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Robotics

The creepiest robot just got hands

Jennifer Mossalgue • 5 minutes

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Good morning, robotics enthusiasts. Clone Robotics just made a hand that’s almost too human. Sinewy artificial muscles, carbon-fiber bones, and a tangle of sensors let it move with freaky precision — and survive half a million cycles.

It’s the perfect hand for the startup’s infamous humanoid, already dubbed “the world’s creepiest robot.”

In today’s robotics rundown:

  • Lifelike robotic hand mimics human grip

  • Hugging Face’s robotics lead launches startup

  • China sounds alarm on humanoid bubble

  • Robots rebuild Pompeii’s shattered frescoes

  • Quick hits on other robotics news

LATEST DEVELOPMENTS

CLONE ROBOTICS

👊🏼 Lifelike robotic hand mimics human grip

Image source: Clone Robotics

The Rundown: U.S.-Polish startup Clone Robotics just dropped a new demo of its updated anthropomorphic robot hand, which the company claims now has human-level grip, precision, and speed.

The details:

  • With 27 degrees of freedom, the hand uses 70 inertial sensors and pressure pads to track angle, speed, and grip force in real time.

  • Controlled by the company’s Neural Joint V2 Controller and a sensor glove, the hand mirrors human finger movements with near-zero latency.

  • The company says the hand’s carbon fiber bones, ligament-style tethers, and hydraulic artificial muscles have endured over 650K cycles without fatigue.

  • Posting on X, Clone Robotics says building a fully actuated, human-level robotic hand is hard, but making it durable is “even more challenging.”

Why it matters: Clone’s biomimetic hand powers its Alpha humanoid — with just 279 units planned — which swaps rigid actuators for water-driven artificial muscles. If soft hydraulics scale, humanoids can escape mechanical stiffness for something much more humanlike. Whether we can handle the creep factor is another question.

HUGGING FACE

🤖 Hugging Face’s robotics lead launches startup

Image source: LinkedIn

The Rundown: Europe’s humanoid race just got a fresh Parisian entrant. UMA, a stealthy new startup founded by Hugging Face’s top roboticist Rémi Cadene, is quietly assembling a founding team to build general-purpose humanoids in the French capital.

The details:

  • Job posts call for “stylized” humanoid walking, reinforcement learning, foundation models, and human teleoperators feeding data back into the loop.

  • The ads sketch a full humanoid stack: whole-body mechatronics, distributed real-time firmware, and robotics roles focused on shipping complete systems.

  • The founding team is being assembled by Cadene, the robotics lead at Hugging Face, and a former Meta/Tesla robotics researcher.

  • This summer, UMA was reportedly in talks to raise roughly $40M in seed funding, signaling serious investor interest behind the stealth project.

Why it matters: UMA is stepping directly into Europe’s suddenly crowded humanoid arena — joining Germany’s Agile Robots and Neura Robotics, the UK’s Humanoid, and France’s Wandercraft. The difference this time: the hardware looks to be architected from day one as a platform for large-scale, end-to-end AI.

CHINESE ROBOTICS

🫧 China sounds alarm on humanoid bubble

Image source: Unitree

The Rundown: China’s top economic planner just slapped a warning label on the country’s humanoid boom, saying a froth of more than 150 near-identical robot makers is starting to look like a bubble, not a revolution, Bloomberg reports.

The details:

  • Officials say more than 150 firms are now cranking out lookalike bots, risking a flood of copycat machines that soak up capital and cut off real R&D.

  • The sector has been turbocharged by viral stunts from startups like Unitree and is officially recognized by Beijing as a growth engine.

  • Humanoid stocks have surged, with the Solactive China Humanoid Robotics Index up nearly 30% in 2025, but real-world adoption remains years away.

  • Chinese regulators plan to tighten market entry, promote consolidation, and steer resources into core tech and training infrastructure to prevent collapse.

Why it matters: China’s warning shows that even the world’s biggest robotics ecosystem is worried its humanoid boom is drifting into bubble territory, echoing past tech frenzies that ended in tough shakeouts. If regulators move to cool the sector, it could reshape the global humanoid race just as competition seriously ramps up.

ROBOTS FOR GOOD

🎨 Robots rebuild Pompeii’s shattered frescoes

Image source: RePAIR

The Rundown: Robots are piecing together Pompeii's shattered frescoes — one fragment at a time. The RePAIR project deploys machine vision and pattern-matching algorithms to reassemble thousands of broken artifacts gathering dust in storerooms.

The details:

  • The system scans and digitizes fragments, then uses AI to detect subtle patterns that human eyes miss across thousands of pieces.

  • Robotic arms handle the delicate reassembly work that once took conservators years to complete manually.

  • Installed at Pompeii’s Casina Rustica, the robot has already restored frescoes from the House of the Painters at Work and the gladiators’ training hall.

  • The system is designed to augment, not replace, human experts — handling the puzzle work so archaeologists can focus on higher-level interpretation.

Why it matters: RePAIR represents a rare leap from digital to physical. While major museums use AI for restoration, few systems actually reassemble physical fragments robotically. If RePAIR proves scalable beyond Pompeii's frescoes to mosaics, pottery, and statues, it could unlock millions of artifacts gathering dust in museum storerooms.

QUICK HITS

📰 Everything else in robotics today

Sunday Robotics hired at least 10 former Tesla employees — including veterans of the Optimus and Autopilot teams — to help launch its Memo home robot.

A wave of Bay Area startups and big-tech skunkworks are reportedly pivoting away from humanoids toward “Pixar-like” robots: compact, expressive bots on wheels.

Surgical robotics, already a multibillion-dollar market globally, will nearly double by 2029, according to a new MassDevice intelligence report.

Xiaomi CEO Lei Jun says the company plans to deploy humanoids throughout its factories within five years, leveraging AI-powered automation to boost efficiency.

Flexion Robotics dropped a demo of its modular “brain” software in a humanoid that autonomously navigates rough outdoor terrain, detects trash, and cleans it up.

A 16-year-old from Bristol, UK, spent two years designing and building a fully functional robotic hand out of Lego pieces.

UBTech Robotics landed a multimillion-dollar deal to deploy its Walker humanoid in a trial at Chinese border crossings to manage crowds and guide travelers.

Chinese firm Deep Robotics staged a rescue drill to showcase how its X30 robot dogs can operate in hazardous environments and assist with disaster response.

Australia’s marine science agency is testing AI-guided robot boats that scan the seafloor and drop baby corals on ceramic carriers to help restore the Great Barrier Reef.

More than 800 Chicago residents signed a petition urging the city to pause its sidewalk delivery robot pilot until officials release safety and ADA data.

The ARM Institute signed a five-year cooperative agreement with the Air Force Research Laboratory worth up to $87M to conduct R&D.

Two Lisbon teens built a six‑legged AI reforestation robot that climbs burned slopes, analyzes soil, and plants saplings in one of Europe’s most wildfire‑scarred countries.

Elon Musk now says Tesla will “roughly double” its supervised Robotaxi fleet in Austin to about 60 cars next month, far short of his pledge to hit 500 vehicles by year-end.

COMMUNITY

🎓 Highlights: News, Guides & Events

See you soon,

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

AI

AI cracks 30-year math problem

 • 7 minutes

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Good morning, AI enthusiasts. An AI just delivered a breakthrough in mathematics — solving a 30-year-old problem using no human help at all.

