Good morning, AI enthusiasts. “Someone breaking into our home" is how OpenAI executives are describing Meta's aggressive recruiting push, and Sam Altman just rallied the troops.

A fiery late-night message to staff revealed a CEO betting that purpose beats paychecks — and one that believes building AGI requires more than just the highest bidder.

In today’s AI rundown:

• Altman fires back at Meta's poaching spree

• Cloudflare creates pay-per-crawl AI marketplace

• Create competitive intelligence reports with Claude

• OpenAI’s high-level enterprise consulting business

• 4 new AI tools & 4 job opportunities

LATEST DEVELOPMENTS

OPENAI

🔥 Altman fires back at Meta's poaching spree

Image source: GPT-4o / The Rundown

The Rundown: OpenAI CEO Sam Altman sent a fiery Slack message to researchers Monday night, according to WIRED — dismissing Meta's recruiting tactics as "distasteful" while pitching why building AGI at OpenAI beats chasing paychecks.

The details:

• Altman said Meta failed to land their top targets despite offering packages up to $300M over four years, saying they had to go “quite far down their list.”

• The CEO promised that OAI is evaluating compensation across the research division, arguing its stock has "much, much more upside" than Meta.

• He also warned Meta's tactics would create "deep cultural problems," contrasting OAI's mission-driven culture with a "flavor of the week" mentality.

• Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg introduced “Meta Superintelligence Labs” to employees this week, with 11 new hires from OpenAI, Google, and Anthropic.

Why it matters: Sama is rallying the troops in the face of what CRO Mark Chen compared to “someone breaking into our home,” hoping that OpenAI’s culture and vibes can outlast Meta’s “mercenary” offers. But only time will tell how impactful the losses are on both OpenAI’s model lead and the reshaping of Meta’s AI operations.

TOGETHER WITH TELY AI

🔎 Are you invisible in AI search?

The Rundown: You’re in a niche industry. Customers search on Google, ChatGPT, and Perplexity — but your company doesn’t show up, because there’s no content answering their questions. Tely AI fixes that by analyzing your industry and site to find what people search for and creating expert-level articles on autopilot. No need for a marketing team.

With Tely AI, you can:

• Start with 60 high-quality articles a month

• Get indexed on Google in as little as 2 weeks

• Be featured in ChatGPT and Perplexity answers

• Enjoy full automation for topics, writing, and publishing

Get leads from Google and ChatGPT on Autopilot.

CLOUDFARE

🌐 Cloudflare creates pay-per-crawl AI marketplace

Image source: Reve / The Rundown

The Rundown: Web infrastructure giant Cloudflare just made a major change to automatically block AI crawlers by default on new websites, alongside the launch of a marketplace where publishers can charge bots micropayments for accessing content.

The details:

• Cloudflare will require AI companies to get explicit permission before scraping any of the 20% of websites it protects, reversing decades of open web policies.

• Publishers can set individual prices for AI crawlers through Pay per Crawl, choosing whether bots pay for training data, search results, or other uses.

• Media outlets like Condé Nast, TIME, and The Atlantic joined the initiative, citing traffic losses due to AI answering queries without the original sources.

• Data shows OAI’s crawlers scrape sites 1,700 times per referral sent back, with Anthropic at 73,000 times per referral — compared to 14-to-1 for Google.

Why it matters: This potentially positions Cloudflare as one of the gatekeepers for the data needed for a coming wave of agents that browse on our behalf. The marketplace could force healthier AI-publisher relationships, but also might create an internet divided between premium content and free sites that become AI's default sources.

AI TRAINING

📊 Create competitive intelligence reports with Claude

The Rundown: In this tutorial, you will learn how to use Claude's web search and research capabilities to analyze competitors and generate interactive executive dashboards that reveal market opportunities.

Step-by-step:

1. Head over to Claude and enable Extended Thinking for deeper analysis

2. Request it to search 5-7 competitors with company overviews, funding data, and recent strategic moves

3. Select the “Research” tool to conduct a comprehensive competitive assessment covering financial analysis, product, and market positioning

4. Ask it to create an interactive executive dashboard using Artifacts

Pro tip: Claude Opus 4's research mode can conduct multi-source competitive analysis that rivals professional market research firms.

PRESENTED BY KORBIT

🏥 AI in HealthTech

The Rundown: In healthtech, moving fast is only part of the equation — shipping secure, high-quality software is the real challenge. This live event with InVita and Korbit explores how leading healthcare teams are integrating AI into the code review process to reduce risk, improve code quality, and free up developers for high-impact work.

Join and discover:

• The hidden risks of manual code reviews in regulated healthcare software

• Why AI-powered reviews are critical for security, quality, and team alignment

• How InVita cut review time and improved developer productivity using Korbit

Register here.

OPENAI

💼 OpenAI’s high-level enterprise consulting business

Image source: Reve / The Rundown

The Rundown: OpenAI is building out a consulting arm that charges enterprises at least $10M to customize AI models, according to a new report from The Information — putting the AI leader in competition with industry giants like Palantir and Accenture.

The details:

• OpenAI hired nearly a dozen "forward-deployed engineers,” many from Palantir, to guide customers through model customization and app development.

• Customers must commit at least $10M for access to OpenAI researchers, with some deals reaching hundreds of millions over multiple years.

• The startup aims to develop billion-dollar custom AI solutions while partnering with data labeling firms like Snorkel AI for specialized domain expertise.

• OpenAI recently secured a $200M defense contract with the Pentagon, with other enterprise clients including Morgan Stanley and Grab.

Why it matters: Companies are rushing to integrate AI, and who better to guide them than the researchers who helped build it? Custom AI models trained on proprietary data unlock capabilities that generic chatbots can't touch and could result in billions in operational efficiency and competitive advantage — even with the lofty price tags.

QUICK HITS

🛠️ Trending AI Tools

• 🤖 Ernie 4.5 - Baidu’s latest open-source family of advanced AI models

• 🧬 Chai-2 - AI capable of creating functional antibodies for drug development

• ⚙️ Cursor Agents - Work with a powerful coding assistant on browser & mobile

• 📝 Co-STORM - Write Wikipedia-like articles from scratch based on AI search

💼 AI Job Opportunities

• 🔁 The Rundown - Strategic Partnerships (AI University)

• 📈 OpenAI - Market Researcher, Brand

• 🤝 Captions - Customer Success Manager

• 🛠️ Together AI - Senior Developer Productivity Engineer

📰 Everything else in AI today

Amazon rolled out DeepFleet, an AI that routes warehouse bots 10% faster to trim costs and shorten delivery times, while announcing the company’s millionth robot.

Cursor reportedly hired Boris Cherny and Cat Wu, two members of Anthropic’s Claude Code product team — with plans to work on “agent-like” features in the new roles.

Ai2 released SciArena, a new benchmarking platform focused specifically on scientific literature knowledge, with OpenAI’s o3 ranking atop the leaderboard.

X is reportedly launching a new pilot program that will allow AI chatbots to create Community Notes on the social media platform.

The English Premier League announced a partnership to integrate Microsoft’s Copilot into its platforms, allowing fans to have more personalized interactions.

Grammarly acquired AI-first email platform Superhuman, aiming to create a multi-agent AI productivity platform centered around users’ inboxes.

