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Robotics

Uber's $10B robotaxi pivot

Jennifer Mossalgue • 6 minutes

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Good morning, robotics enthusiasts. Uber just made a $10B wager on its robotaxi future, locking up autonomous EV fleets and buying into their makers.

With Waymo scaling and Tesla and Amazon-backed rivals circling, Uber is pouring billions into hardware it doesn’t control to avoid becoming a software layer on someone else’s machine. Can the ride-hailing giant stay essential in an autonomous world, or is this the moment the platform starts looking vulnerable?

In today’s robotics rundown:

  • Uber pours $10B into driverless ride-hails

  • Google’s Gemini turns Spot into an AI inspector

  • Toyota’s giant humanoid shoots perfect hoops

  • Tesla’s biggest factory may build Optimus

  • Quick hits on other robotics news

LATEST DEVELOPMENTS

UBER

🚖 Uber pours $10B into driverless ride-hails

Image source: Ideogram / The Rundown

The Rundown: Uber is earmarking more than $10B to secure autonomous EV fleets and buy into their makers as it jockeys with Waymo, Tesla, and Amazon-backed rivals to shape the driverless ride-hail market, the Financial Times reports.

The details:

  • Uber plans to spend over $7.5B buying dedicated robotaxi fleets and more than $2.5B taking stakes in autonomous-vehicle developers.

  • The company is stitching together a marketplace of AV partners, including Baidu in China and EV makers Lucid and Rivian.

  • The most concrete deal is with Lucid: a combined $500M equity investment and a commitment to purchase at least 35K Lucid vehicles.

  • Uber plans to roll out robotaxis in 28 cities by 2028, leaning on partners like Nuro, and has set up an Uber AV Labs unit and dedicated fast-charging hubs.

Why it matters: Uber’s pivot comes as Alphabet’s Waymo scales commercial robotaxis in U.S. cities and Tesla pushes its vertically integrated “Cybercab” vision. Uber is under pressure to invest heavily in hardware it does not control, as it leans on its massive global rider base to stay at the center of autonomous mobility.

BOSTON DYNAMICS

🧠 Google’s Gemini turns Spot into an AI inspector

Image source: Boston Dynamics

The Rundown: Boston Dynamics plugged Google DeepMind’s Gemini into its Spot robot dog so it can autonomously patrol industrial sites, visually read analog gauges and thermometers, and flag problems without a human in the loop.

The details:

  • Spot can now autonomously read analog gauges and thermometers in industrial sites, converting video into structured data with no human oversight.

  • The system uses multimodal reasoning to interpret complex panels and environments, letting Spot decide when a reading is abnormal.

  • These new capabilities are being rolled out to customers focused on routine inspections in factories, refineries, and other hazardous facilities.

  • The upgrade shifts Spot’s role from a teleoperated camera platform to a semi‑autonomous “inspector.”

Why it matters: Spot just got a serious brain upgrade. With Google DeepMind’s Gemini Robotics‑ER 1.6 wired into its Orbit AIVI‑Learning stack, it can now patrol factories and refineries, zoom in on pressure gauges and thermometers, and read them with near‑human accuracy. Plus, it can grind through tedious rounds with no downtime.

TOYOTA

🏀 Toyota’s giant humanoid shoots perfect hoops

Image source: Toyota Frontier Research Center / X

The Rundown: Toyota’s latest humanoid can shoot flawless free throws on live TV. CUE7, standing 7'2", took the court during a live B.League game in Tokyo this week — dribbled, rolled to the line, and sank it.

The details:

  • A hybrid control system combines reinforcement learning with model predictive control, letting the robot adapt shot mechanics in real time.

  • CUE7 locks onto the hoop, uses sensors to gauge distance, makes fine upper-body adjustments to arm angle and posture, then releases the ball on an arc.

  • The robot swaps the older four‑wheel base for a lighter two‑wheel design, cutting 46 kg from its predecessor, going to 74 kg from 120 kg.

  • The project goes back nearly a decade: CUE3 sank 2,020 free throws in 2019 for a Guinness record; CUE6 hit a 24.5m shot in 2024 for another.

Why it matters: Unitree’s G1 can dribble and hit layups using imitation learning from motion-capture data, while lab projects like DribbleBot push humanoids toward ball control. What separates CUE7 is the underlying stack: a hybrid of reinforcement learning and model predictive control that lets the robot analyze and adjust on the fly.

TESLA

🤖 Tesla’s biggest factory may build Optimus

Image source: China News Service / Tesla Shanghai assembly line

The Rundown: Tesla wants to turn its Shanghai Gigafactory — the sprawling plant that delivered more than half its cars and hit record output last year — into the backbone of its Optimus humanoid ambitions.

The details:

  • Tesla China president Wang Hao told local media that GigaShanghai could be a “golden key” to solving the mass production challenge for Optimus.

  • In Q1 2026 alone, the factory accounted for 59.6% of Tesla’s global quarterly output, with deliveries jumping 23.5% year-over-year to 213,398 vehicles.

  • Tesla says it is already converting its Fremont factory — freed up by the sunset of Models S and X — into an Optimus line designed for up to 1M units a year.

  • Although analysts say Tesla built only a few hundred humanoids in 2025, Musk’s new $1T pay plan hinges in part on delivering 1M bots by 2035.

Why it matters: Shanghai already delivers more than half of Tesla’s global cars, but whether or not Tesla could smoothly put Optimus into those same high‑throughput lines isn’t quite clear. Still, Shanghai’s scale is its best shot at jumping from a few hundred prototypes a year to the tens of thousands it needs to make this business real.

QUICK HITS

📰 Everything else in robotics today

Ukraine says it has captured a Russian frontline position using only drones and ground robots, in what Kyiv touts as a first glimpse of autonomous warfare.

A humanoid named Edward Warchocki, built on a Unitree G1 platform, went viral after a video showed it chasing a group of wild boars down the street in Warsaw.

Uber and Nuro started testing a premium robotaxi service in San Francisco using Lucid Gravity SUVs equipped with Nuro’s autonomous driving system.

Skild AI acquired Zebra Technologies’ Robotics Automation business to power large-scale, end-to-end warehouse automation with its Skild Brain software.

Korean AI chip startup DEEPX is deepening its Hyundai partnership to develop a generative AI robotics platform using its next-gen low-power chips ahead of an IPO.

Snake-like robots developed in Japan use an AI control system to seamlessly switch between slithering and rolling, boosting their movement efficiency over complex terrain.

Waymo began testing its all-electric Jaguar I-Pace robotaxis with safety drivers on London roads as a step toward launching the city’s first commercial robotaxi service.

Austin-based Contoro Robotics raised about $13.5M, shortly after winning an SXSW Pitch award, to scale its AI-powered trailer and container-unloading robots.

DJI will unveil two new consumer drones, the Lito and higher-end Lito X1, at a “Just Fly” launch event on April 23.

Almost 100 humanoids are training in Beijing’s E-Town district for a full test run of a 21 km half-marathon course just days before the official 19 April race.

About 20 international teams will push military robots through one of the world’s toughest real-world field trials at ELROB 2026 in Thun, Switzerland, in June.

Mobileye is seeking a buyer for its transit app Moovit, likely at a steep discount to the roughly $900M its parent Intel paid in 2020, as it doubles down on autonomous driving.

EPFL researchers developed a “kinematic intelligence” framework that lets a task demoed by a human be transferred and executed by multiple differently built robots.

KAIST’s new DreamWaQ++ system lets quadruped robots see terrain and walk adaptively like animals across complex, unpredictable ground.