With DeepSeek and Google also reaching gold-level reasoning, we may finally be on the cusp of mathematical superintelligence, where solving hard problems could be a superpower shared far beyond pro-level mathematicians.

P.S. Our next edition of The Rundown Roundtable is here, where our staff members share the unique ways we’re incorporating AI into both our work and personal lives. See the latest use cases below, and submit your own workflow here.

In today’s AI rundown:

  • ‘Aristotle’ AI cracks 30-year math problem

  • The Rundown Roundtable: Our AI use cases

  • Use AI to find patents and innovation opportunities

  • China overtakes the U.S. in open AI economy

  • 4 new AI tools, community workflows, and more

LATEST DEVELOPMENTS

HARMONIC

🤖 ‘Aristotle’ AI cracks 30-year math problem

Image source: Gemini / The Rundown

The Rundown: Aristotle, an AI system built by Harmonic, just independently solved a 30-year-old Erdős problem, marking what researchers are calling the first real step into the “vibe proving” era of mathematics.

The details:

  • Aristotle solved a version of Erdős Problem #124, which has been open since the 1990s, in six hours, and then formally verified the proof in Lean in a minute.

  • The result came from Aristotle’s beta version, updated with stronger reasoning and a natural language interface to explore and write step-by-step proofs.

  • Vilad Tenev, the founder of Harmonic, called this the arrival of “vibe proving” — AI-driven proofs discovery followed by machine-verifiable rigor.

  • The development follows Harmonic’s $120M funding and Aristotle’s IMO gold performance, putting it alongside Google and OpenAI in mathematical reasoning.

Why it matters: Harmonic’s breakthrough is another push toward mathematical superintelligence, where proofs will be generated, verified, and scaled at superhuman speeds. Tools like these can also open participation in advanced mathematics, turning it from something only experts do into something anyone can contribute to.

TOGETHER WITH TELUS

🔒 Secure AI before it’s too late

The Rundown: Hidden vulnerabilities and compliance challenges are emerging faster than ever. Uncharted is where industry leaders take action to secure the future of AI. Gain actionable strategies in nine expert-led sessions to protect your AI innovations before it’s too late.

In this insightful summit, you'll uncover:

  • Hidden dangers lurking in 24+ frontier models

  • Legal frameworks that balance innovation with responsibility

  • Proactive defense strategies from top CISOs

Get the insights.

THE RUNDOWN ROUNDTABLE

💡 The Rundown Roundtable: Our AI use cases

Image source: Ideogram / The Rundown

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

Rowan, CEO: I’m getting ahead of my 2026 fitness goals by giving the new ChatGPT 5.1 Pro model context from my old peak-performance training plans, Whoop data, work schedule, dietary restrictions, and goals. Together, we’re building a program designed to get me back to peak shape — optimized exactly for how I train, work, and recover.

Jason, Head of Product: I ran a functional lab test and sent the results to ChatGPT. It flagged my homocysteine at 46 (safe range is under 10) and suggested it could be linked to an MTHFR variant. I ordered a follow-up genetic test — and it came back positive for the C677T mutation. I started Thorne MethylGuard Plus supplements, and six weeks later, my homocysteine was normal. It helped me connect dots I wouldn’t have seen on my own.

Mayur, Content Manager: My work shifts usually stretch past midnight, so I’ve been trying to take my health more seriously. I created a dedicated project on ChatGPT and a mirrored one on Grok just to cross-check things, where I’ve uploaded my entire routine and all the details from my full body checkup. I’ve started adding photos of every medicine, supplement, and treatment I’ve been taking, along with notes on why and when I use them.

The idea is to keep updating it so it kinda becomes a digital biodata of my health and a go-to place for all my specific health-related questions.

AI TRAINING

🔎 Use AI to find patents and innovation opportunities

The Rundown: In this tutorial, you’ll learn how to use Perplexity’s AI-powered patent search to quickly identify existing patents, uncover open innovation spaces, and reduce the risk of infringement before investing in new ideas.

Step-by-step:

  1. Go to Perplexity.ai and type your question (e.g., “Are there any patents related to AI automations?”). The platform automatically detects patent-related searches and shows relevant filings, owners, and grant dates

  2. Refine your query with context, such as “Find active patents in AI-driven industrial automation.” Then ask follow-ups like “Show whitespace in this field” to reveal gaps and opportunities

  3. Enable Agent Mode to activate multi-step reasoning. The agent compiles patents across regions, creates tables and charts, and visualizes your research space for deeper analysis

  4. Review the generated CSV and PNG reports to identify crowded zones, emerging areas, and potential whitespace

Pro tip: Start broad, then narrow your search by asking the agent to group results by company, summarize claims, or map open innovation zones.

PRESENTED BY WARP

🏆 Warp’s No. 1 Dev Agent gets a massive upgrade

The Rundown: Warp just launched its biggest Agents update yet, propelling it to No. 1 on Terminal-Bench agentic coding benchmark ahead of Claude Code, Gemini, and Codex.

Warp’s Development Agent now includes

  • Full terminal use with long-running commands like servers and debuggers

  • Steerable planning you can review and edit in real time

  • Full lifecycle support, from planning and coding to deployment

See what the next evolution of development agents looks like.

Try Warp today.

AI MARKET

🇨🇳 China overtakes the U.S. in open AI economy

Image source: MIT

The Rundown: A new MIT and Hugging Face study analyzing 2.2B Hugging Face downloads reveals a “fundamental rebalancing” of the open AI economy, with U.S. industry dominance collapsing in favor of Chinese heavyweights.

The details:

  • The study found that Chinese AI developers have surpassed the U.S. industry in downloads, capturing 17.1% of the market compared to the U.S.’s 15.8%.

  • This surge is largely driven by two Chinese players, DeepSeek and Alibaba’s Qwen, holding 14.2% of the market between August 2024 and August 2025.

  • Google, Meta, OpenAI, which commanded 40%+ of downloads before 2023, are completely absent, with Comfy topping the list for the U.S. with 5.4% share.

  • The study also found that true open source is dying, with models disclosing their training data crashing from 79.3% in 2022 to just 39% in 2025.

Why it matters: The rapid ascent of Chinese models marks a changing of the guard. The open ecosystem has transitioned from a U.S.-led monopoly (historically led by Google) to a landscape where Chinese labs now provide the “brains.” This gap can increase further, with a wave of Chinese releases, led by DeepSeek, likely on the way.

QUICK HITS

🛠️ Trending AI Tools

  • 🧠 Math V2 - DeepSeek’s open-source mathematical reasoning model

  • 🤳 Perplexity - AI answer engine, now with persistent memory

  • 🏆 GELab-Zero-4B - StepFun’s new SOTA, open-source computer use model

  • 🛒 Vidi2 - ByteDance’s AI video editor with spatio-temporal grounding

📰 Everything else in AI today

Elon Musk’s xAI is reportedly set to raise a $15B round of funding at a $230B pre-money valuation next month, CNBC reported.

AI and agents drove $14.2B in global online sales on Black Friday, with $3B of this coming from the U.S. alone, Salesforce data revealed.

Virgin Australia signed a deal with OpenAI to embed ChatGPT-powered tools directly into how people search for and plan flights.

Data intelligence giant Databricks is in talks to raise $5B at a valuation of $134B — roughly 32x its expected sales of $4.‌1B for this year, The Information reported.