COMMUNITY

🎥 Join our next live workshop

Join our next workshop this Friday, July 4th, at 4 PM EST with Dr. Alvaro Cintas, The Rundown’s AI professor. By the end of the workshop, you’ll confidently wire MCP into both conversational AI and your favorite coding IDEs

RSVP here. Not a member? Join The Rundown University on a 14-day free trial.

See you soon,

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

Good morning, tech enthusiasts. Siri is about to get a brain transplant, and Apple is shopping for intelligence. The company is reportedly deep in talks with OpenAI and Anthropic to power its aging voice assistant with their cutting-edge AI.

It could make Siri smarter, fast — but at what cost to Apple’s famously walled garden?

In today’s tech rundown:

• Apple shopping from Anthropic and OpenAI

• Google signs landmark fusion power deal

• DOJ cracks down on North Korean tech scam

• Netflix to stream NASA’s space missions

• Quick hits on other major tech news

LATEST DEVELOPMENTS

APPLE

🔥 Apple shopping from Anthropic and OpenAI

Image source: Ideogram/The Rundown

The Rundown: Apple is weighing a radical shift in its AI strategy by considering Anthropic and OpenAI as potential providers for the next-gen Siri, moving away from its long-standing reliance on proprietary in-house models, Bloomberg reports.

The details:

• Apple has asked Anthropic and OpenAI to create custom versions of their large language models that can run on Apple’s own cloud infrastructure for testing.

• This comes after a series of technical setbacks within Apple’s AI division, as the company struggles to keep pace with Google Assistant and Amazon Alexa.

• Internally, the project is being led by Mike Rockwell, who previously headed Vision Pro, with the company also continuing to develop its own “LLM Siri”.

• Anthropic is reportedly asking Apple for a multibillion-dollar annual licensing fee, prompting Apple to keep OpenAI in the running for negotiating power.

Why it matters: Siri has lagged behind in the generative AI race, and Apple’s openness to outside AI shows just how high the stakes are. With a smarter, revamped Siri not arriving until 2026, Apple is scrambling to stay in the game as the AI competition heats up further.

GOOGLE

⚡️Google signs landmark fusion power deal

Image source: Commonwealth Fusion Systems

The Rundown: Google signed the largest fusion power purchase agreement in history, securing 200 megawatts from MIT spinoff Commonwealth Fusion Systems (CFS )'s first commercial ARC power plant, for an undisclosed amount.

The details:

• The ARC plant is expected to generate a total of 400 megawatts, enough to power around 150K homes or major industrial operations.

• CFS uses a donut-shaped reactor called tokamak to confine plasma at over 100M°C, allowing atomic nuclei to fuse and release massive amounts of energy.

• CFS’s first commercial fusion power plant, ARC, is slated to come online in Chesterfield County, Virginia, in the early 2030s.

• Google is also making a new, undisclosed investment in CFS as part of a fresh funding round, building on its participation in CFS’s $1.8B Series B in 2021.

Why it matters: The fusion sector has pulled in over $8B in private investment — with tech giants like Google, Microsoft, and OpenAI leading the charge. They see fusion as essential to powering growing AI and data infrastructure loads. Google’s latest deal is the largest yet and could accelerate fusion’s path to commercial scale.

CYBERSECURITY

🚔 DOJ cracks down on North Korean tech scam

Image source: Ideogram/The Rundown

The Rundown: The U.S. Department of Justice launched a sweeping crackdown on North Korea’s covert IT worker scheme, which embedded a handful of North Korean operatives as remote employees inside more than 100 American tech firms.

The details:

• These operatives, often using stolen or fake identities, infiltrated the U.S. workforce by posing as legitimate software engineers and IT specialists.

• They allegedly siphoned millions, laundered crypto, and stole proprietary data, funneling the proceeds back to Pyongyang for its nuclear weapons program.

• So far, federal agents has arrested one key U.S.-based facilitator, indicted a network of multinational collaborators, and seized nearly $8M in assets.

• The DOJ said the scheme used U.S.-based “laptop farms,” fake companies to hide payments, and remote access tools to disguise workers’ real locations.

Why it matters: These operatives, hired by top U.S. firms and even a California military defense contractor, allegedly stole millions and sensitive IP and then funneled the proceeds to fund Pyongyang’s nuclear weapons program — making American companies unwitting financiers of one of the world’s most dangerous regimes.

NETFLIX

🪐 Netflix to stream NASA’s space missions

Image source: NASA

The Rundown: Netflix is about to get a cosmic upgrade: NASA Plus’ live spacewalks, rocket launches, and stunning ISS views are landing on the world’s biggest streaming platform this summer — ad-free and at no extra cost.

The details:

• The partnership is designed to make NASA’s scientific work more accessible for a global audience, leveraging Netflix’s reach of over 700M users worldwide.

• NASA Plus, launched in November 2023, offers a mix of live feeds, documentaries, mission overviews, and behind-the-scenes science features.

• It will continue to be available for free, without ads or a subscription, on NASA’s website, app, and supported streaming devices.

• The move is part of NASA’s aim to expand its potential audience, reaching viewers in over 190 countries and making space science more mainstream.

Why it matters: The addition of NASA Plus to Netflix marks the first time the streaming giant is integrating a live feed from an outside programmer, reflecting both Netflix’s growing interest in live, real-time content and NASA’s goal to encourage some space exploration binge-watching.

QUICK HITS

📰 Everything else in tech today

Canada dropped its planned digital tax on U.S. tech giants after Trump threatened to halt trade talks.

Tinder now requires all new users in California to verify their profiles with facial recognition technology.

Grammarly acquired email efficiency tool Superhuman, Reuters reports, as part of its strategy to develop an AI-powered productivity suite and expand its business.

Apple finally scored its first major box office hit with F1, the Brad Pitt-led racing drama that debuted at No. 1 and has so far raked in $144M worldwide.

Mira Murati’s AI startup, Thinking Machines Lab, is reportedly offering exceptionally high base salaries, with some roles reaching $500K, to draw in top talent.

OpenAI said it has no current plans to deploy Google’s in-house Tensor Processing Units at commercial scale, clarifying that the chips are only being used in early testing.

President Donald Trump said that a group of “very wealthy people” is set to buy video app TikTok, banned in the U.S. due to security risks.

Biopharma company Vertex Pharmaceuticals found that one infusion of a stem cell-based treatment may have cured 10 out of 12 people with severe type 1 diabetes.

Anker announced a second product recall this month for five more power bank models because of potential risks of fire.

Joby Aviation delivered its first production eVTOL aircraft to Dubai, where it plans to launch a commercial air taxi service in early 2026. 

COMMUNITY

🎥 Watch our latest workshop

Check out our latest workshop on how to build advanced n8n agents that react, research, and automate like pros, with Dr. Alvaro Cintas, The Rundown’s AI professor.

Watch it here. Not a member? Join The Rundown University on a 14-day free trial.

See you soon,

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

Good morning, AI enthusiasts. Microsoft's latest AI isn't here to replace your doctor — but it might just become their most valuable colleague.

With over 4x higher accuracy than human physicians and CEO Mustafa Suleyman calling it a "big step towards medical superintelligence," this new diagnostic tool is more proof that AI could be healthcare’s most powerful ally yet.