Roboticists showed that injecting a bit of randomness into how individual bots move prevents dense robot swarms from jamming, sharply increasing overall flow.

COMMUNITY

🎓 Highlights: News, Guides & Events

See you soon,

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

AI

Allbirds ditches sneakers for AI compute

Zach Mink • 7 minutes

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Good morning, AI enthusiasts. CEOs love to predict that all companies will eventually become AI companies. It’s doubtful any of them had “sustainable-sneaker-brand pivots to AI compute” in mind.

Allbirds, a $4B wool sneaker darling at its IPO peak, just closed a $50M financing deal to become a GPU-rental shop — sending the stock up 600%+ in a single day and taking the crown for the wildest AI pivot of the year.

In today’s AI rundown:

  • Allbirds ditches sneakers for AI compute

  • Gemini lands on Mac with native desktop app

  • Audit business with Notion's built-in Claude agents

  • Snap cuts 1,000 jobs on AI productivity boosts

  • 4 new AI tools, community workflows, and more

LATEST DEVELOPMENTS

ALLBIRDS

👟 Allbirds ditches sneakers for AI compute

Image source: Lovart / The Rundown

The Rundown: Allbirds just announced a $50M financing deal to reinvent itself as "NewBird AI", converting the gutted footwear company into a GPU rental business and sending the stock up over 600% on the pivot.

The details:

  • Allbirds initially sold its brand assets to American Exchange Group in March for $39M, a fall from the company’s $4B IPO peak in 2021.

  • The AI compute move sent shares of $BIRD from $3 to over $20, lifting a market cap that closed Tuesday at just $22M.

  • The company said the $50M deal will fund GPU purchases to launch a GPU-as-a-Service business, renting out AI compute under long-term contracts.

  • Shareholders will also vote next month to strip Allbirds' 'public benefit' status, formally ending the company's sustainable-footwear mission.

Why it matters: Many CEOs love to say every company will eventually be an AI company, but gutting a business for parts and retooling it as a GPU rental probably isn't what they had in mind. Allbirds is running the same move that blockchain rebrands used to revive dying tickers, this time with a compute crunch giving the pitch cover.

TOGETHER WITH UNWRAP

⚡ See how Perplexity automates customer feedback

The Rundown: Unwrap’s customer intelligence platform pulls all your feedback (surveys, reviews, support tickets, social comments, etc.) into one view, and then uses AI and NLP to surface actionable insights and deliver them straight to your inbox.

With Unwrap, you get:

  • All customer feedback automatically categorized

  • Query feedback using Unwrap Assistant, or in your favorite tools via MCP

  • Real-time alerts from feedback as they arise, and a clear view of customer sentiment

  • A platform trusted and tested at scale by DoorDash, Stripe, Clay, lululemon, WHOOP, and more

Unwrap is offering a trial of its tools to Rundown AI subscribers! Just grab a time with the team to get set up.

GOOGLE

🖥️ Gemini lands on Mac with native desktop app

Image source: Google

The Rundown: Google just rolled out a new Mac app for its Gemini assistant, giving the AI a native desktop chatbot experience, coming a year after rivals like ChatGPT and Claude made their moves.

The details:

  • The app launches via Option+Space and offers screen-sharing, Drive and Photos file access, and Nano Banana image and Veo video generation.

  • The Gemini app trails in agentic abilities, remaining a chat-first assistant, while Claude and ChatGPT can directly execute tasks on users' machines.

  • Google calls this release “just the beginning” of its desktop assistant push, with more features teased for the coming months.

  • The company also rolled out a Windows app that bundles Gemini and Google Lens into a search bar, but shipped English-only versus the Mac's global rollout.

Why it matters: The desktop is becoming a fight for muscle memory, with native apps unlocking stickiness as a user’s daily driver. Gemini is showing up a year late, which follows a trend of losing to Claude / ChatGPT on accessibility and ease of use, even more than performance — but Google’s distribution can make up for things in no time.

AI TRAINING

📋 Audit business with Notion's built-in Claude agents

The Rundown: In this guide, you will learn how to use Notion's prebuilt Claude-powered AI agents and use them to audit your workspace for efficiency. We found the audits to be thorough and well-formatted, like a report you’d get from a real consultant.

Step-by-step:

  1. In Notion, go to Notion AI in the sidebar, click the + button > browse templates, and install the Business Workspace Auditor 

  2. Give the agent access to relevant pages and workspaces, and hit the save button. Then, open it and @ mention the pages/databases you want reviewed

  3. Just say: “Audit this page,” and it will work, running its preconfigured audit and creating an issue report with severity and a recommended fix for each item

  4. If you give the agent edit permissions on the page/database it audited, you can tell it to make the recommended fixes itself, as well

Pro tip: This flow works for other templates, too. Try Business Process Audit to map and diagnose a workflow, or Task Triager to route a brain-dump to your Tasks database.

PRESENTED BY POSTMAN

💸 The ROI of AI engineering

The Rundown: Postman’s cost savings analysis evaluates six engineering workflows to prove how AI-native development delivers measurable ROI by eliminating manual API tasks and external tool friction.

In this report, you’ll explore:

  • Measurable ROI of actual time and money saved per team

  • Why natively integrated, built-in AI outperforms external tools

  • Before-and-after benchmarks engineering leads can use to measure impact

Read Postman's full cost savings analysis.

SNAP

✂️ Snap cuts 1,000 jobs on AI productivity boosts

Image source: Snap

The Rundown: Snap just announced layoffs of 1,000 employees representing 16% of its workforce, with CEO Evan Spiegel attributing the reduction to AI efficiency rather than shareholder pressure.

The details:

  • Snap is swapping traditional teams for small AI-augmented pods, with the tech writing 65% of new code and fielding 1M+ monthly queries at the company.

  • Spiegel said AI’s advances “enable our teams to reduce repetitive work, increase velocity, and better support our community, partners, & advertisers."

  • The social media giant’s stock rose 7-9% on the news but remains down 30% YTD, with the plan targeting $500M in annual cost savings by the end of 2026.

  • Block opened 2026's AI layoff wave in February with 4,000 cuts (40% of staff), and 70K+ tech jobs have been erased across companies this year.

Why it matters: Wall Street is rewarding two AI moves above all else right now: wholesale pivots (Allbirds) and AI-driven layoffs. With the tech sector’s sentiment at an all-time low and anxiety over job loss rising, the disconnect between what markets cheer and what workers fear is only widening.

QUICK HITS

🛠️ Trending AI Tools

  • 💻 Gemini for Mac - Google's new native macOS app for Gemini

  • 🌎 Lyra 2.0 - NVIDIA's AI to turn text, camera paths into explorable 3D scenes

  • 🎧 Gemini 3.1 Flash TTS - Google's speech model for 70+ languages

  • 🎆 Ernie Image - Baidu’s powerful new open-weight text-to-image model

📰 Everything else in AI today

ASAPP’s Nirmal Mukhi and special guest Kate Leggett analyze recent Forrester research on planning, staffing, and operationalizing the new roles AI agents bring to the customer service workforce.*

Adobe debuted Firefly AI Assistant, its push into "agentic creativity", with a chat that runs multi-app creative workflows across Photoshop, Premiere, Lightroom, and Firefly.

Google released Gemini 3.1 Flash text-to-speech, a new model with audio tags that can steer tone, pace, and accent, currently #2 on Artificial Analysis’s TTS leaderboard.

GPT-5.4 Pro produced a proof for a 60-year-old math problem, with mathematician Jared Lichtman saying it found a path humans overlooked for nearly a century.

Anthropic is switching Claude Enterprise pricing to charge businesses based on token consumption, a shift that could significantly raise bills for power users.