Avatar director James Cameron called gen AI “horrifying,” saying it makes up a character, an actor, a performance from scratch, unlike his movies’ performance capture approach that celebrates the “actor-director moment.”

Deutsche Telekom and Schwarz Group are reportedly planning a joint “AI gigafactory” in Germany, eyeing the EU’s $20B funding to rival U.S. and China.

Telegram CEO Pavel Durov launched Cocoon, a decentralized compute network to let GPU owners earn TON tokens for private AI processing, challenging cloud providers.​

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 Martin K. in Bratislava, Slovakia:

“I use SimTheory AI to create a simple invoice payment assistant. I volunteer for a non-profit, and I'm responsible for paying about 30 invoices every month. I upload the PDF invoices to the assistant I created. It then recognizes all relevant information, enriches it with additional data for accounting and finance, and creates a table for an internal system and an XML file for batch payments. It works 100% correctly and increases my productivity 10-fold.

The next challenge is to use a Google Sheets MCP to automatically enter the data into the internal system.”

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

Apple takes the crown from Samsung

Jennifer Mossalgue • 5 minutes

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Good morning, tech enthusiasts. Apple is about to end Samsung’s 14-year reign as the world’s top phone maker, powered by iPhone 17 hype and a global upgrade cycle kicking into gear.

Apple is smartly sliding into budget territory it once ignored, and analysts say this price-slashing could keep the Cupertino giant on top until 2029. Could a rumored foldable iPhone be the final twist of the knife?

In today’s tech rundown:

  • Apple set to overtake Samsung for top spot

  • MIT says AI is ready for 12% of jobs

  • Alibaba launches Meta-rivaling AI glasses

  • China rescues astronauts stranded on space station

  • Quick hits on other tech news

LATEST DEVELOPMENTS

APPLE

🍎 Apple set to overtake Samsung for top spot

Image source: Ideogram / The Rundown

The Rundown: Apple is poised to overtake Samsung as the world's largest smartphone maker in 2025, reclaiming the top spot for the first time in some 14 years on the back of surging iPhone 17 demand.

The details:

  • Counterpoint Research expects Apple to ship about 243M iPhones next year versus roughly 235M phones for Samsung, a gap of around 8M units.

  • That would give Apple about a 19.4% share of the global smartphone market, edging out Samsung at about 18.7% as the overall market grows just over 3%.

  • The surge is driven by strong iPhone 17 sales and a major upgrade cycle as pandemic-era devices age out, especially in the U.S. and China.

  • Analysts expect Apple to hold the No. 1 spot through at least 2029, helped by upcoming lower-cost “e” models and a possible foldable iPhone.

Why it matters: Apple's riding high on strong iPhone 17 sales, even as the iPhone Air stumbles. But the key move is Apple's expansion beyond premium, betting it can dominate multiple price tiers at once — hooking aspirational buyers in developing markets while keeping high-end customers locked in the iOS ecosystem.

MIT

🧊 MIT says AI is ready for 12% of jobs

Image source: Ideogram / The Rundown

The Rundown: MIT just quantified the AI job scare: 11.7% of the U.S. labor market is now economically replaceable by existing AI, representing roughly $1.2T in annual wages across finance, healthcare, admin work, and white-collar services.

The details:

  • The estimate comes from the new “Iceberg Index,” a large-scale simulation that models 151M U.S. workers, mapping 32K skills across 923 occupations.

  • Researchers contrast a "Surface Index" of current AI use — 2.2% of wages, mostly in tech — with an 11.7% "Iceberg Index" of tasks already automatable.

  • Not surprisingly, the jobs most exposed are heavy on repeatable cognitive and admin work in sectors like finance, healthcare, and professional services.

Why it matters: The 11.7% figure represents what AI can handle right now, not what will actually get automated — that depends on corporate strategy, political decisions, and adoption speed. But some states are already using the index to run what-if scenarios on retraining and investment before the automation wave hits for real.

ALIBABA

👓 Alibaba launches Meta-rivaling AI glasses

Image source: Alibaba

The Rundown: Alibaba just entered the smart glasses race with its Meta-rivaling Quark AI Glasses, a $500-ish wearable powered by the company’s Qwen large language models, now hitting the shelves in China.

The details:

  • The glasses come in two models — the flagship S1 and stripped-down G1, starting at 3,799 yuan ($537) and 1,899 yuan ($268), respectively.

  • Alibaba says the main hardware difference is the lenses: the S1 uses clear micro-OLED screens in the frames, while the G1 omits the AR-style display.

  • Both models include bone conduction microphones, built-in cameras, and a swappable dual-battery system that can last up to 24 hours on a charge.

  • The glasses plug into Alibaba's commerce stack, letting users look at products and instantly pull up Taobao pricing or trigger Alipay payments, for example.

Why it matters: Alibaba is betting it can beat Meta by wiring AI glasses directly into China's largest e-commerce and payments infrastructure. While Meta relies on partners like Ray-Ban, Alibaba owns the full stack from hardware to checkout, potentially delivering a tighter — and more profitable — experience.

SPACE

🚀 China rescues astronauts stranded on space station

Image source: Shujianyang via Wikimedia

The Rundown: China launched an uncrewed Shenzhou-22 spacecraft as an emergency lifeboat for three astronauts stranded on the Tiangong space station after suspected space debris cracked their return capsule.

The details:

  • The capsule docked with Tiangong just over three and a half hours after liftoff, restoring a guaranteed escape route and delivering supplies.

  • The damaged Shenzhou-20 spacecraft was scheduled to return three astronauts to Earth earlier this month, but window cracks grounded the vehicle.

  • China's space agency accelerated the launch, originally slated for April or May 2026, to provide a safe return option.

  • Shenzhou-22 hauled medical supplies, station equipment, repair tools for the damaged capsule, plus fresh fruit, vegetables, and comfort foods.

Why it matters: China's response validates its "one launch, one on standby" emergency protocol, which keeps a backup spacecraft and rocket in near-readiness at Jiuquan. The swift resolution stands in sharp contrast to NASA's handling of two astronauts stranded on the International Space Station for nine months last year.

QUICK HITS

📰 Everything else in tech today

HP Inc. plans to cut 4K to 6K jobs worldwide by fiscal 2028 as it leans on AI to drive productivity across its PC and printer business.

Anduril’s autonomous weapons are flunking real-world tests, reports the WSJ, as the Palmer Luckey–founded defense startup rides a $2.5B raise to a $30.5B valuation.

McKinsey quietly cut about 200 global tech jobs as it shifts more internal work to AI systems, joining a wider trend of using automation to handle support tasks.

The European Parliament passed a non-binding resolution calling for children under 16 to be barred from social media by default unless parents explicitly consent.

A trial of GLP-1 drugs like Ozempic shows that when people stop taking them, they tend to regain the weight and lose many of the cardiovascular and metabolic benefits.

Singapore-made AI “Kumma” teddy bear is back on sale even after it was recalled for the toy’s chatbot engaging in sexually explicit conversations.

WeRide and Uber launched the Middle East’s first fully driverless robotaxi service in Abu Dhabi, a year after starting operations with safety drivers.

Pony.ai plans to triple its global robotaxi fleet from about 1K vehicles at the end of this year to more than 3K by the end of 2026 as its growth ambitions ramp up.