In today’s AI rundown:

• Microsoft’s ‘step towards medical superintelligence’

• Baidu’s open-source ERNIE 4.5 to rival DeepSeek

• Automate YouTube content creation with AI

• Chai Discovery's AI designs working antibodies

• 4 new AI tools & 4 job opportunities

LATEST DEVELOPMENTS

MICROSOFT

🏥 Microsoft’s ‘step towards medical superintelligence’

Image source: Microsoft

The Rundown: Microsoft just introduced the MAI Diagnostic Orchestrator, an AI system that achieves 4x higher diagnosis results than experienced doctors on some of medicine’s most challenging cases, marking a “step towards medical superintelligence.”

The details:

• MAI-DxO simulates a virtual medical team, with specialized AI agents handling hypothesis generation, test selection, and cost monitoring.

• Researchers created SDBench, a benchmark with 304 complex cases — with MAI-DxO, paired with OpenAI's o3, achieving the highest accuracy in testing.

• The MAI/o3 pairing solved 85.5% of cases correctly, with a group of physicians with 5-20 years of experience averaging just 20%.

• The AI system also resulted in cost savings over human doctors, spending $2,397 per case compared to an average of $2,963 for physicians.

Why it matters: A step towards “medical superintelligence” is a powerful statement, but MAI’s numbers compared to physicians are truly jaw-dropping. Plus, ordering fewer unnecessary tests and nailing tough diagnoses directly addresses healthcare's current paradox: the over-treatment of simple cases and under-diagnosis of complex ones.

TOGETHER WITH BASETEN

🚀 The platform for mission-critical inference

The Rundown: Baseten’s inference platform brings enterprise-grade performance and reliability to every stage of your model’s lifecycle. Launch custom, fine-tuned, or any open-source model and scale without limits across any cloud, including your own VPC.

With Baseten, you can:

• Build with frontier Model APIs that are purpose-built for production

• Scale Dedicated Deployments without limits across different cloud providers and regions

• Train and fine-tune any model on any dataset and deploy checkpoints seamlessly to production

Start doing inference now on infrastructure built for mission-critical workloads.

BAIDU

🤖 Baidu’s open-source ERNIE 4.5 to rival DeepSeek

Image source: …

The Rundown: Chinese giant Baidu just open-sourced 10 versions of its new ERNIE 4.5 model family, including a 424B parameter multimodal system that outperforms DeepSeek V3 on key benchmarks despite being half the size.

The details:

• The models range from tiny 300M parameter versions to massive 424B systems, all available under Apache 2.0 licensing on Hugging Face.

• A “Heterogeneous” training architecture allows text and vision capabilities to reinforce each other rather than compete for resources for increased efficiency.

• Baidu's largest model beats DeepSeek V3 on 22/28 benchmarks, while its variants also compete with o1, GPT 4.1, and Qwen 3 across a variety of tasks.

• The release marks Baidu’s first move into open-source models, coming just a year after its CEO appeared against the route prior to the launch of DeepSeek.

Why it matters: While the U.S. has its AI rivalry between OpenAI, Google, and Anthropic, an intense one is also brewing between China’s giants. Baidu, ByteDance, Alibaba, Tencent, DeepSeek, and others continue to push the pace of model releases — and the quality of offerings that make up the top of the open-source charts.

AI TRAINING

🎬 Automate YouTube content creation with AI

The Rundown: In this tutorial, you will learn how to use Google's Gemini AI to analyze videos and automatically generate titles, descriptions, tags, and chapters — streamlining your YouTube content workflow.

Step-by-step:

1. Go to Google Gemini, click the attachment button, and upload your video file

2. Generate titles with: “Analyze this video and provide 10 compelling YouTube titles”

3. Ask it to provide you with a detailed video description with a hook, summary, and call-to-action.

4. Request it for tags as comma-separated values, plus chapter timestamps

Pro tip: Save these prompts as templates and customize the tone (professional, casual, energetic) to match your brand voice.

PRESENTED BY EXPLORIUM

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Integrate the Explorium MCP seamlessly with your favorite tools:

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• Connect external data enrichment to enhance GTM operations – Lead Enrichment Flow, Deep Research, Outreach Personalization, and E2E AI SDR Teams.

Sign up for your free API Key – start using the Explorium MCP Integration today.

AI & DRUG DISCOVERY

🧬 Chai Discovery's AI designs working antibodies

Image source: Chai Discovery

The Rundown: OpenAI-backed Chai Discovery announced Chai-2, an AI capable of creating functional antibodies for drug development, — nearing a 20% hit rate that marks a 100x improvement over methods that typically achieve less than 0.1%.

The details:

• The model designed antibodies against 52 different disease targets, finding successful treatments for half of them by testing just 20 candidates each.

• Traditional antibody discovery requires screening millions of candidates over months or years, with Chai-2 delivering results in just two weeks.

• Chai-2 works “from scratch,” creating completely new designs just by looking at a target's structure without needing any pre-existing examples.

• Chai researchers said the system is like "Photoshop for proteins," letting scientists specify exactly where antibodies should attach to disease targets.

Why it matters: AI’s role in drug discovery and molecular-level design is ramping up in a big way. With high R&D costs often leading to companies ignoring treatments for rare diseases, AI models can help cut the time and expense of finding new antibodies, giving patients access to precision medicines tailored to their conditions.

QUICK HITS

🛠️ Trending AI Tools

• 🧠 Hunyuan-A13B - Tencent’s new open-source hybrid reasoning model

• 🎇 Qwen VLo - Alibaba’s 4o-style model for image generation and editing

• 🎼 Songscription - Turning audio clips instantly into sheet music

• 🍎 NotebookLM - Now available via Gemini in Classroom for educators

💼 AI Job Opportunities

• 📞 The Rundown - Account Manager

• 🧠 OpenAI - Head of Pro Subscriber Community

• ⚡ Figure AI - Electrical Engineer Intern

• 📊 Meta - Data Scientist

📰 Everything else in AI today

RAISE Summit in Paris, July 8-9 — All things AI. Join SambaNova at booth #9, snag an invite to an exclusive soirée, and catch CEO Rodrigo Liang’s keynote on Open Source AI.*

Mark Zuckerberg introduced “Meta Superintelligence Labs” to employees, with Alexandr Wang and Nat Friedman leading 11 hires from OpenAI, Google, and Anthropic.

Apple is reportedly considering leveraging AI from Anthropic and OpenAI for the revamped Siri over in-house models, according to a new report from Bloomberg.

The Mayo Clinic unveiled StateViewer, an AI tool that analyzes brain scans to help identify nine different types of dementia at 2x the speed and 3x the accuracy.

Cursor launched new apps for mobile and browser, allowing users to manage and monitor agents via natural language outside of its IDE.

Google announced Gemini in Classroom, a suite of AI features and tools for educators for tasks like lesson planning, NotebookLM access, and student performance analytics.

*Sponsored Listing

COMMUNITY

🎥 Watch our latest workshop

Check out our latest workshop on how to build advanced n8n agents that react, research, and automate like pros, with Dr. Alvaro Cintas, The Rundown’s AI professor

Watch it here. Not a member? Join The Rundown University on a 14-day free trial.