*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 Kerstin R. in London, UK:

"I have a lot of clothes I no longer need. And while I've donated some, there are some higher ticket items in there I've been looking to sell. But getting all of the items listed on a secondhand sales platform seemed very time-consuming and daunting.

So I've built my own system, where all I need to do is take some photos of each item, add some keywords, brand, size, and price, submit it via an Airtable form directly from my phone, and Claude creates all the copy for each text field I need from headline to description to make it a super compelling and optimised listing.

Claude also helps me gauge pricing based on existing listings on the platform. Huge time saver and I can finally get some money back from things I no longer need."

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

OpenAI's GPT-5.4-Cyber rejects Mythos playbook

Zach Mink • 7 minutes

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Good morning, AI enthusiasts. OpenAI cyber researcher Fouad Matin kept the pitch blunt: "no one should be in the business of picking winners and losers" on who gets to defend their systems.

That's a direct shot at Anthropic's Mythos rollout, capped at a 40-org whitelist of tech giants. With GPT-5.4-Cyber, OpenAI is going the opposite way — betting that arming more defenders beats restricting access to a handful of giants.

P.S. Our upcoming AI Growth Systems course for non-technical operators goes live today, covering everything from competitor intelligence agents to Reddit opportunity finders across three hands-on sessions. Exclusive to Premium and trial members. Learn more and enroll here.

In today’s AI rundown:

  • OpenAI counters Mythos playbook with GPT-5.4-Cyber

  • Nvidia ships open-source AI for quantum computing

  • Automate your Chrome browser with Gemini

  • Anthropic gives Claude Code a desktop makeover

  • 4 new AI tools, community workflows, and more

LATEST DEVELOPMENTS

OPENAI

⚔️ OpenAI counters Mythos playbook with GPT-5.4-Cyber

Image source: Lovart / The Rundown

The Rundown: OpenAI just introduced GPT-5.4-Cyber, a more permissive version of its flagship model built for defensive security work — responding to Anthropic's Mythos release last week with a much wider rollout targeting thousands of verified defenders.

The details:

  • OAI is opening access to anyone who passes ID checks via its Trusted Access for Cyber initiative, while Mythos is limited to just 40+ trusted partners.

  • The new model can reverse-engineer compiled software to flag malware or security flaws, letting analysts inspect programs without the original code.

  • OpenAI researcher Fouad Matin called cyber defense a "team sport," arguing "no one should be in the business of picking winners and losers."

  • Treasury Secretary Bessent summoned Wall Street leaders to an emergency Mythos briefing last week, with concerns growing over its hacking capabilities.

Why it matters: It’s not yet clear how Cyber will stack up to Mythos’ monster benchmark scores, but it’s clear that the next generation of model upgrades is about to have some serious implications for cybersecurity. And the two rivals are taking very different approaches to how accessible each company’s advanced defense models are.

TOGETHER WITH UNWRAP

⚡ See how Oura automates customer feedback

The Rundown: Oura's customer feedback was scattered across the organization — until Unwrap brought it all together. Now they can surface recurring themes, proactively prioritize what actually matters, and continuously improve their members’ experience in ways they never could before.

With Unwrap, you get:

  • All customer feedback automatically categorized

  • Query feedback using Unwrap Assistant, or in your favorite tools via MCP

  • Real-time alerts from feedback as they arise, and a clear view of customer sentiment

  • A platform trusted and tested at scale by DoorDash, Stripe, Clay, lululemon and more

Unwrap is offering a trial of its tools to Rundown AI subscribers! Just grab a time with the team to get set up.

NVIDIA

⚛️ Nvidia ships open-source AI for quantum computing

Image source: Nvidia

The Rundown: Nvidia released Ising, the first family of open-source AI models designed to work with quantum computers — built to tackle technical problems like calibration and error decoding that have kept the tech from scaling out of the lab.

The details:

  • The first Ising model keeps the machines tuned automatically, turning what used to be a days-long manual job into something that takes hours.

  • The second fixes errors as they happen, hitting 2.5x the speed and 3x the accuracy of today's best open-source alternative.

  • Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang called it "the operating system of quantum machines," pitching AI as the missing layer that makes the tech scalable.

  • 20+ institutions are already using Ising at launch, including Harvard, Cornell, Fermilab, Sandia National Labs, IonQ, and UC Santa Barbara.

Why it matters: Nvidia ran the same playbook here that it used for self-driving cars (Alpamayo) and robotics (Isaac GR00T): release the open AI layer, lock in the ecosystem, own the infrastructure beneath a new computing paradigm. The company is planting its flag in a projected $11B quantum market before the race really starts.

AI TRAINING

🤖 Automate your Chrome browser with Gemini

The Rundown: In this guide, you will learn how to turn on and use our favorite Gemini in Chrome features. If you have a Google AI Pro subscription, you will learn how to turn on and use Chrome automations.

Step-by-step:

  1. In Chrome, go to Settings > AI Innovations > Gemini in Chrome, and enable "Show Gemini at the top of the browser" and "Share current tab with Gemini". If on Google AI Pro, also enable "Let Gemini browse for you"

  2. Open three product tabs, click Gemini, type @ to attach tabs, and prompt: “Compare [products] and tell which offers the best features for the best price”

  3. Gemini will compare and give you a recommendation. This works even without Google AI Pro because you are sharing the tabs directly

  4. If you have AI Pro, prompt: “Find me a cheaper [product type] with these same features.” Gemini will send you a plan, then use Chrome to execute it for you

Pro tip: With Google AI Pro, you can even ask Gemini to sign in to your accounts using saved Chrome passwords.

PRESENTED BY TELY AI

💬 Market leaders get leads from ChatGPT and Google

The Rundown: Your buyers are asking AI questions — and AI is answering with your competitors, not you. Tely makes AI like ChatGPT, Google, and Claude recommend your business instead.

With Tely AI, you can:

  • Get recommended in ChatGPT, Google, Perplexity, and Claude in as little as 1 week

  • Fully hands-off: no writers, no agencies, no managing content

  • Costs less than hiring freelancers or maintaining a marketing team

  • Ideal for niche industries where expertise matters

Get leads from Google and ChatGPT on autopilot.

ANTHROPIC

💄 Anthropic gives Claude Code a makeover in desktop

Image source: Anthropic

The Rundown: Anthropic introduced a redesign to Claude Code's desktop app built around the reality that devs now run multiple AI sessions at once, adding a sidebar for managing them, new drag-and-drop panes, and an integrated editor and terminal.

The details:

  • A new sidebar keeps all live and recent sessions in view, with filters by status or project and the ability to auto-archive once a pull request is closed or merged.

  • A drag-and-drop layout now allows users to customize the workspace and monitor multiple windows at once, with more reliability and speed.

  • Developers can now run tests, edit files, review Claude's changes, and preview HTML or PDFs without switching to another tool.

  • Anthropic also launched routines in Claude Code, a new research preview that runs AI tasks on a schedule, via API, or whenever certain GitHub events happen.

Why it matters: The Claude Code redesign and routines both paint the same picture — Anthropic thinks devs are about to spend less time coding and more time using a team of AI agents. Pair routines with the parallel-session redesign, and Claude Code starts looking more like a command center for a half-human, half-AI workforce.

QUICK HITS

🛠️ Trending AI Tools

  • ⚡ Lightfield - AI-native CRM that auto-captures emails, calls, and meetings—then answers any question about your business.*

  • 💻 Claude Code - Anthropic's revamped desktop app for parallel agents

  • ⚙️ Skills in Chrome - Reusable prompt shortcuts for Gemini in Chrome

  • 🧬 Amazon Bio Discovery - Agentic app for antibody drug design, lab testing

*Sponsored Listing

📰 Everything else in AI today

AI personal finance startup Hiro announced that it is winding down operations, with its staff joining OpenAI.

