach to surface blind spots and unlock fresh perspectives.

Step-by-step:

  1. Go to ChatGPT and prompt: "I'm trying to [describe your goal or problem], but I'm continuously stuck on the same ideas. Ask enough questions about the problem to find a new approach."

  2. Add context about your current approaches so ChatGPT knows what you're already trying and can push you beyond those solutions

  3. Answer ChatGPT's questions across categories like user understanding, product experience, engagement, and analytics to reveal new angles

  4. Review the fresh solutions that emerge from this process and iterate on promising ideas

Pro tip: Use this workflow for any problem. The magic is in how ChatGPT will question you until you hit new thinking pathways for better brainstorming.

PRESENTED BY THOUGHTWORKS

🤖 Inside the Agentic AI shift

The Rundown: The Agentic AI Advantage is a new report by Thoughtworks and WIRED that explores how enterprises are using AI agents to drive real results, manage risks, and stay ahead in the next wave of AI disruption.

In the report, you’ll learn:

  • Where AI agents deliver measurable ROI

  • How early adopters are scaling safely

  • Why 40% of projects risk failure

  • Insights from AWS & global AI leaders

Read the full report now.

ANTHROPIC & SLACK

💬 Anthropic brings Claude Code to Slack

Image source: Anthropic

The Rundown: Anthropic just launched a new beta integration that lets developers delegate coding tasks to Claude Code directly from within Slack, turning chat threads into automated development workflows.

The details:

  • Tagging @Claude in Slack creates a full Claude Code session, which uses context from the thread, like bug reports or feature requests, as input.

  • Claude will also automatically select the right repository from a user’s authenticated accounts and post progress updates back to the thread.

  • Once complete, the integration delivers links to review changes and open pull requests without leaving Slack.

  • The feature expands on Anthropic's existing Slack app integration, which previously offered only lightweight chat assistance.

Why it matters: Slack is currently the communication hub for many engineering teams, making it a prime context and real estate for a direct coding integration — helping developers avoid switching between apps and use the autonomous assistant as a plugged-in teammate embedded right into their existing channels.

QUICK HITS

🛠️ Trending AI Tools

  • 🔎 Unwrap Customer Intelligence - Aggregate customer feedback across channels with proactive alerts that surface issues before they escalate*

  • 🧠 Rnj-1 - Essential AI’s new 8B open-source model

  • 🧪 BioMed Agent - SciSpace’s specialized biomedical research co-scientist

  • 🤖 Claude Opus 4.5 - Anthropic’s new benchmark-topping frontier model

*Sponsored Listing

📰 Everything else in AI today

U.S. President Donald Trump approved Nvidia to sell its H200 AI chips to China in exchange for 25% of sales revenue, marking a major reversal of export restrictions.

OpenAI announced a new shopping integration with Instacart to purchase groceries, making it the first Instant Checkout option for ChatGPT users.

Essential AI open-sourced Rnj-1, a small 8B parameter model that rivals much larger systems on coding and software benchmarks.

IBM announced plans to acquire data streaming company Confluent for $11B to help enterprises connect real-time data to AI systems.

Google VP of Global Ads, Dan Taylor, refuted an AdWeek report claiming that ads will be coming to Gemini, saying there “are no ads in the Gemini app and… no current plans to change that.”

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 Leroy P. in England, United Kingdom:

"I volunteer for a small charity, and I am using Google Gemini to supercharge my end-of-year accounts. I run all my financial reports on QuickBooks, upload them to Gemini, and within seconds, it finds any discrepancies, errors, or better ways of recording transactions. It then provides a step-by-step guide to creating the correction journals. This reduces end-of-year accounts work from days to hours and increases the accuracy and clarity of our accounts."

How do you use AI? Tell us here.

🎓 Highlights: News, Guides & Events

See you soon,

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

Robotics

Trump's next big move: robots

Jennifer Mossalgue • 5 minutes

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Good morning, robotics enthusiasts. Trump’s AI obsession just sprouted metallic limbs: Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick is reportedly meeting CEOs from Boston Dynamics to Apptronik as the White House plans a 2026 push to pack U.S. factories with robots.

The twist? Reshore manufacturing and take on China — but let machines do the work.

In today’s robotics rundown:

  • White House readies 2026 robotics push

  • These bots are made from lobster shells

  • Robot builds furniture from speech

  • Robots hunt MH370 in new deep-sea search

  • Quick hits on other robotics news

LATEST DEVELOPMENTS

U.S. ROBOTICS

🤖 White House readies 2026 robotics push

Image source: Ideogram / The Rundown

The Rundown: Trump spent 2025 pitching AI as a strategic asset; now he’s pivoting to robots. Politico says Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick is courting robotics CEOs as the White House drafts a 2026 executive order to double down on robotics.