YouTube is testing a new “Your Custom Feed” feature that lets users actively shape their home recommendations with prompts rather than solely relying on algorithms.

Battery recycler Redwood Materials, which just raised $350M, is cutting about 5% of its 1,200-person workforce — affecting a few dozen employees.

COMMUNITY

🎓 Highlights: News, Guides & Events

See you soon,

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

AI

DeepSeek returns with an IMO-crushing AI

 • 6 minutes

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Good morning, AI enthusiasts. The big whale is back — this time with an open-source reasoner that hits gold-medal performance on one of the world’s toughest math competitions.

But the real story is what it unlocks: frontier reasoning, once gated by proprietary labs, is now free for all. For the first time, anyone can own the brain of a world-class mathematician.

In today’s AI rundown:

  • DeepSeek’s new reasoner crushes IMO 2025

  • OpenAI’s API user data leaked in third-party breach

  • Create Instagram product shots with Nano Banana Pro

  • NVIDIA’s case for scale isn’t everything in AI

  • 4 new AI tools, community workflows, and more

LATEST DEVELOPMENTS

DEEPSEEK

🤖 DeepSeek’s new reasoner crushes IMO 2025

Image source: Gemini / The Rundown

The Rundown: DeepSeek just released DeepSeek-Math-V2, an open-source MoE model that achieves gold-medal performance at IMO 2025, democratizing “research-level” mathematical reasoning that was previously locked behind proprietary walls.

The details:

  • The model scored 118/120 on the 2024 Putnam competition (beating the top human score) and solved 5 of 6 IMO 2025 problems, hitting the gold standard.

  • On IMO ProofBench, it hit 61.9%, nearly matching Google’s specialized Gemini Deep Think that won IMO gold and crushing GPT-5, which scored only 20%.

  • Math-V2 uses a generator-verifier system where one model proposes a proof and another critiques it — instead of rewarding final answers only.

  • The verifier assigns confidence scores to steps, forcing the generator to refine weak logic and ensuring step-by-step self-debugging of reasoning.

Why it matters: By open-sourcing a model that rivals Google’s internal heavyweight, DeepSeek has broken the monopoly on frontier mathematical reasoning, providing the community with a blueprint to build agents that debug their own thought processes. This can be a game-changer in domains like engineering, where mistakes are costly.

TOGETHER WITH BLAND

📞 There’s an AI company without churn?

The Rundown: In San Francisco, there’s an AI company who’s making inbound voice agents that sound human, run 24/7, and are so good that they deliver 127% net revenue retention.

If you call it yourself, you’ll be able to:

  • Have Bland role-play any use case

  • Experience the lowest latency on the planet (<500ms)

  • Have a phone call that you actually enjoy

For Black Friday, Bland is offering to create your enterprise a custom agent for free so you can validate the quality before you commit.

OPENAI

‼️ OpenAI’s API user data leaked in third-party breach

Image source: Gemini / The Rundown

The Rundown: OpenAI just revealed that its analytics vendor Mixpanel suffered a security incident, with an attacker exporting some of its API users’ profile information — although no chat data, API keys, payment details, or credentials were compromised.

The details:

  • The breach occurred on November 9, covering Mixpanel’s systems that provided web analytics on the frontend interface of OpenAI’s API product.

  • The data the attacker exported included profile information associated with the API product, such as names, emails, locations (city/state), and device details.

  • OpenAI confirmed that users of ChatGPT and other products were not impacted, and no chat, API data, credentials, or payment details were leaked.

  • It removed Mixpanel and is notifying affected users directly, while urging vigilance against potential phishing attempts that could use the leaked data.

Why it matters: While OpenAI’s defenses held, this incident serves as a stark reminder of the security risks third-party partners can introduce. For affected API users, the immediate danger isn’t account compromise but rather social engineering, where attackers may use the leaked emails to create even more trouble.

AI TRAINING

🖼️ Create Instagram product shots with Nano Banana Pro

The Rundown: In this tutorial, you’ll learn how to use Nano Banana Pro to generate a full 9-image Instagram feed from just one inspiration photo, turning your product shots into cohesive, high-quality visuals for social media campaigns.

Step-by-step:

  1. Go to Gemini → Tools → Create Images, ensure Pro mode is enabled, and upload an inspiration image that reflects your desired style or aesthetic

  2. Upload your product image, describe it, then prompt with: “Create a 9-image Instagram feed for this product with varied angles, people, and environments”

  3. Click Submit to generate your 9-image grid. Review results and, if needed, ask Nano Banana to regenerate or isolate specific shots

  4. Download your favorite visuals and post them directly to Instagram, TikTok, or your brand’s storefront for an instant, consistent feed

Pro tip: The more specific and visually aligned your examples are, the better the AI matches your desired aesthetic.

PRESENTED BY YOU.COM

🧠 Tinkering with prompts can only get you so far

The Rundown: Most companies get stuck tinkering with prompts and wonder why their agents fail to deliver dependable results. This guide from You.com breaks down the evolution of agent management, revealing the five stages for building a successful AI agent and why most organizations haven’t gotten there yet.

In this guide, you’ll learn:

  • Why prompts alone aren’t enough and how context and metadata unlock reliable agent automation

  • Four essential ways to calculate ROI, plus when and how to use each metric

  • Real-world challenges at each stage of agent management and how to avoid them

If you’re ready to go beyond the prompt, this is the playbook for you.

AI RESEARCH

📈 NVIDIA’s case for scale isn’t everything in AI

Image source: NVIDIA

The Rundown: NVIDIA and the University of Hong Kong published a paper suggesting that the future of AI might not come from scaling but from smarter orchestration, with their new tool training small models that can surpass frontier AI at a fraction of the cost.

The details:

  • ToolOrchestra trains an “orchestrator” model that decides when to reason internally and when to call specialized tools and models, based on the task.

  • An 8B model trained with the system surpassed GPT-5 and Claude Opus 4.1 on Humanity’s Last Exam, scoring 37.1% while being 2.5x more efficient and faster.

  • Even when tested with unseen tools, the orchestrator adapted well — showing its ability to work with changing toolsets and pricing structures.

  • Prior agents overused the strongest (and most expensive) tools and models, but ToolOrchestra avoided this by orchestrating targeted model and tool usage.

Why it matters: In line with Ilya Sutskever’s recent comments, ToolOrchestra challenges the “bigger is better” ideology. Instead of one giant system, NVIDIA shows how small models coordinating tools may be the path forward. If orchestration beats scaling, the smartest model/tool conductor will be the next big AI breakthrough.

QUICK HITS

🛠️ Trending AI Tools

  • 🤳 Perplexity - AI answer engine, now with virtual try-on for shopping

  • 🧠 Math V2 - DeepSeek’s open-source mathematical reasoning model

  • 🤖 Stories - Character AI’s interactive experience for kids

  • 🎆 FLUX.2 - Black Forest Labs’ new visual intelligence model

📰 Everything else in AI today

Jeff Bezos’ new stealth AI venture, "Project Prometheus," quietly acquired General Agents, an agentic computing startup, Wired reports.

OpenAI lost a key discovery ruling, forcing it to hand over internal communications about why it deleted two datasets of allegedly pirated books, boosting authors’ chances of proving willful copyright infringement.

Perplexity launched persistent memory, enabling the assistant to remember user preferences, interests, and conversations for valuable context on relevant tasks.