AWS rolled out Amazon Bio Discovery, a new drug-design platform with biological foundation models and a built-in lab network for synthesis and testing.

UK AI safety evaluators said Claude Mythos Preview is the first AI to complete their 32-step corporate hack simulation, showing big jumps in cyber-attacks over Opus 4.6.

Baidu released ERNIE-Image, an 8B open-weight text-to-image model that nears top rivals on benchmarks despite its small size.

OpenAI's Greg Brockman framed AI as the shift to a "compute-powered economy," claiming ~1B weekly ChatGPT and Codex users on the company’s 10th anniversary.

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 Will G. in Nashville, TN:

"At almost 70 years old, I dove into ChatGPT at work. I used it to develop a system using Microsoft Forms, Lists, and Power Automate to put a QR-based product item tracking system in place without purchasing scanners.

The guys on the dock and delivery drivers scan the QR, and we get real-time product tracking. Now the oldest guy at work is considered the ‘AI Guy’."

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

What happens when AI runs a retail store

Zach Mink • 7 minutes

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Good morning, AI enthusiasts. Most AI agent demos live inside sandboxes with fake money and simulated users. This one signed a three-year lease and hired real people.

Andon Labs' latest experiment just dropped an AI into its own retail store in San Francisco with a $100K budget and full autonomy over hiring, operations, and more, a preview of a future where AI replaces the boss long before it replaces the worker.

In today’s AI rundown:

  • AI agent hires humans, opens boutique in SF

  • OpenAI talks Anthropic rivalry, Amazon upside

  • Run Google’s latest AI on your phone for free

  • Stanford's AI index: 53% adoption, 31% trust

  • 4 new AI tools, community workflows, and more

LATEST DEVELOPMENTS

AI EXPERIMENT

🏪 AI agent hires humans, opens boutique in SF

Image source: Andon Labs

The Rundown: Andon Labs just dropped an AI agent named Luna into a real retail space with a $100K budget and a credit card, with the AI creating a boutique, hiring workers, and managing the shop as what may be the world's first AI employer.

The details:

  • Andon Labs' last experiment was an AI vending machine at Anthropic, with the new one giving a 3-year lease, $100K budget, and total autonomy.

  • Luna's only directive was to turn a profit, with the AI creating the boutique concept, posting job listings, and handling interviews over Zoom (camera off).

  • The agent runs on Claude Sonnet 4.6 for reasoning and Gemini 3.1 Flash-Lite Preview for voice, observing the store via screenshots from security cameras.

  • When hiring a painter, Luna accidentally selected Afghanistan on TaskRabbit's dropdown menu, and later botched the opening-weekend staff schedule.

Why it matters: Real-world agent experiments like this keep producing the same result: capable in some areas, but hilariously broken in others. But every model upgrade, memory advance, and agentic feature is going to help close that gap, with a version of Luna that doesn't make these mistakes likely only a generation or two away.

TOGETHER WITH YOU.COM

🤔 Are your web search APIs giving you what you need?

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

What you’ll get:

  • A four-phase framework for evaluating AI search

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

  • Metrics and code for measuring accuracy

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

OPENAI

📝 OpenAI talks Anthropic rivalry, Amazon upside

Image source: Lovart / The Rundown

The Rundown: OpenAI’s CRO Denise Dresser sent an internal memo calling Anthropic's $30B run rate “inflated”, labeling it a “single-product company in a platform war” and pointing to the Amazon deal as a way to break free from Microsoft constraints.

The details:

  • The memo, published by The Verge, calls Anthropic's compute shortage a 'strategic misstep’, saying users now face throttled access and availability.

  • Dresser said Anthropic’s message is built on “fear” and “restriction,” and that OpenAI’s “positive message will win over time.”

  • She also accused the rival of inflating its revenue numbers via accounting tactics, claiming they overstate the run rate by around $8B.

  • Dresser also called OAI’s Microsoft deal limiting for enterprise business, noting “staggering” demand for Bedrock since February’s Amazon deal.

Why it matters: Either OpenAI is using “internal” memos to leak out information strategically to the media, or they are extremely bad at keeping things in-house. Either way, this memo reads like an IPO pitch more than a strategy update — and with both rivals racing to public debuts this year, that’s probably the point.

AI TRAINING

📱 Run Google’s latest AI on your phone for free

The Rundown: In this guide, you will learn how to download and run Google's latest AI models on your phone for free. No account, no subscription, no internet required after setup.

Step-by-step:

  1. Get Google AI Edge Gallery from the App Store/Google Play, open it, tap AI Chat, and download a model from the options; ours was Gemma 4 E2B (2.5 GB)

  2. Once the model is ready, tap the settings icon in the top right and enable Thinking. This starts step-by-step reasoning, so the model shows its work

  3. Start chatting now. Everything runs locally on your phone, with no data leaving the device, and the model works even without an internet connection

  4. One caveat is that the app doesn't save chat history. If you close a thread, the conversation is gone. You can, however, tap the + button to see sent messages

Pro tip: Tap Agent Skills instead of AI Chat to give the model extra abilities. There's a restaurant roulette, a Wikipedia lookup, an interactive map, a QR generator, and more.

PRESENTED BY GLEAN

🧠 Why you need a context graph

The Rundown: Join Glean on April 23 to see why connectors, MCP, and real-time app access are not enough on their own. See where federated approaches fall short and why a permissions-aware context graph creates a stronger foundation for enterprise AI and agents.

You’ll learn:

  • Why federated approaches fall short on quality, context depth, and token efficiency

  • How to give AI and agents the context needed to reason and act reliably

  • What to look for in an enterprise AI platform

Register now.

AI RESEARCH

📊 Stanford's AI index: 53% adoption, 31% trust

Image source: Stanford HAI

The Rundown: Stanford HAI released its 2026 AI Index, showing tech that has now reached over half the world's population faster than the PC or internet — but with public trust in AI sitting at record lows and entry-level workers already losing jobs.

The details:

  • Almost 3/4 of AI experts are optimistic about the tech's impact on jobs, but only 23% of the public agrees, the widest gap the report has tracked.

  • The US builds most of the world's AI but ranks just 24th in actually using it at 28.3% adoption, behind Singapore, the UAE, and most of Southeast Asia.

  • China has nearly erased the US lead on AI benchmarks with Anthropic's top model ahead by 2.7%, while AI researchers moving to the U.S dropped 89%.

  • Dev employment for ages 22-25 fell nearly 20% since 2024, even as older engineer headcounts grew, and firm surveys say planned cuts will accelerate.

Why it matters: These are just a few of the countless interesting stats in the 400+ page report. The expert-public divide is a timely stat, given the current anti-AI climate playing out in scary ways. AI insiders see a productivity boom, but regular people aren’t buying it, and just 31% Americans trust the government to manage the changes.

QUICK HITS

🛠️ Trending AI Tools

  • 📚 Scroll - Turn any knowledge base into a world-class AI experience for employees and customers*

  • ⚖️ Harvey Agents - Legal AI agents for memos, diligence reports, and more

  • 💳 Lovable Payments - One-chat setup for adding payments to AI-built apps

  • ⚙️ HeyGen CLI - Agentic tool for generating videos via terminal

*Sponsored Listing

📰 Everything else in AI today

Workshop Labs announced that it is joining Thinking Machines, bringing its personalized, human-first AI stacks to Mira Murati's lab via acquihire.