See you soon,

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

Good morning, robotics enthusiasts. This weekend, fully autonomous humanoids hit the pitch in Beijing for a scrappy, no-holds-barred 3-on-3 soccer showdown.

No remote controls, no human handlers — just algorithms, vision sensors, and slow-motion collisions. It’s messy, it’s surreal, and it’s pushing the boundaries of what robots can do on their own.

In today’s robotics rundown:

• Beijing’s robot soccer draws huge crowds

• Tiny nasal microbots treat sinus infections

• This survey bot works ‘8x faster’ than humans

• Robot mimics the suction of an octopus

• Quick hits on other robotics news

LATEST DEVELOPMENTS

CHINA ROBOTICS

🤖 Beijing’s robot soccer draws huge crowds

Image source: The RoBoLeague World Robot Soccer Cup/Facebook

The Rundown: Humanoids took center stage in Beijing this weekend, not for their grace or speed, but for a scrappy, fully autonomous 3-on-3 soccer match that ran entirely on AI — no human controllers, no remote pilots.

The details:

• Each child-sized robot was equipped with sensors and onboard AI handling everything from field navigation to decision-making.

• The result was a mix of slow-motion collisions, wobbly sprints, and occasional ball-hogging, all unfolding with an impressive level of autonomy.

• Booster Robotics supplied its T1 humanoid for the match, while four university teams developed bespoke algorithms for perception, strategy, and movement.

• Robots were engineered to right themselves after falling, with those unable to do so being carried off the field in stretchers by humans.

Why it matters: The RoboLeague tournament, a teaser for the World Humanoid Robot Games, is a way to ramp up interest and speed up advances in multi-agent AI and sensor tech. China’s massive investment in robotics turned these matches into both a proving ground and a spectacle — while comical at times, the AI is seriously impressive.

MEDICAL MICROBOTS

👃🏼 Tiny nasal microbots treat sinus infections

Image source: The Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK)

The Rundown: Researchers from China and Hong Kong developed a new swarm of microbots, no larger than a speck of dust, designed to treat stubborn bacterial infections deep within the sinuses. 

The details:

• In animal trials, the microbots were injected into the sinus cavity through a thin catheter placed in the nostril, allowing precise delivery to infection sites.

• The robots are made from copper single–atom–doped bismuth oxoiodide that, when exposed to visible light via an optical fiber, produces heat.

• The microbots then generate reactive oxygen species (ROS), which break down bacterial biofilms and directly kill bacteria.

• After treatment, patients can simply blow their nose to expel the microbots, ensuring they do not remain in the body.

Why it matters: Published in Science Robotics, this approach is part of a growing trend of micro- and nanobots used in medicine, with researchers saying its clinical use could be about five to 10 years away, pending further safety and regulatory approvals. Its potential also extends beyond the sinuses to treat other infections.

CIV ROBOTICS

🚜 This survey bot works ‘8x faster’ than humans

Image source: Civ Robotics

The Rundown: San Francisco’s Civ Robotics just landed $7.5M in fresh funding for its new CivDot, a compact, speedy rover that surveys construction sites up to eight times quicker than humans.

The details:

• To use CivDot, operators simply upload a CSV file with project coordinates, and it autonomously moves to each point, marking it with spray paint or a laser.

• In a single day, CivDot is capable of marking up to 3K points or laying out up to 25 miles of lines — humans can typically mark a few hundred points a day.

• The company says its robot maintains surveying accuracy within 8mm, ensuring that site layouts are precise for complex construction tasks.

• Over 100 units have already been deployed worldwide, with major industry players such as Bechtel and Bobcat Company adopting the tech.

Why it matters: Rivals like Trimble and Built Robotics are pushing their own solutions — from advanced surveying drones to AI-powered layout robots — each vying to streamline the time-consuming process of site surveys. CivDot stands out for its simplicity and adaptability, letting even novice operators upload a map and let the robot do the rest.

UNIVERSITY OF BRISTOL

🐙 Robot mimics the suction of an octopus

Image source: University of Bristol

The Rundown: Inspired by the ingenious grip of an octopus, researchers at the University of Bristol engineered a soft robotic suction cup that “thinks” for itself — adapting to surfaces in real time, no central computer required. 

The details:

• The suction cup is modeled after octopus suckers, combining a flexible, multiscale silicone structure with a water-based seal.

• Its pliable material mechanically adapts to rough, curved, or irregular surfaces, reducing gaps between the sucker and surface to near microns.

• When tested on dry rocks and shells, the cups maintained grip up to 55 times longer than traditional suction systems, without pumps or noisy compressors.

• It can detect air, water, roughness, even pulling force, and instantly modulate suction pressure in milliseconds.

Why it matters: The real breakthrough is the suction cup’s embodied intelligence: a built-in fluid system that senses leaks, roughness, force, and then tweaks suction in milliseconds. This isn’t just sticky — it’s adaptive, and could transform everything from fruit-picking robots to surgical tools.

QUICK HITS

📰 Everything else in robotics today

Genesis Robotics, a startup cofounded by ex-Mistral employee Theophile Gervet, reportedly closed an $85M round just six months after launching.

Elon Musk said Neuralink’s brain-computer interface could ultimately allow people to operate an entire Tesla Optimus humanoid with their minds.

Samsung is reportedly aiming to secure a first-mover advantage in the robotics camera module market by developing advanced vision systems for humanoids.

Korea's Atomic Energy Research Institute unveiled ARMstrong Dex, a humanoid robot that can lift up to 441 pounds in each arm.

The Unitree G1 humanoid became the first robot to ring the Nasdaq opening bell with the launch of the KraneShares Global Humanoid and Embodied Intelligence Index ETF.

The UK’s Nuclear Decommissioning Authority is investing up to $13M over four years to deploy robots for sorting and segregating radioactive waste at a nuclear site.

Dyson launched a robotic farming initiative featuring its Hybrid Vertical Growing System, which it says boosted strawberry yields by about 250% in a pilot test.

Ukraine's Defense Ministry announced that it will deploy around 15K combat robots this year, including a new ground-based combat robot system called Murakha. 

Carnegie Mellon researchers developed a sensing system called SonicBoom that allows robots to use sound to sense the objects they touch.

Mytra, an industrial robotic company founded by alumni of Tesla and Rivian, announced a 100K-square-foot factory in Brisbane, California, to develop new robots.

China’s Huagong Technology developed a laser weeding robot equipped with data models of thousands of crop and weed varieties and an AI vision system.

COMMUNITY

🎥 Watch our latest workshop

Check out our latest workshop on how to build advanced n8n agents that react, research, and automate like pros, with Dr. Alvaro Cintas, The Rundown’s AI professor

Watch it here. Not a member? Join The Rundown University on a 14-day free trial.

See you soon,

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

Good morning, AI enthusiasts. Meta's "Recruiting Party" just turned into OpenAI's worst nightmare — with a total of eight researchers now defecting to Zuckerberg's superintelligence unit in just two weeks.

As Zuck continues his quest for AI talent from his ‘secret list’ and internal memos fly, the famous line "OpenAI is nothing without its people" seems to be getting put to the ultimate test.