The details:

  • The Department of Transportation is also preparing a robotics working group, expected to be announced as part of a broader federal robotics effort.

  • Ideas on the table include tax breaks and federal funding for robotics firms and tougher trade measures aimed at Chinese subsidies and IP abuses.

  • By 2023, China was running about 1.8M industrial robots on its factory floors, roughly four times the U.S. total.

  • After Politico’s report dropped, robotics stocks jumped — pure-play names like Richtech Robotics and Serve Robotics surged.

Why it matters: Washington’s rumored shift from software to embodied AI acknowledges that data center computing alone won’t counter China's manufacturing edge. The administration now faces a political paradox: promising American jobs while banking on automation to compete globally.

EPFL

🦞 These bots are made from lobster shells

Image source: EPFL

The Rundown: Engineers at EPFL just turned lobster leftovers into working robot parts — by treating the shells as ready-made exoskeletons and making the case that tomorrow’s “biohybrids” might be built from yesterday’s dinner.

The details:

  • Researchers injected the shells with soft elastomer, added motors, and coated them in silicone to create durable, controllable biohybrid actuators.

  • These actuators can lift 500 grams solo or work as grippers that can handle everything from highlighter pens to fragile tomatoes.

  • The shells’ natural structure provides a built-in combo of strength and bendability that’s ideal for joints and grippers.

  • The researchers even demonstrated a swimming robot propelled by two flapping exoskeletal fins.

Why it matters: After use, most synthetic components from the lobster bot can be reused. The team calls it “dead matter robotics,” showing how food waste can be repurposed into low-cost, eco-friendly robot hardware — though natural variation in biological structures requires more sophisticated controllers for precision tasks.

MIT

🔨 Robot builds furniture from speech

Image source: MIT

The Rundown: MIT researchers are closing the loop between generative AI and the physical world with a “speech‑to‑reality” system that lets you literally talk a robot through building furniture.

The details:

  • A table‑mounted robotic arm listens to spoken prompts like “build a simple stool with three legs” or “a low shelf.”

  • The system uses 3D generative models to design a structure that matches the request, and then snaps together modular beams, joints, and panels.

  • In demos, the setup managed to assemble stools, chairs, shelves, a small table, and even a dog statue in just a few minutes.

  • The team plans to swap magnetic connections for more robust joints to improve weight-bearing capability.

Why it matters: The modular approach could eliminate manufacturing waste by letting users disassemble and reconfigure components into entirely new objects when needs change. It also makes physical fabrication accessible to anyone who can describe what they want — no 3D modeling skills or robotics knowledge required.

OCEAN INFINITY

🚤 Robots hunt MH370 in new deep-sea search

Image source: Ocean Infinity

The Rundown: Malaysia is now deploying a private robot fleet into the Indian Ocean for another crack at the MH370 mystery, more than a decade after the Boeing 777 vanished with 239 people aboard.

The details:

  • Malaysia’s transport ministry says Texas-based marine robotics firm Ocean Infinity will restart a deep-sea search for MH370 later this month.

  • The Malaysian government will pay Ocean Infinity a fee of $70M if its 18‑month search locates the wreckage.

  • Malaysia approved Ocean Infinity’s mission in March, but the search was suspended after bad weather hit a new 15K-square-km search area.

  • Ocean Infinity’s CEO says the firm has significantly upgraded its subsea tech since its unsuccessful 2018 search.

Why it matters: The search represents a high-stakes bet on autonomous underwater systems that have matured dramatically since 2018, when Ocean Infinity last tried and came up empty. Success would close aviation’s most confounding cold case while demonstrating how far deep-sea robotics has advanced in a few years.

QUICK HITS

📰 Everything else in robotics today

Figure CEO Brett Adcock posted a short clip of the Figure 03 robot accelerating into a run, pivoting, and stopping cleanly, an answer to Tesla’s clip of Optimus running.

EngineAI’s founder, Zhao Tongyang, went viral after taking a brutal kick to the chest from the startup’s new T800 humanoid, a stunt meant to prove the robot’s power.

Boston Dynamics is hinting at a new update that, per Atlas lead Mario Bollini, would shift the Atlas from R&D to a humanoid built at “automotive” production volumes.

A new Unitree video shows its nearly 6-foot H2 humanoid fighting the smaller G1, recycling the kickboxing routines the company first trained on its shorter bots.

Waymo says it will file a voluntary software recall with federal safety regulators over how its robotaxis behave around school buses in response to NHTSA scrutiny.

Midea Group, one of the world’s largest home appliance makers, unveiled what it claims is the world’s first six‑armed humanoid.