Apple is reportedly building its first smart glasses with four frame options and an oval camera system, with plans to take on Meta's Ray-Bans as early as 2027.

Legal AI startup Harvey launched Agents, autonomous bots that can execute full legal workflows, including research, memos, and slide decks across 13 domains.

Microsoft is building OpenClaw-style features for 365 Copilot, including agents that work 24/7 inside Office Apps, with a preview likely at its Build conference in June.

SoftBank launched a new company backed by NEC, Honda, Sony, and five other Japanese firms to build a homegrown 1T-parameter physical AI model.

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 Bethany M. in Austin, TX:

"When family members moved to San Francisco, I inherited all the pantry items they left behind. With my own already full pantry, I was suddenly surrounded by unfamiliar flours, grains, and dry goods—and no idea how to use them.

Instead of trying to list everything, I took a photo and asked ChatGPT what I could make. One of my first successes was transforming a jumble of flours and grains into a surprisingly delicious loaf of bread in my bread maker.

That small win gave me the confidence to keep going. Now I use ChatGPT to help with all my cooking—making substitutions, reducing sugar, and adapting recipes. I waste far less food and feel more creative in the kitchen."

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

Unitree's cheapest humanoid goes global

Jennifer Mossalgue • 5 minutes

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Good morning, robotics enthusiasts. Chinese robotics firm Unitree just put its cheapest humanoid on AliExpress — and it ships to your door for $6,800. 

The R1, a four-foot acrobat that can cartwheel and sprint downhill, is now available across North America, Europe, Japan, and Singapore through Alibaba’s e-commerce platform. While Tesla and Figure are working out roadmaps, Unitree is taking orders.

In today’s robotics rundown:

  • Unitree takes its budget humanoid global

  • Uber and Volkswagen launch robotaxis in LA

  • MIT’s fiber muscles move more like the real thing

  • Tesla FSD gets its first EU approvals

  • Quick hits on other robotics news

LATEST DEVELOPMENTS

UNITREE

🤖 Unitree takes its budget humanoid global

Image source: Unitree

The Rundown: Chinese robotics firm Unitree is taking its R1 humanoid global — and it’s going through Alibaba’s AliExpress to do it. Starting at $6,800 in the U.S., the robot is now available to buyers across North America, Europe, Japan, and Singapore.

The details:

  • Unitree’s R1 line runs for around $5K in China, with U.S. pricing starting at $6,800 for R1 Air (20 DoF) and deliveries slated to begin around June 30.

  • Standing roughly 4 feet tall and weighing about 60 lb., the “born for sport” R1 can run downhill, recover from falls, and pull off acrobatics like cartwheels.

  • Unitree is using AliExpress’s Brand+ channel to push the R1 as a consumer-friendly platform for hobbyists, educators, and developers.

  • The global rollout lands as Unitree ramps mass production and eyes an IPO, with analysts projecting it could ship nearly half of China’s humanoids by 2026.

Why it matters: At $6,800 for a fully capable humanoid, Unitree aims to define a consumer product category. While regions like the U.S. get a price markup from $5K, it’s still within reach of a well-funded university lab or a serious developer. That makes it something Tesla, Figure, and Agility don’t have: a humanoid you can actually try to buy.

UBER & VW

🚐 Uber and Volkswagen launch robotaxis in LA

Image source: MOIA / Uber

The Rundown: Volkswagen’s autonomous subsidiary MOIA America and Uber have kicked off public-road testing of ID. Buzz robotaxis in LA, in a move both companies are billing as the next serious challenge to Waymo’s dominance in the city.

The details:

  • The current fleet has around 10 vans, but is slated to scale to more than 100 ID. Buzz robotaxis with onboard safety operators as validation ramps up.

  • The ID. Buzz AD uses a Mobileye Drive stack and a 27-sensor suite — 13 cameras, 9 lidar units, and 5 radars — to achieve SAE Level 4 autonomy.

  • MOIA and Uber plan to start offering paid rides on the Uber app in LA by late 2026, with fully driverless service (no human onboard) targeted for 2027.

  • Uber and MOIA have also opened a joint operations facility in LA to support the rollout, with thousands of ID. Buzz vehicles planned across multiple U.S. cities.

Why it matters: Waymo has logged fully driverless rides in LA since 2024 and now runs more than 250K paid trips weekly across its U.S. markets — a benchmark MOIA will have to clear before Angelenos take the retro van seriously. And before MOIA collects a single fare in California, it needs to clear two major regulatory hurdles.

MIT

💪 MIT’s fiber muscles move more like the real thing

Image source: Ozgun Kilic Afsar, MIT

The Rundown: MIT researchers just built an electrically driven artificial muscle fiber that behaves far more like real muscle than the servo motors used in most robots and prosthetic limbs, and they’ve done it in a form factor not much thicker than a toothpick.

The details:

  • MIT scientists have built a slender, electrically powered artificial muscle fiber that contracts more like biological muscle than traditional servo motors.

  • Inside each fiber is a tiny sealed tube of liquid and an equally tiny electric pump that pushes the liquid back and forth.

  • When the pump runs, one side of the fiber squeezes and shortens while the other side relaxes, similar to how your biceps and triceps work together.

  • In demos, the fibers lifted nearly 9 lb., launched objects in 0.2 seconds, and bent a robotic arm compliantly enough to shake a human hand.

Why it matters: Most robots are built around servo motors that convert rotational force into linear motion and concentrate bulk near the joints. These fibers contract like real muscle and can be distributed throughout a structure. For exoskeletons and prosthetics, it’s the difference between gear you strap on and gear that moves with you.

TESLA

🚗 Tesla FSD gets its first EU approvals

Image source: Tesla

The Rundown: The Netherlands became the first European country to officially clear Tesla’s Full Self-Driving Supervised system for public roads, handing the company a regulatory foothold in a market where it has long operated in a gray zone.

The details:

  • Dutch road authority RDW granted provisional type approval after a testing program spanning both closed tracks and real-world driving conditions.

  • The software is explicitly classified as Level 2 driver assistance, meaning a human driver must monitor the road and remain legally responsible at all times.

  • The decision allows Tesla to roll out FSD Supervised to Dutch customers via software update and could make it easier for other EU countries to follow suit.

Why it matters: The Dutch sign‑off gives Tesla its first formal regulatory blessing for supervised “Full Self‑Driving” in Europe, turning the Netherlands into a potential launchpad for a wider EU rollout. It also sharpens the contrast with the U.S., where the same software is widely used but faces intensifying safety probes.

QUICK HITS

📰 Everything else in robotics today

Kia will start using Boston Dynamics’ Atlas humanoids at its Georgia plant from 2029 and aims to launch its first car with Level 2 highway automation by 2027.

Unitree said its H1 humanoid hit a top speed of 10 meters per second in a recent sprint, claiming a new humanoid speed record.

Beijing reportedly completed a full-scale nighttime rehearsal of its April 19 humanoid half-marathon, using over 70 teams to test the full 21 km course.

Waymo is launching a pilot with Google’s Waze to share pothole data collected by its robotaxis with five U.S. city transportation departments to help get them fixed.

DJI posted a teaser for an April 16 announcement that is almost certainly the already leaked Osmo Pocket 4 handheld camera.

Chinese humanoid startup EngineAI raised a $200M Series B round that values the company at over $1.4B and pushes its total funding toward $1B.

Robotic sage grouse decoys are being tested in Grand Teton National Park to lure real birds back to restored habitat and away from airport runways.

Indian firm SS Innovations unveiled a drone carrying a robotic surgery system so remote surgeons can perform life-saving procedures in battlefield zones.