Perplexity also updated its email assistant to work across multiple calendars at once, currently available for Gmail and Outlook.

Cohere expanded its partnership with SAP, taking its agentic AI platform, North, to SAP’s Cloud infrastructure and Business Technology Platform.

Alibaba released Quark AI Glasses, a smart eyewear line powered by its in‑house Qwen LLMs and Quark assistant, in China — with prices starting at 1,899 yuan ($268).

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 Allen W. in Santa Barbara, CA:

“I'm a songwriter trained in traditional folk music. I write songs, and then ChatGPT helps me translate them into indie folk. I give it the lyrics and ask how an indie folk songwriter would write these lyrics. ChatGPT wants to do everything, like determine chord structure, tempo, etc., but I keep it only on the lyrics.”

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

Karpathy's advice for the AI classroom

Zach Mink • 7 minutes

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Good morning, AI enthusiasts. Teachers have been fighting a losing battle against AI-generated work — and one of the field's leading voices says it's time to give up.

Former OpenAI researcher Andrej Karpathy called AI detection tools “doomed to fail,” calling for the education system to rethink how grading and testing are handled in a world where students all have the technology at their fingertips.

In today’s AI rundown:

  • Karpathy urges schools to ditch AI homework detection

  • Harvard AI pinpoints disease-causing DNA mutations

  • Turn any UI into a landing page with Gemini 3 Pro

  • MIT index exposes hidden AI iceberg hitting workforce

  • 4 new AI tools, community workflows, and more

LATEST DEVELOPMENTS

AI & EDUCATION

📚 Karpathy urges schools to ditch AI homework detection

Image source: Gemini / The Rundown

The Rundown: Former OpenAI researcher Andrej Karpathy just urged educators to abandon efforts to catch AI-generated homework, arguing detection tools are broken, and that grading needs to shift back into the classroom in the AI age.

The details:

  • Karpathy said educators will “never be able to detect” the use of AI in homework, and that detectors “don’t work” and are “doomed to fail”.

  • He cited Google’s Nano Banana Pro, showcasing how it can complete exam problems correctly while mimicking students’ handwriting.

  • Karpathy proposed moving graded work to in-school settings over take-home assignments, while embracing AI as a learning companion outside of school.

  • He said education’s goal in the AI age should be for students to be “proficient in the use of AI” but also able to “exist without it”.

Why it matters: AI has accelerated much faster than schools can prepare for, turning the entire education system on its head without a clear roadmap for how to navigate the changes. With mixed opinions of the tech and implementations varying massively, it’s going to take a major effort to rewire schools for a generation growing up with AI.

TOGETHER WITH GLEAN

💡 Become an Agent of Change at Glean: LIVE

The Rundown: Join Glean’s flagship virtual launch event to meet the AI agents changing the future of work – and the people behind them. Hear from world-class AI researchers, business leaders, and engineers to see how agentic AI is driving a new wave of productivity and collaboration.

Register for Glean: LIVE December ‘25 to:

  • Hear research-backed insights on what’s improving how people lead and work with AI

  • Meet a new kind of AI agent and see product demos of the tech powering the next era

  • Explore AI opportunities that empower leaders and builders to change work for the better

  • Learn best practices for change management as people, agents, and processes evolve

Register now.

HARVARD UNIVERSITY

🧬 Harvard AI pinpoints disease-causing DNA mutations

Image source: Harvard Medical School

The Rundown: Harvard Medical School introduced popEVE, a new AI genetic analysis tool that can rank harmful DNA variants across a patient’s entire genome — outperforming DeepMind’s AlphaMissense and significantly cutting false positives.

The details:

  • PopEVE analyzes mutation patterns across hundreds of thousands of species and then calibrates the results against databases of healthy human genomes.

  • Researchers applied the model to 31,000 children with severe developmental disorders, solving roughly one-third of cases that had gone undiagnosed.

  • The analysis flagged over 120 genes with no prior connection to the conditions, two dozen of which outside teams have since verified.

  • DeepMind's AlphaMissense flags 44% of people as carrying dangerous variants, popEVE drops that figure to 11% after reducing false positives.

Why it matters: There is still so much to be learned about our genome and the causes of rare genetic conditions, and models like PopEVE are coming to crack the code — expanding scientific understanding by surfacing genes no one knew to look for, and getting real diagnoses to families who've spent years without answers.

AI TRAINING

🚀 Turn any UI into a landing page with Gemini 3 Pro

The Rundown: In this tutorial, you will learn how to use Gemini 3 Pro to study any UI design from video and turn it into a fully working landing page, complete with animations, interactions, and polished layouts that don't look AI-generated.

Step-by-step:

  1. Find UI inspiration on Dribbble, Behance, or any live SaaS site, then download a screen recording of the scrolling page (not just a static screenshot)

  2. Upload the video to Gemini 3 Pro (thinking mode on) and prompt: "Study this video and write a detailed prompt describing the UI in depth—layout, colors, typography, animations—then turn it into instructions for a developer"

  3. Ask Gemini to convert the analysis into markdown format for a clean handover document, then copy the full prompt into a new Gemini chat

  4. Adapt the prompt to your product (swap company name, concept) and add: "Create a high-fidelity interactive landing page based on this design spec and show me a live preview"—then iterate on colors, sections, or animations before exporting to Cursor, Bolt, or Replit for deployment

Pro Tip: Gemini 3.0 is great at analyzing videos for animations and UI specs and turning them into functional landing pages and websites.

PRESENTED BY YOU.COM

📊 Stop guessing and prove AI ROI

The Rundown: AI spend is rising, but most leaders can't measure return on investment. This comprehensive guide from You.com provides a step-by-step framework to measure, model, and maximize AI impact.

What's inside:

  • A practical framework for measuring and proving AI’s business value

  • Four ways to calculate ROI, plus when and how to use each metric

  • A You.com tested LLM prompt to create your own interactive ROI calculator

Download the AI ROI Guide.

AI RESEARCH

🧊 MIT index exposes hidden AI iceberg hitting workforce

Image source: MIT

The Rundown: MIT just published a study on AI’s impact on the workforce using its ‘Iceberg Index’, a labor simulation that shows AI can handle tasks worth 11.7% of U.S. wages — a number that expands beyond the layoffs visible in the headlines.

The details:

  • The Iceberg Index models 151M American workers across 32,000 skills, showing where AI capabilities overlap with human job functions.

  • Tech layoffs represent just 2.2% of total wage exposure (around $211B), while AI’s hidden automation potential in admin and finance is as high as $1.2T.

  • Manufacturing states registering little tech-sector impact face the widest gaps, with roles like HR, logistics, and finance showing nearly 10x the exposure risk.

  • States including Tennessee, North Carolina, and Utah are already testing workforce policy scenarios on the platform before allocating real budgets.

Why it matters: Most AI workforce coverage focuses on tech industry layoffs, but this index suggests the larger exposure may sit in office and professional roles spread across every state, not just Silicon Valley — meaning the job displacement problem that many are already warning about could be a lot bigger than was already estimated.

QUICK HITS

🛠️ Trending AI Tools

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

  • 🍌 Nano Banana Pro - Google’s new image AI with improved text rendering

  • 🏆 Gemini 3 - Google’s new top-ranked AI model

  • 🎆 FLUX.2 - Black Forest Labs’ new visual intelligence model

📰 Everything else in AI today

OpenAI introduced Voice Mode directly within ChatGPT’s chat threads, allowing users to leverage the feature in conversations without an entirely separate mode.