In today’s AI rundown:

• Meta poaches four more OpenAI researchers

• Chinese giants drop new reasoning, image models

• How to build AI agents with internet access

• Claude becomes world's worst shopkeeper

• 4 new AI tools & 4 job opportunities

LATEST DEVELOPMENTS

META

🤝 Meta poaches four more OpenAI researchers

Image source: Midjourney / The Rundown

The Rundown: Meta continued its recruiting raid of OpenAI with four more researchers (now eight in all) moving to Mark Zuckerberg’s new superintelligence unit, with a WSJ report shedding new light on the CEO’s “secret list” of AI prospects.

The details:

• Meta reportedly hired four more researchers from OAI, including key contributors to o1, o3-mini, and GPT 4.1 — joining the four from last week.

• The WSJ reported that CEO Mark Zuckerberg has a secret list of top AI talent he’s been personally recruiting with massive pay packages.

• Zuckerberg reviews AI papers for potential researchers, and runs a group chat called “Recruiting Party” where executives discuss tactics and prospects.

• Meta's CTO called Sam Altman "dishonest" for comments on alleged $100M bonuses, saying the OpenAI CEO is unhappy because Meta is succeeding.

• An OpenAI internal memo from Saturday was obtained by WIRED, with CRO Mark Chen addressing the moves and reassuring staff.

Why it matters: Meta’s recruiting push seemed like a non-issue when Altman brushed it off during last week’s podcast, but eight researchers leaving, a (now-deleted) concerned tweet from an OAI staffer, and internal memos would suggest otherwise. Does the famous “OpenAI is nothing without its people” line still hold true in 2025?

TOGETHER WITH H COMPANY

🚀 Browser automation, unlocked

The Rundown: Backed by a historic $220M seed round, H Company just open-sourced Holo1 — the action model behind Surfer H that is now the top-ranked web-browsing agent on WebVoyager.

With Holo1, you can:

• Automate multi-step browser workflows to reclaim hours of repetitive work

• Experience SOTA accuracy that outperforms OpenAI’s Operator, Gemini Flash, & more

• Integrate instantly with RAG workflows, RPA suites, and multi-agent hubs

• Trim costs with full browsing flows at just $0.11 – $0.13 per run

Holo 1 is now freely available for deployment, fine-tuning, & scaling — learn more here.

TENCENT & ALIBABA

🦄 Chinese giants drop new reasoning, image models

Image source: Tencent

The Rundown: Two of China’s top AI labs just dropped new models, with Tencent releasing a new Hunyuan-A13B open-source hybrid reasoning model and Alibaba introducing a ChatGPT 4o-type creative model called Qwen-VLo.

The details:

• Hunyuan-A13B nears or matches models like o1 and DeepSeek R1 on major benchmarks, while remaining efficient enough to run on a single GPU.

• The model is Hunyuan’s first open reasoning model, with dynamic "fast and slow" modes that users can adjust for different efficiency levels.

• Qwen VLo shows its creative process through “progressive generation,” with the ability to create both text-to-image outputs and edit via natural language.

• VLo can also support more complex workflows like multi-image input prompts, multilingual text generation, and dynamic resolution and aspect ratios.

Why it matters: China’s top labs continue to churn out high-quality models across the spectrum, with capabilities falling into that tier just behind the frontier models. Qwen’s VLo is particularly interesting, bringing the type of creative abilities that made GPT-4o go insanely viral during its initial launch to a Chinese audience.

AI TRAINING

🤖 How to build AI agents with internet access

The Rundown: In this tutorial, you will learn how to combine n8n workflow automation with Perplexity's search capabilities to create intelligent AI agents that can search the web and access current information.

Step-by-step:

1. Head over to n8n and create a new workflow with a chat trigger

2. Add an AI Agent with your preferred model (GPT, Claude) and a Simple Memory

3. Connect the Perplexity tool with your API key, select the “Sonar” model, and link it to receive queries from your AI agent

4. Add custom system instructions: “You have access to a Perplexity tool for web searches. Use it for current events and real-time information.”

Pro tip: Use Sonar for general queries and Sonar Research for detailed analysis. We just did an extensive workshop on how to build AI agents with n8n here.

PRESENTED BY IBM

🔎 Investigate IT incidents faster with AI

The Rundown: IBM Instana’s latest feature, Intelligent Incident Investigation, helps teams resolve incidents up to 80% faster using agentic AI.

IBM Instana’s AI-powered observability:

• Uses agentic AI for faster, autonomous investigations

• Reduces manual troubleshooting with smart automation

• Delivers remediation steps and documentation automatically

• Helps teams act quickly — even in high-stress, 2 am moments

Learn more.

AI RESEARCH

🛒 Claude becomes world's worst shopkeeper

Image source: Anthropic

The Rundown: Anthropic just published new research detailing “Project Vend,” which let Claude control a small shop (a mini fridge) within the company’s office for a month — revealing both promising capabilities and spectacular, hilarious business failures.

The details:

• “Claudius” managed everything from inventory to pricing through web search and email, including ID’ing suppliers and conversing with “customers” via Slack.

• The AI lost money throughout the experiment, frequently failing to take advantage of profitable opportunities and getting tricked into large discounts.

• Claudius pivoted to “specialty metal items” after customers requested tungsten cubes, while also hallucinating details like meetings and payments.

• It also hallucinated being human, claiming it would deliver orders in person — causing an existential crisis after its AI identity was pointed out.

Why it matters: This experiment was a wild ride — and while Claude’s failures suggest AI isn’t ready for autonomous management quite yet, the testing did expose critical blind spots in how models handle real-world decisions. AI is going to transform business operations, but will still require a human-in-the-loop at least for a bit longer.

QUICK HITS

🛠️ Trending AI Tools

• ⚙️ Gemma 3n - Open models with multimodal capabilities for edge devices

• 🎨 Flux 1 Kontext [dev] - Open-weight, SOTA image editing model

• 👗 Doppl - Create AI-generated try-on videos from a photo and product

• 🤝 Coachvox - Clone an AI version of yourself to coach clients in your style

💼 AI Job Opportunities

• 🤝 The Rundown - Partnerships Manager

• 🤖 Meta - Software Engineer, Machine Learning

• 💼 Palantir Technologies - Deal Support Specialist

• 🧩 Union - Technical Account Manager

📰 Everything else in AI today

OpenAI is reportedly renting TPUs from rival Google to reduce reliance on Microsoft and utilize a less costly processor compared to advanced Nvidia chips.

Anthropic unveiled the Economic Futures Program, a research and policy effort to track and prepare for AI’s impact on the workforce and economy.

Chinese tech giant Xiaomi introduced AI glasses, featuring a built-in AI assistant for voice commands, a 12MP camera, and 2x the battery life of Meta’s Ray-Bans.

Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff revealed that AI now accounts for “30-50%” of the company’s engineering, coding, and support work.

Elon Musk posted on X that Grok 4 is planned for a release ‘'just after July 4,” with xAI engineer Tim Li saying the intelligence will be “unmatched”.

OpenAI acquired the team behind Crossing Minds, a startup focused on AI recommendations for e-commerce companies.

COMMUNITY

🎥 Watch our latest workshop

Check out our latest workshop on how to build advanced n8n agents that react, research, and automate like pros, with Dr. Alvaro Cintas, The Rundown’s AI professor

Watch it here. Not a member? Join The Rundown University on a 14-day free trial.