Princeton engineers built an origami-inspired soft robot that uses heat-driven shape-changing materials and embedded electronics to fold and move with precise control.

COMMUNITY

🎓 Highlights: News, Guides & Events

See you soon,

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

AI

Anti-AI anger hits Sam Altman's front door

Zach Mink • 7 minutes

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Good morning, AI enthusiasts. Last week, OpenAI published a 13-page policy doc warning that AI could reshape society faster than anyone has prepared for. Days later, someone tried to set Sam Altman's house on fire.

The 20-year-old suspect reportedly believed AI would lead to human extinction — and while the attack was criminal, the anxiety behind it isn’t fringe. With societal changes just beginning, anger like this also isn’t going away soon.

In today’s AI rundown:

  • Anti-AI suspect targets Altman's home, arrested

  • The Rundown Roundtable: Our AI use cases

  • Generate editable infographics in 15 minutes

  • AI finds GLP-1 side effects trials missed

  • 4 new AI tools, community workflows, and more

LATEST DEVELOPMENTS

OPENAI

🚨 Anti-AI suspect targets Altman's home, arrested

Image source: Sam Altman (@sama on X)

The Rundown: A 20-year-old was arrested after throwing a Molotov cocktail at Sam Altman's home and threatening to burn down OpenAI's HQ, with Altman publishing a personal essay reflecting on AI's stakes, his own mistakes, and calling for de-escalation.

The details:

  • The device hit a gate at Altman's home around 3:45 am, with no injuries occurring, and SFPD arrested Daniel Moreno-Gama an hour later at OpenAI HQ.

  • Moreno-Gama published essays warning that AI would end humanity, and used the organization PauseAI's Discord under the handle "Butlerian Jihadist".

  • Altman responded with a blog calling AI anxiety "justified," admitting past mistakes, and likening the industry's power struggle to a "ring of power."

  • PauseAI condemned the attack, with Moreno-Gama posting 34 messages on its server — one of which a moderator flagged for appearing to call for action.

  • A second attack also reportedly occurred Sunday night, with two suspects firing gunshots outside Altman’s residence.

Why it matters: Anti-AI sentiment is going mainstream fast — and OAI and Altman, who himself called the fear "justified," have become the face of the tech for people to direct their anger at. Unfortunately, with 4 in 5 Americans now worried about AI and society’s transformation just beginning, that anger isn’t going away soon.

TOGETHER WITH VISA

🤖 Get your business ready for agentic commerce

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Intelligent Commerce Connect enables:

  • Seamless acceptance of agent-initiated payments

  • Makes product catalogs discoverable on AI platforms

  • Orchestration and PCI compliance for enablers

Explore Intelligent Commerce Connect and get ahead of the agentic commerce curve.

THE RUNDOWN ROUNDTABLE

💡The Rundown Roundtable: Our AI use cases

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

Shubham, Editor: I used Perplexity to find the right earbuds for my iPhone, mainly for light music and calls. It compared AirPods 4, Pro 2, Pro 3, Beats Fit Pro, and Nothing Ear models, breaking down ANC, call quality, Apple ecosystem features, and prices.

It helped me see that AirPods Pro 2 gave me everything I needed—strong noise cancellation, seamless pairing, and Spatial Audio—without paying extra for Pro 3 or Beats' upgrades I wouldn't use much.

Jennifer, Tech & Robotics Writer: My first media job was as a fact-checker at a major magazine. Those jobs have already mostly vanished before AI arrived, but now I use ChatGPT 5.4 Thinking as a last-pass fact-checker on my newsletters before I hit send.

I’ll ask it to identify inconsistencies, isolate the assertions that most need verification, and check key numbers, quotes, and factual claims against original or primary sources. In other words, it does not replace reporting, but it is remarkably good at stress-testing a draft before publication — essentially fact-checking my fact-checking.

AI TRAINING

📊 Generate editable infographics in 15 minutes

The Rundown: In this guide, you will learn how to turn raw research into an editable infographic using Perplexity, Gemini, and Canva Magic Layers, going from a data-heavy topic to a graphic you can fix and ship instead of rebuilding manually.

Step-by-step:

  1. Use your preferred AI to research the infographic data, prompting: “Do deep research on [topic]. Look for outliers and narrative angles. Our end goal is four infographic concepts recapping the most interesting data trends”

  2. Turn the concepts into image prompts: “Give me a prompt for each concept that I can paste into an image generator. Make data easy to copy and paste”

  3. Give those prompts to Gemini, generate some options, and download the best PNG. Then, upload it to Canva, click Edit, open Magic Studio, and Magic Layers

  4. Canva will make the image editable, letting you clean up the layers, fix text, swap incorrect images, and tighten the layout for near-perfect infographics

Pro tip: Skip the research step when you already have a memo, case study, or report. Feed it into Perplexity or Gemini and turn the strongest data into an infographic prompt.

PRESENTED BY BLAND AI

📞 Build a phone agent from a single prompt

The Rundown: Bland AI just launched Norm, a voice AI assistant that lets anyone create a fully functional phone agent by simply describing what they need. Just tell Norm what you want, and it generates the prompt, agent logic, conditions, and integrations instantly.

With Norm, you can:

  • Go from idea to working phone agent with a single prompt, with no dev work needed

  • Auto-generate agent logic, conditions, and integrations like calendar booking in seconds

  • Turn months of voice AI development into days with one-shot agent creation

Try Norm for free here.

AI RESEARCH

💊 AI finds GLP-1 side effects trials missed

Image source: Lovart / The Rundown

The Rundown: Penn researchers published a study that fed over 400K Reddit posts about Ozempic and Mounjaro into AI models using a technique called “computational social listening”, pulling out side effects that clinical trials hadn’t caught.

The details:

  • The team used GPT and Gemini to map posts by 67K users to standardized medical terms, covering 5+ years of real Ozempic and Mounjaro discussions.

  • Nearly half the sample reported at least one side effect, flagging menstrual irregularities, chills, and hot flashes that aren’t reflected in current drug labels.

  • Fatigue ranked as the second most common complaint among users, despite barely showing up in clinical trial reporting thresholds for either drug.

  • Co-author Lyle Ungar compared Reddit to a "neighborhood grapevine", with patients swapping real-time notes that rarely make it into a doctor's visit.

Why it matters: AI is compressing parts of the drug discovery process, but it’s also increasing the novelty of what’s entering the market, making side effects harder to catch. Reddit is not a peer-reviewed journal, but thousands flagging similar symptoms is hard to dismiss — and LLMs just made it possible to listen at that scale.

QUICK HITS

🛠️ Trending AI Tools

  • 🧠 Muse Spark - Meta’s multimodal reasoning AI with multi-agent mode

  • ⚙️ Cursor 3 - Cursor's agent-first interface for parallel coding agents

  • 🎥 Avatar V - HeyGen's AI avatar model that generates studio-quality videos

  • 🤖 Hermes Agent - AI agent with memory and cross-platform messaging

📰 Everything else in AI today

Agentic Analytics Summit, April 29 - Free virtual event where data leaders from Brex, Patagonia, Cube, and more share how they're building AI-native analytics in production. Learn more.*

Alibaba revealed it is behind "HappyHorse," the unreleased video AI model that debuted atop global rankings and knocked ByteDance's Seedance 2.0 to second place.

U.S. Treasury Secretary Bessent and Fed Chair Powell summoned Wall Street CEOs to an urgent meeting over cyber risks posed by Anthropic's Mythos model.

Meta is reportedly hiring recently departed OAI Stargate execs, with Peter Hoeschele, Shamez Hemani, and Anuj Saharan joining to help build the new Meta Compute group.