Hyundai unveiled its four-wheeled MobED, a production-ready mobility bot aimed at last‑mile delivery, logistics, and other industrial jobs.

Israeli startup Mentee Robotics has broken its 2025 silence with an uncut 18-minute demo of two V3 MenteeBot humanoids autonomously running warehouse tasks.

Distalmotion raised $150M in funding that will primarily go toward ramping U.S. adoption of its Dexter soft‑tissue robotic surgery system.

A Baidu robotaxi in Zhuzhou, China, struck two pedestrians, trapping one under the vehicle and sending both to intensive care.

Malaysian agtech firm Agroz is teaming up with China’s UBTECH to drop Walker S humanoids into its vertical farms, where they’ll seed, monitor, and harvest crops.

UK researchers will employ robotic dogs, drones, and experimental 6G links in an EU-backed pilot in Greece to spot early wildfire signs and alert responders faster.

A humanoid dubbed Hangxing No. 1 is directing traffic, spotting violations, and issuing audio warnings at a major intersection in Hangzhou’s Binjiang district.

COMMUNITY

🎓 Highlights: News, Guides & Events

See you soon,

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

AI

Poetiq cracks major reasoning benchmark

Zach Mink • 7 minutes

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Good morning, AI enthusiasts. Six months ago, the best AI models could barely hit 5% on the ARC-AGI-2 reasoning benchmark. Today, a tiny startup just crossed 50% — and beat Google using its own model in the process.

With a “meta-system” that refines existing models rather than building from scratch, Poetiq's achievement shows that the next breakthroughs might come from clever engineering, not just pure scale.

In today’s AI rundown:

  • Poetiq tops ARC-AGI-2 with Gemini variant

  • The Rundown Roundtable: Our AI use cases

  • Create LinkedIn carousels in ChatGPT with Canva

  • Poetry prompts can bypass AI safety guardrails

  • 4 new AI tools, community workflows, and more

LATEST DEVELOPMENTS

POETIQ

🏆 Poetiq tops ARC-AGI-2 with Gemini variant

Image source: Poetiq

The Rundown: Six-person AI startup Poetiq just officially claimed the top spot on the ARC-AGI-2 reasoning benchmark, beating out Google’s Gemini 3 Deep Think at half the cost by orchestrating existing models over building its own.

The details:

  • Poetiq's meta-system adapts to new models within hours, achieving the top-ranked results shortly after Gemini 3 launched without any retraining.

  • Using Gemini 3 Pro as a base, Poetiq's refinement system scored 54% at $30 per task — outpacing Google's top variant Deep Think at 45% and $77.

  • The result marks the first system to crack the 50% barrier on ARC-AGI-2, with leading models previously struggling to hit 5% just six months ago.

  • The startup’s open-sourced approach uses LLMs to continuously refine their own outputs, with a built-in self-auditing system to ensure quality solutions.

Why it matters: The ARC-AGI-2 progress from sub-5% to over 50% in just months shows how quickly things are advancing. Poetiq’s refinement shows a future with AI gains coming from two directions at once: frontier model development and clever orchestration built on top of them from teams without massive compute budgets.

TOGETHER WITH LINDY

🦾 AI that works like a teammate, not a chatbot

The Rundown: Describe what you need done, and Lindy builds custom AI agents that qualify your leads, draft your reports, handle customer support, and knock out the busywork eating up your team's day. No coding. No complexity. Just results.

What you can automate today:

  • Sales agents that qualify leads and book meetings while you sleep

  • Support agents who resolve tickets instantly across phone and chat

  • Ops agents that turn hours of manual work into minutes

Start free with $20 in credits today and get up and running in minutes with Lindy’s 6,000+ integrations.

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.

Billy, Educator: I’m a big basketball fan. The launch of Nano Banana 3.0 coincided with the start of the NBA season. So to test its consistency, I used a dynamic prompt formula in Google Sheets + Nano Banana to generate product photos of hats for each NBA team. I was able to get consistent styling across each design as if they were part of a fictional brand. Now I just need AI to get me an NBA licensing deal…

Reagan, Strategic Partnerships: Being outdoors and in nature is part of my daily life. During the week, I often go for long walks in between work blocks and recently discovered Wispr Flow. It’s a time I’m often thinking through work solutions and brainstorming ideas, so having the ability to simply talk and have those ideas transcribed and sent directly to my workspace has been amazing.

Rishi, Product Marketing Manager: I’m building a new paid advertising tracker in Google Sheets, and want to document certain parts that need explanation in our central database (Notion).