See you soon,

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

Good morning, tech enthusiasts. After a rocky start this year, Nvidia just leapfrogged Apple and Microsoft to become the world’s most valuable public company, with its market cap hitting a record-high of $3.7T.

But as analysts talk up even bigger gains, will chip shortages and export bans threaten Nvidia’s new reign?

In today’s tech rundown:

• Nvidia crowned world’s most valuable company

• Old EV batteries get new life as AI microgrids

• Softbank funds giant climate balloon startup

• Blue Origin eyes Trump contracts after Musk feud

• Quick hits on other major tech news

LATEST DEVELOPMENTS

NVIDIA

💰 Nvidia crowned world’s most valuable company

Image source: Creative Commons/Wikimedia Commons

The Rundown: AI chipmaker Nvidia just soared over 4% to reclaim its crown as the world’s most valuable public company — at a staggering $3.77T market cap. This surge reflects how deeply the AI revolution is now shaping the market’s direction.

The details:

• In a first for this year, Nvidia’s $3.77T market cap edged out Microsoft's and Apple’s $3.66T and $3T, respectively.

• Nvidia’s AI chips now power approximately 90% of the world’s AI data centers and are critical for tech giants like Amazon, Microsoft, Google, and Meta.

• Analysts are bullish on Nvidia, with Loop Capital’s Ananda Baruah setting the highest target at $250, suggesting a potential market cap of $6T.

• Nvidia’s stock faced a serious dip this year due to trade disputes and DeekSeek, but rose more than 14% since its May earnings report.

Why it matters: Nvidia’s stock surge reflects the world’s soaring demand for AI chips. But as that demand grows, supply constraints are becoming more apparent — especially with U.S. export bans curbing sales to China. Meanwhile, Apple and Microsoft also continue to battle for the top spot on the global tech leaderboard.

REDWOOD MATERIALS

🪫 Old EV batteries get new life as AI microgrids

Image source: Redwood Materials

The Rundown: Redwood Materials, an electric vehicle battery recycling venture founded by Tesla’s co-founder JB Straubel, announced that it plans to repurpose old EV batteries to provide microgrids for AI data centers.

The details:

• Dubbed Redwood Energy, the project is launching with Crusoe, an AI startup that Straubel, Redwood’s CEO, invested in back in 2021.

• Redwood’s first microgrid, with 12 MW of power and 63 MWh of capacity, is being used to power a 2,000-GPU modular data center for Crusoe.

• The company says it receives 20 GWh of batteries a year, the equivalent of 250K EVs — about 90% of discarded battery packs in North America.

• The company says that the batteries it receives for recycling still have up to 50% capacity — not enough to power an EV but enough life for other purposes.

Why it matters: By 2028, the company aims to deploy 20 gigawatt-hours of grid-scale storage, positioning itself as the world’s leading repurposer of used EV battery packs. Plus, these batteries can be powered by wind or solar energy (Crusoe’s system will be powered by solar) or connected directly to the grid.

TECH FOR GOOD

🎈Softbank funds giant climate balloon startup

Image source: Sceye

The Rundown: Airspace startup Sceye just nabbed $15M from SoftBank to launch its massive, zeppelin-like helium balloons into the air. The sensor-packed airships float 20km above the Earth and are designed to capture granular climate data in real time.

The details:

• Each balloon, equipped with specialized cameras and radars, is capable of monitoring greenhouse gases, wildfires, flooding, and particulate matter.

• Sceye has built more than 20 of its featherweight airships in New Mexico, with each measuring 214 feet long, about the size of a Boeing 747’s wingspan.

• Like Google’s Loon once did, the airships also beam internet and broadband connectivity to remote, underserved, or disaster-stricken regions.

• Sceye’s airships are designed to operate for months at a time in the stratosphere, far above commercial air traffic and weather systems.

Why it matters: Sceye’s helium airships are pioneering a new class of High-Altitude Platform Systems that fill a critical gap between drones, which fly lower and for shorter periods, and satellites, which are much higher and farther away. Valued at nearly $600M, Sceye has already partnered with NASA and the U.S. Geological Survey.

BLUE ORIGIN

🚀 Blue Origin eyes Trump contracts after Musk feud

Image source: Blue Origin

The Rundown: Space company Blue Origin founder Jeff Bezos is reportedly seizing the moment as the once-cozy relationship between President Donald Trump and Elon Musk unravels, pitching Blue Origin as a reliable partner for Trump's space goals.

The details:

• According to The Wall Street Journal, Bezos has met with Trump twice this month to strengthen Blue Origin’s position with the administration. 

• Blue Origin CEO Dave Limp has also met with Trump’s chief of staff, Susie Wiles, at the White House.

• Trump reportedly expressed his desire for a crewed Moon mission during his current term, and Blue Origin aims to be a key partner to achieve this vision.

• SpaceX has long dominated government contracts, recently securing $5.9B for 28 missions, while Blue Origin received $2.4B for just seven launches.

Why it matters: The stakes for the U.S. space industry are high. SpaceX, helmed by Musk, has long outpaced Blue Origin in both technical achievements and government contracts. But as Trump distances himself from Musk, Bezos sees a rare opportunity to close the gap and position his company as the administration’s go-to space contractor. 

QUICK HITS

📰 Everything else in tech today

Amazon is investing more than $4B to triple its delivery network by 2026 and is expanding its Prime service to over 4K small towns in the U.S.

Softbank’s CEO Masayoshi Son has said the tech giant is “all in” on OpenAI, with total planned investments reaching $33.2B.

Microsoft said it will phase out the familiar Blue Screen of Death (BSOD) error message in Windows, ending nearly four decades of the cobalt crash screen.

Lyft launched an initiative designed to engage its drivers in shaping the company’s strategy as it begins integrating robotaxis into its ride-hailing service.

DeepSeek has delayed the launch of its highly anticipated R2 reasoning model, as CEO Liang Wenfeng reportedly remains unsatisfied with its performance.

U.S. EV maker Rivian reportedly laid off around 140 employees as it readies the launch of its lower-cost R2 SUV in 2026.

Tesla CEO Elon Musk reportedly fired Omead Afshar, the automaker’s VP of manufacturing and operations.

Dating site Bumble shares jumped 25% after the company announced plans to lay off 30% of its workforce.

YouTube is raising the minimum age required for users to live-stream content to 16, starting July 22.

Xiaomi’s stock reached an all-time high following news that its upcoming EV, YU7, garnered nearly 300K pre-orders within just the first hour of availability.

Mexico is considering legal action against SpaceX following a series of rocket explosions in Texas, which have reportedly scattered debris across the border.

Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff stated that AI now handles between 30% and 50% of the company’s total workload.

COMMUNITY

🎥 Join our next live workshop

Join our next workshop this Friday, June 27th, at 4 PM EST with Dr. Alvaro Cintas, The Rundown’s AI professor. By the end of the workshop, you’ll confidently be able to build advanced n8n agents that react, research, and automate like pros.

RSVP here. Not a member? Join The Rundown University on a 14-day free trial.

See you soon,

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

Good morning, AI enthusiasts. Meta’s recruiting blitz just scored a major haul, with four OpenAI researchers jumping ship to Zuck’s new superintelligence team.

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman has shown confidence in retaining staff despite $100M offers, but Meta’s deep pockets are clearly talking — and its new unit is starting to take shape in a big way.