Anthropic hosted Christian leaders at its HQ for a summit on Claude's moral development, covering grief responses, whether AI could be a "child of God,” and more.

*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 Elle W. in Ontario, Canada:

"After two years of chronic lower back pain and no answers from specialists, I was stuck. Despite X-rays and MRIs showing osteoarthritis and degenerative discs—common findings that didn't explain my specific agony—physiotherapy and shots failed. The medical field offered suggestions, but no solutions.

I fed my symptoms, imaging, and history into Gemini to find the root cause. Together, we pinpointed the exact triggers. It built a targeted exercise program and a four-month recovery plan with weekly milestones. Now, at 3.5 months, my pain is nearly gone. Where humans couldn't help, Gemini’s ability to troubleshoot and analyze my data finally gave me my life back. I am incredibly grateful for this healing journey."

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

Snap takes another swing at smart glasses

Jennifer Mossalgue • 6 minutes

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Good morning, tech enthusiasts. Snap is taking another shot at smart glasses — this time with Qualcomm chips, on-device AI, and real pressure to deliver.

The reboot follows the abrupt exit of its top Specs exec amid a reported clash with CEO Evan Spiegel, as the company races to beat Meta to the face-worn AI interface. But Meta’s Ray-Ban glasses are already gaining traction; Snap’s Spectacles are still trying to ship.

In today’s tech rundown:

  • Snap’s Spectacles get a Qualcomm engine

  • Tesla may build a low-priced SUV after all

  • Meta bans the ads being used to sue it

  • One therapy wipes out 3 autoimmune diseases

  • Quick hits on other tech news

LATEST DEVELOPMENTS

SNAP

👓 Snap’s Spectacles get a Qualcomm engine

Image source: Snap

The Rundown: Snap is finally inching toward launching its long-delayed AI-powered Spectacles, striking a multi-year Qualcomm chip deal to bring its next-gen AR glasses to consumers later this year after a recent executive shake-up at its Specs unit.

The details:

  • The new Spectacles will run on Qualcomm’s Snapdragon XR chips, enabling on-device AI, advanced graphics, and multiuser digital experiences.

  • Snap spun out Specs as a separate subsidiary earlier this year to focus on the glasses business after years of fits and starts with the product line.

  • In February, Snap abruptly parted ways with Scott Myers, its senior VP of Specs, following a reported clash with CEO Evan Spiegel.

Why it matters: Snap’s decade-old Specs unit is under pressure to finally turn Spectacles into a real consumer platform just as Meta, Apple, and others race to dominate the smart glasses market. If this launch fizzles like past attempts, Snap risks ceding the next hardware frontier to rivals with deeper pockets and tighter ecosystems.

TESLA

🚗 Tesla may build a low-priced SUV after all

Image source: Reve / The Rundown

The Rundown: Tesla is developing a compact electric SUV designed to undercut its own Model 3 on price, Reuters reports — two years after CEO Elon Musk scrapped the $25K "Model 2” and called building cars for human drivers “pointless.”

The details:

  • The vehicle would measure about 14 ft., making it significantly shorter than the Model Y’s 15.7 ft., and would be an entirely new design.

  • To hit a lower price point, Tesla plans to use a smaller battery pack and a single electric motor, trading range against the Model Y’s 306-to-327-mile rating.

  • Sources said production would be based at Tesla’s Shanghai factory, with one source adding that Tesla aims to expand manufacturing to the U.S. and Europe.

  • Pricing would land substantially below the entry-level Model 3, which starts at $34K in China and $37K in the U.S.

Why it matters: Tesla’s sales have taken a hit as Chinese EVs flood the sub-$30K segment, a price point the company has never actually reached. A compact SUV would be its most direct answer yet to that pressure, though with no formal approval and only early supplier conversations underway, the timeline remains unclear.

META

⚖️ Meta bans the ads being used to sue it

Image source: Getty / Reve

The Rundown: Meta just removed a wave of Facebook and Instagram ads placed by plaintiffs’ law firms recruiting clients for social media addiction lawsuits, as litigation against the company continues to mount.

The details:

  • Meta has pulled campaigns from major national firms targeting teens and parents to join social media addiction lawsuits.

  • Meta said it wouldn't “allow trial lawyers to profit from our platforms while simultaneously claiming they are harmful.”

  • An LA jury recently awarded $6M against Meta and Google for a woman’s depression; a New Mexico jury fined Meta $375M over child safety failures.

  • More than 3,300 addiction-related lawsuits are pending in California state courts, with another 2,400 federal cases centralized there.

Why it matters: The same ad-targeting engine that helped Meta capture attention is now being used to recruit people to sue them. With billions in potential liability on the line and thousands of cases pending, the move shows how fiercely Meta intends to fight a legal battle that could reshape platform accountability for teen mental health.

BIOTECH

💉 One therapy wipes out 3 autoimmune diseases

Image source: Ideogram / The Rundown (rendering of a CART-T cell)

The Rundown: For the first time, a single round of experimental CAR-T-cell therapy put all three of a patient’s severe, treatment-resistant autoimmune diseases into lasting remission — a result doctors say they've never seen before.

The details:

  • The woman was managing three debilitating autoimmune conditions until a single infusion of T cells effectively rebooted her immune system.

  • Doctors hacked a blood-cancer treatment, reprogramming her T cells to hunt down CD19-tagged B cells, the antibody factories gone rogue in her system.

  • Within weeks, her blood counts normalized as a fresh population of mostly naïve B cells repopulated her system.

  • Fourteen months on, she remains off all medications for the three conditions, with no reported side effects from the therapy itself.

Why it matters: CAR-T-cell therapy has already transformed blood cancer treatment — but repurposing it for autoimmune disease is a newer, bolder bet. A single case isn’t a cure, and larger trials are needed. Still, sustained triple remission without ongoing medication is the kind of outcome researchers rarely dare to predict.

QUICK HITS

📰 Everything else in tech today

SpaceX recorded a loss of nearly $5B in 2025 despite generating more than $18.5B in revenue, according to a report by The Information.

Disney’s new CEO, Josh D’Amaro, plans to cut up to 1K jobs, with the company’s recently consolidated marketing department expected to bear the brunt of the layoffs.

Almost half of the U.S. data centers planned to open in 2026 are likely to be delayed or canceled due to power grid limits, equipment shortages, and local opposition.

Apple’s first foldable iPhone remains on track to be unveiled in September 2026 alongside the iPhone 18 Pro lineup, despite earlier rumors of delay, Bloomberg reports.

Spotify is adding new global settings so you can turn off all videos, including music videos, podcast videos, and Canvas loops, and keep Spotify audio-only if you want.

Instagram is rolling out a long‑requested feature that lets users edit their comments shortly after posting, so they no longer need to delete and rewrite them.

Volkswagen will stop building its ID.4 electric SUV at its Tennessee plant and shift the factory to producing the higher-volume, gasoline-powered Atlas SUV instead.

NASA traced the helium leak in Orion’s propulsion system to faulty valves and is now planning a hardware redesign to prevent similar issues on future lunar missions.

The EU has hit Google, Apple, and Meta with more than $7B in antitrust and digital regulation fines since 2024, triggering a clash with the U.S. government.

Startup Radify Metals developed plasma reactors that can refine rare-earth metals, potentially undercutting China’s dominance over the rare-earth supply chain.

Greece plans to ban social media access for children under 15 starting January 1, 2027, as part of new legislation aimed at protecting young people’s mental health.

Finland’s long‑planned Onkalo facility is on the verge of becoming the world’s first operational deep geological repository for spent nuclear fuel.