Character AI rolled out Stories, an interactive AI choose-your-own-adventure experience, designed to craft safe formats for teens.

Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei is being called to testify at a House of Representatives hearing about the company’s discovery of an AI cyberattack that used Claude Code.

OpenAI projects ChatGPT will reach 220M paid subscribers by 2030, which would place it among the world's largest subscription totals alongside Netflix and Spotify.

Perplexity launched a new virtual try-on feature alongside an updated shopping experience, allowing users to view clothing on a virtual avatar of themselves.

HP announced that the company is restructuring and cutting 4,000-6,000 jobs due to the industrywide AI shift, expecting to generate $1B in savings by 2028.

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 Kurtis T. in Northland, New Zealand:

"I’m a creative while I am at home and not an engineer. I tend to busy myself with multiple side projects around the house. I use ChatGPT 5.1 to manage different projects, whether it be my food gardens, brand design, or training programs.

Utilizing the projects setting, I am able to file separate projects and add resource files from various places to that specific project, giving that conversation more specific reference points. Everything is organized and in its right spot, and I can simply go back into that project and kick it back off as if I had not left."

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

Ilya Sutskever breaks silence on AI's future

Zach Mink • 6 minutes

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Good morning, AI enthusiasts. The AI industry is betting hundreds of billions on one idea: more compute equals smarter AI.

But the man who helped build ChatGPT says that era is ending. OpenAI co-founder Ilya Sutskever just broke his silence in a rare interview — sharing his take on ASI timelines, his secretive startup, and why research will drive the next AI leap.

In today’s AI rundown:

  • Ilya Sutskever says AI's 'age of scaling' is ending

  • Black Forest Labs’ Flux.2 image generation suite

  • Use ChatGPT shopping research to find best deals

  • Anthropic: AI could double U.S. productivity growth

  • 4 new AI tools, community workflows, and more

LATEST DEVELOPMENTS

ILYA SUTSKEVER

🧠 Ilya Sutskever says AI's 'age of scaling' is ending

Image source: Dwarkesh Podcast

The Rundown: Safe Superintelligence founder Ilya Sutskever just appeared on the Dwarkesh Podcast, giving his take on scaling, ASI, his secretive startup, and more — arguing that research breakthroughs, not compute, will drive the next wave of progress.

The details:

  • Sutskever said that 2020-2025 was the “age of scaling”, but we’ve reached the point where research becomes the differentiating factor for AI breakthroughs.

  • He forecasts 5-20 years until superhuman-like learning AI emerges, adding that the first ASI systems should be built to care about sentient life.

  • Sutskever said that his startup, SSI, is taking a “different technical approach” to superintelligence, and called it an “age of research” company.

  • He also revealed that SSI was raising at a $32B valuation and declined an acquisition offer from Meta, with his cofounder marking the only departure.

Why it matters: Sutskever has been out of the spotlight since his exit from OpenAI, with SSI quietly working in the shadows — but his words carry massive weight in the AI world. His take on a “return to research” over compute comes at an awkward time, as the majority of the industry continues to pour massive money into scaling infrastructure.

TOGETHER WITH 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.

BLACK FOREST LABS

🎨 Black Forest Labs’ Flux.2 image generation suite

Image source: Black Forest Labs

The Rundown: Black Forest Labs dropped Flux.2, a new family of powerful image models — featuring multi-reference capabilities that maintain character and style consistency across up to ten input images and cost reductions compared to rivals.

The details:

  • FLUX.2 combines a model that handles both text and images with another that handles spatial relationships for realistic lighting, physics, and compositions.

  • The models come in slightly below Google’s recently released SOTA Nano Banana Pro, but offer a significant cost reduction in pricing.

  • The lineup includes Pro for top-quality API access, Flex for dev customization, Dev as an open-weights option, and Klein coming soon as fully open-source.

  • Outputs now reach up to 4MP with improved typography capabilities, enabling production-ready infographics, UI mockups, and complex text layouts.

Why it matters: Nano Banana Pro felt like a step change in the range of creative workflows and abilities, but Flux.2 shows the competition isn’t lagging far behind. While AI’s image realism was already virtually imperceptible from reality, the next-gen world knowledge, consistency, and text capabilities are the next leap forward.

AI TRAINING

🏷️ Use ChatGPT shopping research to find best deals

The Rundown: In this tutorial, you will learn how to use ChatGPT's Shopping Research feature to find the best deals without hopping across multiple sites, centralizing the entire experience from search to price comparison to checkout links.

Step-by-step:

  1. Go to ChatGPT, click the plus button, and select Shopping Research to enable the tool

  2. Describe what you're looking for (e.g., "Find me the best Black Friday laptop deals and compare across sites")—answer follow-up questions about budget, specs, and use case to refine results

  3. Review final suggestions showing top deals, price comparisons across retailers, trade-offs, alternatives, and direct links to each listing

  4. Select your product, click through to the retailer, and complete your purchase

Pro Tip: Soon, you’ll also be able to buy selected products directly in ChatGPT via services like Stripe or PayPal — no need to visit the retailer’s site.

PRESENTED BY INCOGNI

📞 Unknown number calling?

The Rundown: Scammers don’t pick phone numbers at random – they buy your data from brokers. The BBC caught call center workers on hidden camera, with one bragging about making $250K from victims.

With Incogni, you can:

  • Automatically delete your personal information from data brokers' databases

  • Monitor and block new data exploits as they appear across the web

  • Reduce spam calls, phishing attempts, and identity theft risk continuously

Try Incogni here and get 55% off your subscription with code RUNDOWN.

AI RESEARCH

📈 Anthropic: AI could double U.S. productivity growth

Image source: Anthropic

The Rundown: Anthropic published new research analyzing 100K Claude conversations to track AI’s productivity gains, estimating that widespread AI adoption could boost annual U.S. labor productivity growth by 1.8% — doubling the current rate.

The details:

  • Anthropic researchers fed 100K anonymized conversations through its Clio privacy tool, mapping tasks to federal labor data to calculate productivity gains.

  • Researchers found Claude cuts task completion time by roughly 80%, with the average work request taking about 90 minutes without assistance.

  • Software developers account for 19% of estimated productivity gains, followed by operations managers, marketing specialists, and customer service roles.

  • Examples of tasks with massive time savings included curriculum development (96%), research assistance (91%), and executive admin functions (87%).

Why it matters: There is plenty of debate over AI’s actual impact vs. hype, and this research shows the real gains across a variety of sectors and tasks. But the bigger question the study sidesteps: whether the estimated doubling of productivity growth comes with the job displacement Anthropic's own CEO continues to warn about.

QUICK HITS

🛠️ Trending AI Tools

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

  • 🎆 FLUX.2 - Black Forest Labs’ new visual intelligence model

  • 🛒 Shopping Research - New interactive shopping experience in ChatGPT

  • 👁️ HunyuanOCR - Tencent’s open-source, SOTA visual understanding model

📰 Everything else in AI today

Nvidia responded to concerns over Google’s TPUs gaining a foothold, saying its hardware is “a generation ahead” with “greater performance, versatility, and fungibility.”

Anthropic tested Claude Opus 4.5 on a take-home exam given to prospective performance engineers, with the AI scoring “higher than any human candidate ever.”