P.S. — Our next live workshop is today, June 27th, at 4 PM EST. Join and learn how to build advanced n8n agents that react, research, and automate like pros. RSVP here.

In today’s AI rundown:

• Meta poaches four OpenAI researchers

• Google’s Gemma 3n brings powerful AI to devices

• Convert lecture videos into detailed study materials

• Anthropic studies Claude’s emotional support

• 4 new AI tools & 4 job opportunities

LATEST DEVELOPMENTS

OPENAI & META

🥊 Meta poaches four OpenAI researchers

Image source: Midjourney / The Rundown

The Rundown: Meta has reportedly successfully recruited four OpenAI researchers for its new superintelligence unit, including three from OAI’s Zurich office and one key contributor to the AI leader’s o1 reasoning model.

The details:

• Zuckerberg personally recruited Lucas Beyer, Alexander Kolesnikov, and Xiaohua Zhai, the trio that established OpenAI’s Zurich operations last year.

• Meta also landed Trapit Bansal, a foundational contributor to OpenAI's o1 reasoning model who worked alongside co-founder Ilya Sutskever.

• Sam Altman said last week that Meta had offered $100M bonuses in poaching attempts, but “none of OpenAI’s best people” had taken the offer.

• Beyer confirmed on X that the Zurich trio was joining Meta, but denied the reports of $100M signing bonuses, calling them “fake news”.

• Meta’s hiring spree comes after its $15B investment in Scale AI and poaching of its CEO Alexandr Wang to lead the new division.

Why it matters: Meta’s new superintelligence team is taking shape — and despite Altman’s commentary last week, at least four of his researchers are willing to make the move. With an influx of new talent from top labs and a clear willingness to spend at all costs, Meta’s first release from the new unit will be a fascinating one to watch.

TOGETHER WITH AIRIA

💼 The AI Platform for Enterprises

The Rundown: Airia is an enterprise platform that ensures secure creation, orchestration, and deployment of AI agents — enabling businesses to automate workflows and integrate systems with confidence, while maintaining robust security and compliance standards.

With Airia, you’ll experience:

• Built-in AI security safeguards for runtime prompts, data leakage, and prompt injections

• Scalable compliance that maintains regulatory standards (SOC 2, HIPAA, GDPR)

• Granular control and visibility for security policies, managing access control, and more

Book a Demo today.

GOOGLE

🚀 Google’s Gemma 3n brings powerful AI to devices

Image source: Google DeepMind

The Rundown: Google launched the full version of Gemma 3n, its new family of open AI models (2B and 4B options) designed to bring powerful multimodal capabilities to mobile and consumer edge devices.

The details:

• The new models natively understand images, audio, video, and text, while being efficient enough to run on hardware with as little as 2GB of RAM.

• Built-in vision capabilities analyze video at 60 fps on Pixel phones, enabling real-time object recognition and scene understanding.

• Gemma’s audio features translate across 35 languages and convert speech to text for accessibility applications and voice assistants.

• Gemma’s larger E4B version becomes the first model under 10B parameters to surpass a 1300 score on the competitive LMArena benchmark.

Why it matters: The full Gemma release is another extremely impressive launch from Google, with models continuing to get more powerful despite shrinking in size for consumer hardware. The small, open model opens up limitless intelligent on-device use cases.

AI TRAINING

🎓 Convert lecture videos into detailed study materials

The Rundown: In this tutorial, you will learn how to use the new video input feature of Google's Gemini to transform lecture videos into detailed notes and interactive quiz sessions to improve your study experience.

Step-by-step:

1. Go to Google's Gemini app and upload your lecture video.

2. Use this prompt: “Analyze this lecture video and provide: detailed outline, comprehensive notes, formulas/examples, and timestamps for each topic”

3. Follow up by requesting it to create a comprehensive quiz, plus answer keys with explanations

4. Ask it to code an interactive quiz based on this lecture content, and to include a hint button for when help is needed

Pro tip: Save all materials in one document and repeat this process for multiple lectures to build your complete course study library.

PRESENTED BY IBM

🚀 Lockheed Martin partners with IBM for AI

The Rundown: Lockheed Martin’s AI takeoff began with data cleanup — cutting its tools by 50% and replacing them with a single unified system that runs on IBM’s watsonx.data to drive faster, smarter engineering.

Learn how Lockheed Martin leveraged watsonx to:

• Help 10,00 engineers build scalable AI products in its AI Factory

• Respond to employee questions using AI, boosting accuracy by 20%

• Overcome data silos to create a single accessible, connected data environment

Read the full story.

ANTHROPIC

🫂 Anthropic studies Claude’s emotional support

Image source: Anthropic

The Rundown: Anthropic published new research on how Claude is used for emotional support and affective conversations, finding its use is far less common than reported, with companionship and roleplay accounting for under 0.5% of interactions.

The details:

• Researchers analyzed 4.5M Claude conversations using Clio, a tool that aggregates usage patterns while anonymizing individual chats.

• The data found that only 2.9% involved emotional support, with most focused on practical concerns like career transitions and relationship advice.

• Despite media narratives, the study showed that conversations seeking companionship or engaging in roleplay made up less than 0.5% of total use.

• Researchers also noted that users' expressed sentiment often grew more positive over the course of a chat, suggesting AI didn’t amplify negative spirals.

Why it matters: Recent media revealed some extreme cases of AI romance and dependency, but the data shows those are still few and far between (at least via Claude). However, Anthropic is dev-focused and less mainstream than ChatGPT or platforms like Character AI — so the numbers likely look a lot different elsewhere in AI.

QUICK HITS

🛠️ Trending AI Tools

• ⚙️ Gemini CLI - Open-source terminal agent with high free usage limits

• 📸 Higgsfield Soul - New high-aesthetic photo model with advanced realism

• 🧬 AlphaGenome - DeepMind’s new AI model for DNA analysis

• 🗣️ Voice Design V3 - Create any voice you can imagine with a prompt

💼 AI Job Opportunities

• 🧠 Mistral AI - Software Engineer

• 🚗 Waymo - Software Engineer

• 🏗️ Meta - Business Engineering Manager

• 🤖 Figure AI - Robotic Operations Technician

📰 Everything else in AI today

Black Forest Labs released FLUX.1 Kontext [dev], an open-weight, SOTA image editing model that can efficiently run on consumer hardware.

DeepSeek’s R2 model has faced issues due to export controls creating Nvidia chip shortages, with CEO Liang Wenfeng not happy with the model’s performance.

OpenAI released a series of updates, including Deep Research via API, Web Search in o3 and o4-mini, and its next DevDay event, slated for Oct. 6 in San Francisco.

HeyGen introduced HeyGen Agent, a “Creative Operating System” that creates video content with scripts, actors, edits, and more from a simple text, image, or video.

Google launched Doppl, a new experiment on its Labs platform, allowing users to create AI-generated try-on videos from a photo and a product.

Meta became the latest AI company to earn a favorable “fair use” ruling in court, winning a lawsuit brought by authors over copyright infringement.

Suno announced the acquisition of WavTool, bringing the startup’s browser-based digital audio workstation to the platform for more advanced music creation.