An easy way to do this is filming looms, taking the transcript, and plugging it into ChatGPT with the following prompt "I filmed a Loom explaining X. Using the transcript below, please write a 5-8 sentence summary which explains what X is, what it does, what it means, and how to use it in a simple to understand way?"

AI TRAINING

🎨 Create LinkedIn carousels in ChatGPT with Canva

The Rundown: In this tutorial, you’ll learn how to create professional LinkedIn carousels in minutes using ChatGPT's Canva app integration, which gives you the ability to draft content and design slides all within a single interface.

Step-by-step:

  1. Go to ChatGPT, open a new chat, click the '+' button to select Canvas, then prompt: "Write a 5-slide LinkedIn carousel on '(your topic)'. Slide 1: A hook. Slides 2-4: One tip each. Slide 5: A CTA. Keep each under 40 words"

  2. Refine your content in Canvas, then activate Canva by prompting: "@canva, create a 5-slide LinkedIn carousel using this content [paste slides]. Use a (detailed style of your choice). Stick to the content copy exactly"

  3. Preview the 4 design options ChatGPT generates, select your favorite, and click the Canva link to open your editable carousel

  4. Review each slide in Canva, make any final tweaks, then click Download and select PDF for LinkedIn documents or PNG for individual slides

Pro tip: Use your brand colors and fonts consistently — once you prompt them in chat, the integration applies them automatically to the carousels.

PRESENTED BY FIDDLER AI

🔎 Gain visibility, context, and control for enterprise agents

The Rundown: Fiddler AI’s upcoming product webinar breaks down how agentic observability can improve AI performance and behavior with visibility, context, and control. Gain deep insights of your AI systems through end-to-end visibility, from pre-production evaluation to production monitoring.

In this live webinar, learn how to:

  • Validate agent behavior before production with golden and challenger datasets

  • Track system-wide health and drill into span-level metrics across the agentic hierarchy

  • Diagnose reasoning chains and decision paths to pinpoint points of failure

Register today to attend live or receive the recording afterward.

AI RESEARCH

✍️ Poetry prompts can bypass AI safety guardrails

Image source: Reve / The Rundown

The Rundown: A new study from Italy’s Icaro Labs just discovered that reformulating harmful requests as poetry can trick leading AI models into producing dangerous content, with some systems falling for the technique every single time.

The details:

  • Icaro Lab tested 25 frontier models from major labs like OpenAI, Google, and Anthropic, finding poetry verses achieved a 62% average jailbreak success rate.

  • Google's Gemini 2.5 Pro was most vulnerable at 100%, while OpenAI's smaller GPT-5 nano resisted all attempted poetry attacks.

  • The poem prompting unlocked dangerous responses on topics including weapons development, hacking, and psychological manipulation.

  • Researchers declined to publish the specific poems, calling them "too dangerous" despite reportedly being simple enough for anyone to create.

Why it matters: AI safety has become a whack-a-mole game, with poetry now joining roleplay scenarios, foreign language tricks, and encoding exploits on the growing list of unexpected vulnerabilities. Each patch seems to invite a new creative workaround — and there’s no finish line for a problem that is only going to get more advanced.

QUICK HITS

🛠️ Trending AI Tools

  • 3️⃣ Mistral 3 - Mistral’s next-generation of open-source models

  • 🌱 Seedream 4.5 - ByteDance’s image AI with powerful editing, text rendering

  • 🧍Kling Avatar 2.0 - Upgraded avatar model with up to 5-minute generations

  • 🗣️VibeVoice - Microsoft’s open-source, real-time text-to-speech model

📰 Everything else in AI today

OpenAI is turning off shopping suggestions after backlash over responses that looked like ads, with CRO Mark Chen saying they “fell short” on the implementation.

Meta acquired Limitless, a startup backed by Sam Altman that makes an AI-powered pendant for recording and transcribing real-world conversations.

The New York Times and Chicago Tribune filed separate lawsuits against Perplexity over copyright infringement, marking the NYT’s second lawsuit against the AI startup.

Meta announced a series of new AI licensing deals with publishers, including CNN, Fox News, and USA Today, to feed real-time news content into its Meta AI platform.

The U.S. Department of Energy launched AMP2, a new AI research platform that officials say will be the world’s largest autonomous system for studying microbes.

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 Anonymous in Houston, TX:

"I recently used ChatGPT as a strategic partner throughout a full interview and negotiation process, and the experience was surprisingly impactful. I leaned on AI to help me prep for interviews, refine talking points, and rehearse answers so I was confident and concise.

Once the offer stage began, ChatGPT helped me craft positioning statements, negotiation language, and follow-up emails that were assertive but professional."

How do you use AI? Tell us here.

🎓 Highlights: News, Guides & Events

See you soon,

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

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