AI music platform Suno partnered with Warner Music Group to train on licensed recordings and let users create songs with participating artists' voices and styles.

Google’s Gemini 3 Pro set a new high score for AI models with a 130 on Tracking AI’s offline IQ test, surpassing Grok 4 Expert Mode’s 126.

Tencent’s Hunyuan open-sourced HunyuanOCR, a SOTA visual understanding model for document parsing, information extraction, text detection, and more.

Perplexity launched a free AI shopping feature for U.S. users that learns personal preferences and enables purchases directly within the app through PayPal.

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 Tara R. in the U.K.:

"I use NotebookLM to create podcasts for my students, as a way to refresh a whole term’s worth of teaching. It’s a practical way for them to review topics while they’re on the go, especially great for those who struggle to find time to revise.”

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

This device wiretaps your 'second brain'

Jennifer Mossalgue • 5 minutes

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Good morning, tech enthusiasts. Your gut, or “second brain,” just got wiretapped — by a hair-thin implant that listens in on real-time neural traffic between belly and brain, without damaging the tissue that keeps you alive.

It’s a tiny device with an intriguing promise: cracking open one of biology’s most cryptic conversations, and maybe rewriting how we diagnose the body from the inside out.

In today’s tech rundown:

  • Scientists decode brain-gut connection

  • Apple’s sales team hit by rare layoffs

  • McKinsey: This is how AI is changing work

  • Tesla says its next AI chip is almost ready

  • Quick hits on other tech news

LATEST DEVELOPMENTS

BIOTECH RESEARCH

🧠 Scientists decode brain-gut connection

Image source: University of Cambridge

The Rundown: University of Cambridge and Dartmouth researchers just built a soft, hair-thin implant that slips between layers of the colon to tap directly into the enteric nervous system, the “second brain” linking gut and brain.

The details:

  • The nano-device records real-time electrical signals traveling between the gut and the brain for up to two weeks, tested so far in rodents and pigs.

  • Packed with 600M neurons across at least 20 cell types, the enteric nervous system choreographs gut motion, secretion, and local immune responses.

  • Because the implant sits in constantly moving tissue without damaging it, it can track how the system responds to stress, food, or disease over time.

  • This could open the door to a new class of bioelectronic diagnostics and treatments for conditions like bowel disease to neurological disorders.

Why it matters: Scientists are untangling how the gut’s microbiome shapes mental health and disease, as evidence mounts that brain-gut signals are more powerful than once believed. Now researchers can eavesdrop on live neural traffic between the two, opening a window into one of biology’s most crucial — and mysterious — conversations.

APPLE

🍎 Apple’s sales team hit by rare layoffs

Image source: Ideogram / The Rundown

The Rundown: Apple just carried out a rare round of layoffs, cutting dozens of roles across its global sales organization in a restructuring move, as first reported by Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman.

The details:

  • The axe fell on account managers handling major corporate, school, and government accounts, plus staff running Apple’s enterprise briefing centers.

  • Management broke the news over the past couple of weeks, with employees saying the cuts blindsided them, given Apple’s famous aversion to layoffs.

  • Apple says the restructuring is meant to “streamline” how it reaches customers and strengthen engagement, while insisting it is still hiring.

Why it matters: While Meta, Google, and Amazon slashed tens of thousands of jobs in 2023–2024, Apple mostly sidestepped the carnage, limiting cuts to specific projects. These layoffs remain minor compared to Apple’s total workforce, but notable in that the tech giant looks to generate record sales of $140B in the December quarter.

MCKINSEY

💻 McKinsey: This is how AI is changing work

Image source: Ideogram / The Rundown

The Rundown: McKinsey dropped its AI jobs verdict: algorithms could swallow 57% of U.S. work hours. But before you panic-update your résumé, they say the future isn’t about machines replacing you, it’s about you becoming their conductor.

The details:

  • McKinsey pegs AI’s potential economic value at $2.9T in the U.S. by 2030 — but only if organizations redesign workflows for human-machine collaboration.

  • More than 70% of the skills employers look for today are shared across both automatable and non-automatable roles, so there’s a large overlap.

  • However, certain specialized cognitive skills — routine accounting, data entry, simple coding — face the biggest hit.

  • Demand for “AI fluency” has grown sevenfold in two years, making it the fastest-growing skill in U.S. job postings.

Why it matters: The shift from execution to orchestration means your job probably survives, but only if you can pivot fast enough to manage the machines instead of mimicking them. Jobs demanding judgment, empathy, and social intelligence stay human, at least until the next breakthrough proves otherwise.

TESLA

🤖 Tesla says its next AI chip is almost ready

Image source: Tesla

The Rundown: Tesla is nearing the final design stage for its next-gen AI5 chip, which will power future robotaxis, AI-driven vehicles, and the company’s forthcoming humanoids, reports Bloomberg.

The details:

  • The AI5 chip, set to deliver 5x the compute of Tesla’s current in-car hardware, will roll out first in small volumes and then in mass production by 2027.

  • CEO Elon Musk revealed that the company’s goal is to launch one new AI chip design for mass production every year.

  • He says the company is aiming for a “tape-out” — or final design — on the AI5 chip, with work on the more advanced AI6 chip already underway.

  • The Tesla AI5 chip will be manufactured by both Samsung at its advanced facility in Taylor, Texas, and TSMC at its new plant in Arizona.

Why it matters: Like Google, Amazon, and Microsoft, Tesla is investing in its own AI chips as an alternative to Nvidia. Like Apple’s custom chip, Tesla’s edge is vertical integration — chips tailor-made for its own hardware — betting that custom silicon can outpace general-purpose rivals in its robotaxis, driver assistance, and humanoids.

QUICK HITS

📰 Everything else in tech today

Tech giant Xiaomi’s EV arm reached profitability in just 19 months, nearly five years ahead of Tesla by capitalizing on its huge consumer base in electronics.

Alphabet closed in on a $4T valuation on Monday as its shares jumped more than 5% to a record $315.90, lifting its market cap to about $3.82T.

Tesla said that Dutch regulator RDW was nearing approval of its Full Self-Driving software by February 2026, but RDW clarified that it had only scheduled a demo.

The Trump administration shut down the Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE, a controversial cost‑cutting unit once led by Elon Musk.

Drug maker Novo Nordisk says that semaglutide, the active ingredient in Wegovy, failed in two large trials to slow Alzheimer’s disease progression.

Amazon plans to invest about $15B in new data center campuses in Northern Indiana, adding 2.4 gigawatts of capacity and creating roughly 1,100 jobs.

NASA renegotiated its Starliner contract with Boeing so that the capsule’s next mission to the International Space Station will fly as a cargo-only test flight.

Nuclear startup X-energy raised $700M, bringing its year’s total to $1.4B, to build the supply chain for its small modular reactors, with 144 orders in place.

The White House reportedly suspended a draft executive order that aimed to override state AI laws and threaten federal funds for states with strict regulations.

COMMUNITY

🎓 Highlights: News, Guides & Events

See you soon,

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

AI

Anthropic enters the frontier AI fight

Zach Mink • 6 minutes

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Good morning, AI enthusiasts. The AI world’s holiday gifts are coming early this season, with Gemini 3, GPT-5.1 Pro, and now Claude Opus 4.5 all launching in a week.

With Anthropic crashing the frontier party with Opus’ new record-breaking coding benchmarks, the revolving door cycle of competition for the world’s top model continues to spin faster than ever.