COMMUNITY

🎓 Highlights: News, Guides & Events

See you soon,

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

AI

Perplexity's agent pivot is on the money

Zach Mink • 7 minutes

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Good morning, AI enthusiasts. Perplexity stopped trying to simply out-Google Google and started going after Mint, TurboTax, and every personal finance app on your phone instead.

The company’s Computer launch in February now doubles as a personal finance hub and tax tool, changing Perplexity’s trajectory from search to something much bigger — with a 50% monthly revenue jump to $450M backing up every agentic move.

In today’s AI rundown:

  • Perplexity plugs its AI agent into bank accounts

  • Jassy’s $200B Amazon AI spend now has receipts

  • Automate your business with custom Notion Agents

  • Oxford AI catches heart failure five years early

  • 4 new AI tools, community workflows, and more

LATEST DEVELOPMENTS

PERPLEXITY

🏦 Perplexity plugs its AI agent into bank accounts

Image source: Perplexity

The Rundown: Perplexity just rolled out a new Plaid integration that lets users connect bank accounts, credit cards, and loans directly to its Computer agent, turning it into a full personal finance hub.

The details:

  • Plaid's 12K+ bank network feeds into Computer, with users able to pull in checking, credit, loan, and brokerage data for a read-only view of their money.

  • The agentic system can then build customized tools like budgets, net worth trackers, debt payoff plans, and retirement dashboards via simple text prompts.

  • The move comes on the heels of Perplexity’s U.S tax integration that autonomously fills out IRS forms and reviews professional-prepared returns.

  • Perplexity Computer launched in late February, with the agentic pivot helping push Perplexity's ARR past $450M in March, a 50% jump in a single month.

Why it matters: Perplexity built its name trying to out-Google Google, but it’s Computer has completely changed the trajectory. With smart connectors and a powerful AI agent, the company is suddenly competing with Mint, TurboTax, and every other app area it ends up integrating — not just search.

TOGETHER WITH SERPAPI

🔍 Access Google Search, Maps, and more live data via API

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With SerpApi, you get:

  • Real-time, reliable results from any search engine

  • ZeroTrace Mode to keep your searches confidential

  • U.S. Legal Shield for scraper legal protection

Try SerpApi playground for free today — Rundown readers can get 50% off for 3 months via chat or email.

AMAZON

✍️ Jassy’s $200B Amazon AI spend now has receipts

Image source: Amazon

The Rundown: Amazon CEO Andy Jassy shared his annual shareholder letter with the company's first-ever AI revenue figures and a defense of the $200B planned capex, dismissing bubble talk and floating the idea of selling Trainium chips to outside buyers.

The details:

  • Amazon's $200B AI spending rattled investors this year, with Jassy's letter firing back with first-ever revenue figures and locked-in customer demand.

  • AWS's AI arm crossed $15B in annualized revenue, a number Amazon had never disclosed — and 260x where AWS itself stood at the same point.

  • The custom Trainium, Graviton, and Nitro chips crossed $20B in yearly revenue, and Amazon may sell “racks of them to third parties in the future.”

  • Two unnamed AWS customers asked to buy the company's entire Graviton chip supply for 2026, with Amazon declining to protect other clients' access.

Why it matters: If you only tracked models as a barometer for the AI race, Amazon might look like it's behind — but the $20B chip numbers tell a different story. Nvidia has dominated AI compute, but the supply side of the boom is finally getting real competition at exactly the moment demand has never been higher.

AI TRAINING

⚙️ Automate your business with custom Notion Agents

The Rundown: In this guide, you will learn how to build Notion Custom Agents that run your company's recurring work on a schedule, automating inbound leads, campaigns, accounting, or any recurring job in your business without adding complexity.

Step-by-step:

  1. In Notion, create two databases — Tasks (Name, Source, Priority, Status, Assigned To) for every to-do, and Reports, so that agents can log their work

  2. Open Notion AI, click +Create custom agent, and prompt: “Create a Weekly Planner agent that reads my last 7 days of emails every Monday morning, adds action items into the Tasks database, and writes a one-paragraph summary of the run into the Reports database”

  3. Notion drafts the agent with a name, trigger, instructions, and data sources. Review, connect Gmail, confirm the schedule, and save

  4. Run it on demand to test. Tighten the instructions if the output is off, then leave it running. Notion shows the next scheduled run, and the work is off your plate

Pro tip: Clone the pattern for every recurring job. Same two databases, different agent, with every run traceable in one place.

PRESENTED BY UNFRAME

📊 Enterprise AI ROI: 2026 benchmarks

The Rundown: While enterprise AI is widely deployed and already delivering measurable gains, many organizations struggle with translating those gains into business outcomes. Unframe surveyed 255 enterprise leaders to reveal current trends in ROI, adoption, and scaling of AI.

In this report, you’ll find:

  • 4 in 5 enterprises report productivity gains

  • ROI drops 25% in environments with 6+ tools

  • Half of potential value is lost between insight and action

Get the report.

AI MEDICAL RESEARCH

🫀 Oxford AI catches heart failure five years early

Image source: Lovart / The Rundown

The Rundown: Researchers at the University of Oxford introduced an AI system that picks up invisible changes in heart fat from routine CT scans, flagging patients at high risk of heart failure up to five years out — with 86% accuracy across 72K patients.

The details:

  • Fat around the heart shifts texture when the muscle beneath is inflamed, with the AI reading the patterns invisible to doctors on any current scan.

  • In the highest-risk bucket, 1 in 4 patients ended up with heart failure within five years — a 20x gap versus those the AI flagged as safe.

  • Oxford is already working with regulators to bring the tool to National Health Service hospitals, and plans to extend it to all chest CT scans within months.

Why it matters: Heart failure's biggest problem isn't treatment, it's timing. Doctors usually can't act until damage has set in, so an 86%-accurate early warning system built into scans patients are already getting could shift the equation of a serious condition from reaction to prevention for better diagnosis and outcomes.

QUICK HITS

🛠️ Trending AI Tools

  • 💼 Claude Cowork - Anthropic's desktop agent, now generally available

  • 💻 Perplexity Computer - New agentic connections for finances, taxes

  • 🧠 Muse Spark - Meta’s multimodal reasoning AI with multi-agent mode

  • 🐈 Meow - Infra that lets agents open bank accounts, issue cards, and more

📰 Everything else in AI today

Spacelift Intelligence just launched, an AI infrastructure suite that helps platform teams ship infra as fast as developers code. Start for free.*

OpenAI has built a model with advanced cybersecurity skills similar to Anthropic’s Mythos, with Axios reporting the company plans to release it to a “small set of partners”.

xAI is undergoing a reorg of its engineering division, with CFO Anthony Armstrong leaving the company as SpaceX execs are installed ahead of the company’s IPO.

OpenAI launched a $100/month Pro tier with 5x more Codex usage than Plus, designed for heavy agentic coding, coming amid anger over Claude usage limits.

Florida's attorney general opened a probe into OAI with subpoenas incoming, citing allegations that ChatGPT helped plan a campus shooting at Florida State University.

*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 A.M in New Zealand:

"I had an interview for a role that was a leap up from where I was currently at. I loaded the job ad into ChatGPT and asked it to run me through interview questions that I voice-answered. Chat reviewed my answers, and I repeated this process until I scored highly.

I then made it to the 2nd round of interviews with the board. I researched all 5 board members and then had Chat run me through another list of questions I could expect, and then repeated the process of reviewing my answers until I scored highly. Bonus points for Chat helping me answer questions in a way that would appeal to the specific board members’ roles and interests. Fingers crossed for a response any day now!"

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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