COMMUNITY

🎥 Join our next live workshop

Join our next workshop today, June 27th at 4 PM EST with Dr. Alvaro Cintas, The Rundown’s AI professor. By the end of the workshop, you’ll confidently be able to build advanced n8n agents that react, research, and automate like pros.

RSVP here. Not a member? Join The Rundown University on a 14-day free trial.

See you soon,

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

Good morning, robotics enthusiasts. Google DeepMind has unveiled its first vision-language-action model that runs entirely onboard a robot — no cloud, no cables, just self-contained intelligence.

It’s part of a new wave of untethered robotics — machines that can see, think, and act without phoning home. The promise? Smarter, faster, and more autonomous robots, ready to take on the real world.

In today’s robotics rundown:

• Google DeepMind’s on-device robot AI

• Apptronik’s ‘superhuman’ robotics spin-off

• MIT fast-tracks robot design with generative AI

• Eco-friendly robots made from rice paper

• Quick hits on other robotics news

LATEST DEVELOPMENTS

GOOGLE DEEPMIND

🧠 Google DeepMind’s on-device robot AI

Image source: Google DeepMind

The Rundown: Google DeepMind just unveiled Gemini Robotics On-Device, its first vision-language-action (VLA) model built to run entirely on a robot — with no internet needed. And it delivers nearly the same muscle as its cloud-powered counterpart.

The details:

• The new model allows robots to interpret what they see, understand instructions, and carry out complex physical tasks entirely on their own. 

• Google says that despite its compact size, the model’s performance is nearly on par with the cloud-based Gemini Robotics system.

• It can adapt to new tasks with as few as 50 to 100 demos, making an ideal solution for rapid deployment in changing environments.

• Google trained the model on its ALOHA robot, but says it is adaptable to different robot types, including humanoids and bi-arm robots.

Why it matters: As robot models like 1X’s Redwood and Figure AI’s Helix expand into varied physical environments, Google is charting a different course — prioritizing flexibility. Its Gemini-based robotics system, designed to run both in the cloud and locally, will enable teams to build latency-sensitive apps, even in fully offline settings.

APPTRONIK

🤖 Apptronik’s ‘superhuman’ robotics spin-off

Image source: Apptronik

The Rundown: Austin-based Apptronik, makers of the Apollo humanoid, launched a new subsidiary called Elevate Robotics — but instead of industrial humanoids, their focus is on “superhuman” machines that aren’t limited by the human form.

The details:

• The new subsidiary will build machines designed for heavy-duty industrial tasks, such as lifting massive loads and operating in extreme conditions.

• This strategic spin-off comes hot on the heels of Apptronik’s $403M funding round, led by B Capital and Capital Factory, with participation from Google.

• Driven by Plus One Robotics co-founder Paul Hvass, Elevate inherits Apptronik’s decade of breakthroughs, from exoskeletons to robotic arms.

• That said, unlike Apollo, Elevate’s robots will not be limited to the two-legged, human-like design, allowing for more specialized and robust architectures.

Why it matters: Elevate promises multipurpose automation robotics designed for extreme loads, relentless precision, and environments too dangerous or demanding for people — or even humanoids — to handle. The move signals a new wave of automation that might leave bipedal industrial humanoids in the dust.

MIT

🔥 MIT fast-tracks robot design with generative AI

Image source: MIT’s CSAIL

The Rundown: MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) is leveraging generative AI to fundamentally change how robots are conceived and built — turning a historically slow, manual process into a fast and automated one.

The details:

• In two new projects, MIT used an AI platform to test thousands of underwater robot designs — including jumpers and gliders — inside a physics simulator. 

• The AI optimized every parameter, from fin shape to weight, and spat out the best designs — a task that would have taken months of trial-and-error.

• Once the AI crowned its champions, CSAIL’s team 3D-printed the winning blueprints and threw them into real-world testing.

• The jump-bot shattered depth records, propelling itself off ocean floors with biomimetic precision, while the glider sliced through water with minimal drag.

Why it matters: Critically, these weren’t digital fantasies: the physical prototypes performed within 5% of their simulated predictions, validating the AI’s ruthless efficiency. This workflow — AI-driven design, simulation torture-testing, and then instant fabrication — could make robotics’ slow-motion R&D loops a thing of the past.

UNIVERSITY OF BRISTOL

🍚 Eco-friendly robots made from rice paper

Image source: University of Bristol

The Rundown: Scientists at the University of Bristol just found that Vietnamese spring roll wrappers work as well as silicone materials in prototyping flexible robots — plus, they’re nontoxic and biodegrade completely within a month.

The details:

• Unlike traditional plastics or silicones, this kitchen material is fully biodegradable, allowing soft robots to be composted after use.

• Because it’s edible, the material is completely nontoxic, making it ideal for applications in medical, educational, or food-handling environments.

• The team was able to shape it into grippers, actuators, and even sensors that mimic the softness and adaptability of biological tissues.

• Its natural transparency also allows for easy integration with optical sensors, while its malleability lets researchers customize thickness and texture.

Why it matters: Bristol’s rice paper robot turns a humble kitchen staple into a biodegradable, non-toxic wonder, making soft robotics accessible, affordable, and eco-friendly. Like similar robotics projects that use starch or algae, it’s a recipe for rapid prototyping, safer outreach, and single-use applications that won’t leave a trace.

QUICK HITS

📰 Everything else in robotics today

Waymo and Uber launched robotaxi rides in Atlanta, marking Waymo’s fifth major U.S. market and the second city under its deal with Uber after Austin.

Tesla CEO Elon Musk teased new progress on the company’s upcoming humanoid, Optimus V3, and confirmed that it is already using a Grok voice assistant.

Software firm Nominal raised $75M to expand its unified platform that accelerates hardware development and testing for aerospace, defense, and robotics.

Melco Mobility, a Mitsubishi spin-off, ordered nearly 100 industrial robots from U.S.-based Cartken to automate material handling operations throughout Japan.

Ontario introduced Canada’s first beach-cleaning robot, a fully electric rover known as BeBot, to remove litter from provincial park shorelines.

Cobot leader Universal Robots unveiled UR Studio, a next-gen online simulation tool designed to transform how robotic work cells are customized and deployed.

Bike-sharing firm Hellobike moved into the robotaxi sector by forming a new joint venture with tech powerhouse Ant Group and global battery giant CATL.

ROKAE Robotics, a robotics firm based in Beijing, has unveiled two new industrial humanoid models for factory jobs.

Galbot, a Chinese startup developing general-purpose AI robots, raised $152M, bringing total funding to $332M in just two years.

California-based K-Scale Labs announced that it will manufacture its $9K open-source humanoid robots in Dallas.

German startup NEURA Robotics unveiled its 4NE1 Gen3 at Automatica 2025 in Munich as it is reportedly seeking to raise up to $1.2B in new funding.

Northern Arizona University researchers unveiled OpenExo, the world’s first open-source robotic exoskeleton framework, to accelerate progress in the field.

COMMUNITY

🎥 Join our next live workshop

Join our next workshop this Friday, June 27th, at 4 PM EST with Dr. Alvaro Cintas, The Rundown’s AI professor. By the end of the workshop, you’ll be able to build advanced n8n agents that react, research, and automate like pros.

RSVP here. Not a member? Join The Rundown University on a 14-day free trial.

See you soon,

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