In today’s AI rundown:

  • Anthropic climbs AI ranks with Claude Opus 4.5

  • OpenAI’s new shopping feature in ChatGPT

  • Vibe code a software tool using Bolt

  • U.S. ‘Genesis Mission’ for AI science breakthroughs

  • 4 new AI tools, community workflows, and more

LATEST DEVELOPMENTS

ANTHROPIC

🤖 Anthropic climbs AI ranks with Claude Opus 4.5

Image source: Anthropic

The Rundown: Anthropic just released Claude Opus 4.5, the company’s new flagship model that competes with Gemini 3 and GPT-5.1 for top performance across the board, particularly excelling on coding and agentic benchmarks.

The details:

  • Opus is the first to break 80% on the SWE-Bench Verified coding benchmark, also setting new highs for tool use, reasoning, and problem-solving.

  • The model matches or beats Google’s Gemini 3 across a range of benchmarks, with Anthropic also calling it the “most robustly aligned model” safety-wise.

  • Anthropic designed Opus to orchestrate teams of smaller Haiku models, positioning the flagship model as a central coordinator for multi-agent systems.

  • Opus 4.5’s pricing also notably comes in at a 66% reduction from Opus 4.1, while also showing massive efficiency gains over Anthropic’s other models.

  • Anthropic also rolled out updates, including unlimited chat lengths, Claude Code in desktop, and expanded access to Claude for Chrome & Excel.

Why it matters: Opus 4.5 arrives in a packed week for frontier AI, landing just days after GPT 5.1 Pro and Gemini 3 hit the market and marking the next step up in the frontier AI model race. The price reduction is also a big move for Anthropic, which has often been criticized for Claude’s costs compared to the market.

TOGETHER WITH PROMPTSIGNAL

📈 Turn AI visibility into growth

The Rundown: PromptSignal is an AI visibility platform that shows how often you appear in AI answers and why. It turns performance data into tailored article briefs, then generates full drafts you can edit or directly publish.

With PromptSignal, you can:

  • Measure citations across top AI models

  • Get your recommended articles

  • Generate drafts, edit details, publish articles fast

Boost your AI visibility today.

OPENAI

🛒 OpenAI’s new shopping feature in ChatGPT

Image source: OpenAI

The Rundown: OpenAI rolled out Shopping Research, a dedicated interactive shopping assistant within ChatGPT that builds personalized buyer guides by scanning trusted retail sources and asking targeted questions about preferences.

The details:

  • The feature runs on a version of GPT-5 mini, fine-tuned specifically for product discovery and trained to prioritize organic reviews over promotional content.

  • Users describe what they need, answer quiz-style questions about budget and preferences, then receive curated guides with 10-15 options in minutes.

  • OpenAI said the feature excels in electronics, beauty, home goods, and outdoor gear, and will soon integrate Instant Checkout for direct transactions.

  • It is available across all ChatGPT tiers with “nearly unlimited usage” available through the holidays.

Why it matters: OpenAI continues to push for ChatGPT to become the home base for the entire purchase cycle, from search to payment. While we haven’t seen ads or the teased vendor revenue streams yet, the cogs are moving into place for OpenAI to challenge Google in a massive disruption to traditional online shopping.

AI TRAINING

💻 Vibe code a software tool using Bolt

The Rundown: In this tutorial, you will learn how to vibe code a personalized software tool without writing code — building an EPUB book reader that segments uploads into chapters for one-click copying into LLMs for deeper learning.

Step-by-step:

  1. Go to Bolt.new, log in with Google or GitHub, and start prompting using natural language — no coding needed

  2. Describe the tool you want: "Vibe code an app where I can upload an EPUB file, and it divides it into chapters so I can one-click copy all the text of that chapter and paste it into ChatGPT"

  3. Test the first output by uploading an EPUB file, evaluate what works and what doesn't, then iterate with prompts like "These chapters are inaccurate"

  4. Copy a parsed chapter into ChatGPT for deep reading: the LLM summarizes every paragraph and preserves nuances that normal PDF/EPUB uploads miss

Hot Tip: We're all going to be building micro-tools for ourselves. By using Bolt, Cursor, or Replit, this process becomes fast, custom, and code-free.

PRESENTED BY GLEAN

💡 Become an Agent of Change at Glean: LIVE

The Rundown: Join Glean’s flagship virtual launch event to meet the AI agents changing the future of work – and the people behind them. Hear from world-class AI researchers, business leaders, and engineers to see how agentic AI is driving a new wave of productivity and collaboration.

Register for Glean: LIVE December ‘25 to:

  • Hear research-backed insights on what’s improving how people lead and work with AI

  • Meet a new kind of AI agent and see product demos of the tech powering the next era

  • Explore AI opportunities that empower leaders and builders to change work for the better

  • Learn best practices for change management as people, agents, and processes evolve

Register now.

U.S. GOVERNMENT & AI

🧪 U.S. ‘Genesis Mission’ for AI science breakthroughs

Image source: Reve / The Rundown

The Rundown: U.S. President Donald Trump signed an executive order directing the DOE to build a unified AI platform, aiming to compress scientific discovery timelines from years to days for “challenges of national importance,” like biotech and energy.

The details:

  • The initiative mobilizes 17 federal research facilities and their supercomputing infrastructure to train AI models on decades of government scientific data.

  • The platform will enable AI agents to automate experiments, test hypotheses, and generate predictive models across chemistry, biology, and engineering.

  • The White House called it the largest coordination of research assets since the Apollo program moon missions of the 1960s.

Why it matters: The geopolitical AI race continues to scale, with the U.S. treating it with the same urgency it once reserved for world-altering technological moments like the moon missions. Given the private sector’s intertwining with government AI efforts, it’s likely we’ll see some familiar labs and more eye-popping deals as part of the effort.

QUICK HITS

🛠️ Trending AI Tools

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

  • 🍌 Nano Banana Pro - Google’s new image AI with improved text rendering

  • 🤖 GPT 5.1 Pro - OpenAI’s powerful new model for Pro users

  • 🧪 Edison Analysis - Edison’s next-gen scientific analysis agent

📰 Everything else in AI today

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and designer Jony Ive revealed that the team has decided on the design for the coming AI device, saying it may arrive in “less than two years.”

Microsoft released Fara-7B, an open-weight AI model that is compact enough to run directly on laptops and can autonomously navigate websites and complete tasks.

OpenAI’s Sora is being blocked from using the term ‘Cameo’ for its personalization feature after Cameo filed a lawsuit and a judge issued a restraining order this week.

Amazon plans to invest up to $50B starting in 2026 to build AI and supercomputing data centers for U.S. federal agencies, including defense and intelligence operations.

Exa introduced Exa 2.1, the latest version of its agentic search API that brings new accuracy, speed, and quality improvements.

Artificial Analysis launched CritPt, a difficult new graduate-level physics benchmark — with Gemini 3 Pro taking the top spot despite solving less than 10% of the problems.

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 Caitlin F. in Atlanta, GA:

"I'm focused on how businesses use AI to improve operations and actually impact the bottom line. One use case takes a call transcript with a prospect, runs it through an assessment of client fit and scalability readiness, and refers to a prior proposal structure to craft a new custom scope. We reflect their pain in their language and our solutions in our terminology. The entire process end-to-end is now 3 minutes."

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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