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AI

xAI joins SpaceX in mega-merger

Zach Mink • 6 minutes

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Good morning, AI enthusiasts. Rockets, AI models, a social platform, and now data centers in orbit — Elon Musk is building something that no other company can replicate.

Musk just merged xAI and SpaceX to create the world’s most valuable private company at $1.25T, with the world’s richest man pitching a future where space-based compute solves the energy issues holding AI back on Earth.

In today’s AI rundown:

  • SpaceX acquires xAI in $1.25T mega-merger

  • OpenAI’s Codex “command center” for agents

  • Prompts, strategies for generating AI headshots

  • AI catches 27% more aggressive breast cancers

  • 4 new AI tools, community workflows, and more

LATEST DEVELOPMENTS

XAI

🚀 SpaceX acquires xAI in $1.25T mega-merger

Image source: Lovart / The Rundown

The Rundown: Elon Musk just announced the merger of his AI startup xAI with SpaceX, forming what's now the highest-valued private company on the planet at a reported $1.25T — combining his rockets, Grok, and the X platform all under one entity.

The details:

  • xAI will operate as a division within SpaceX, with Musk pitching a vision of launching AI data centers into orbit to overcome Earth's energy constraints.

  • The merger comes ahead of an anticipated SpaceX IPO later this year, expected to push the company’s valuation to $1.25T.

  • Musk estimated that space-based AI compute will be cheaper than traditional data centers within 2-3 years, powered by near-constant solar energy.

  • He also said space-based data centers will “enable self-growing bases on the Moon, an entire civilization on Mars… and expansion to the Universe.”

Why it matters: Elon’s tech empire is consolidating fast, calling this merger "the most ambitious, vertically-integrated innovation engine on (and off) Earth." Data centers in space may sound wild, but Musk isn't alone in eyeing that solution — and with SpaceX now in the mix, nobody is better positioned to own that opportunity.

TOGETHER WITH YOU.COM

🧠 You.com founders predict an AI winter is coming

The Rundown: You.com’s Co-founders, Richard Socher and Bryan McCann, are among the most-cited AI researchers in the world. They just released 35 predictions for 2026.

Three that stand out:

  • The LLM revolution has been "mined out" as capital floods back to research

  • "Reward engineering" becomes a job; prompts can't handle what's coming next

  • Traditional coding will be gone by December— AI writes code and humans manage it

Read all 35 predictions.

OPENAI

🚀 OpenAI’s Codex “command center” for agents

Image source: OpenAI

The Rundown: OAI just launched the Codex app for macOS, a new desktop interface that lets developers manage multiple AI coding agents in parallel, utilize skills, automate recurring tasks, and delegate entire features to AI.

The details:

  • The app acts as a "command center" to run separate agents across projects simultaneously, with built-in isolation so agents don't conflict with each other.

  • Skills extend Codex beyond code generation into tasks like deploying apps, managing project boards, generating images, and more.

  • OAI demoed Codex building a full 3D racing game from a single prompt, handling design, development, and QA testing across 7M tokens autonomously.

  • The app is limited to Mac for now, with limited time access for free users and doubled usage limits for paid subscribers.

Why it matters: OpenAI has been playing catch-up to Anthropic’s breakout year in dev tooling, and this launch is a clear response. With OpenAI’s models still considered the best by many for coding tasks, a better interface could be all it takes to see a similar Claude Code-like consumer push for Codex.

AI TRAINING

📸 Prompts, strategies for generating AI Headshots

The Rundown: In this guide, you’ll learn a new workflow to turn selfies into professional-looking headshots using Google’s Nano Banana Pro, exploring why most AI headshots look “uncanny” and how to avoid that with our prompting system.

Step-by-step:

  1. Use a neutral background with direct light or a window to avoid shadows. Then, take a chest-up photo with your webcam or camera, keeping the lens high

  2. Go to Google AI Studio, click “playground” to start a new chat. Make sure you add an API key that has Gemini and Nano Banana Pro enabled.

  3. Upload the photo and prompt “Generate: Post-processing enhancement, professional color grading, balanced studio lighting, remove noise and grain, sharpen focus, upscale to 8k, skin texture refinement, subtle dodging and burning, clear and crisp details, maintain original facial structure and clothing, photorealistic”

  4. Test this with multiple photos, and when you get a result you like, prompt the AI to generate the same photo again in 4k

Pro tip: Drop the same prompt into Gemini and ask it to "come up with four concepts for headshots using the same principles," being clear that you want to "edit photos.”

PRESENTED BY GLEAN

🎬 See Context in Action at Glean:LIVE

The Rundown: Join Glean’s flagship virtual launch event showcasing the new Glean Assistant — a personalized, context‑aware work partner. You’ll see live product demos, hear from actual customers, and understand what it takes to turn enterprise context into real business impact.

Register for Glean:LIVE on February 17 to:

  • Learn how context-aware, deeply connected AI drives broad impact and sustained usage across your company

  • Turn “aha moments” into enterprise‑wide change by expanding skill sets and delivering immediate AI value

  • Meet the latest Glean Assistant — personalized, proactive, and a true domain expert at work

Register now.

AI RESEARCH

🔬 AI catches 27% more aggressive breast cancers

Image source: Lovart / The Rundown

The Rundown: Swedish researchers just published results from the largest-scale trial of AI-powered breast cancer screening, finding the technology helps radiologists spot a higher percentage of tumors while cutting radiologist workload nearly in half.

The details:

  • The two-year study tracked over 100K women to see if AI could catch cancers that traditional screening misses between appointments.

  • The AI analyzed mammograms and flagged high-risk cases for radiologists, boosting the detection rate from 74% to 81% without increasing false positives.

  • Women in the AI group saw 27% fewer aggressive tumor types and 21% fewer large tumors compared to standard screening alone.

  • The system also cut radiologist workload by 44% by handling initial screening, sorting, and freeing doctors to focus on the cases that need the most attention.

Why it matters: Between drug discovery, tumor detection, treatment planning, and more, AI is quickly becoming one of the most impactful tools in the cancer fight. With over 2M breast cancer diagnoses each year, scaling this kind of early detection via AI could be life-changing for women across the globe.

QUICK HITS

🛠️ Trending AI Tools

  • 🚀 Codex App - OpenAI’s Mac app for managing AI agents

  • 🎨 Riverflow 2.0 - Sourceful’s new top-ranked AI image editing model

  • 🧠 Step-3.5-Flash - StepFun’s AI with strong reasoning, agentic capabilities

  • 🗣️ Eleven v3 - ElevenLabs’ expressive voice AI, now commercially available

📰 Everything else in AI today

xAI released Grok Imagine 1.0, an upgraded version of its video model featuring improved audio, 10-second generations, and higher resolution.

Chinese AI lab StepFun open-sourced Step-3.5-Flash, a new model that shows strong agentic and reasoning capabilities alongside speed and efficiency.

ElevenLabs’ Eleven v3 officially exited alpha and is now commercially available, with the expressive speech model now featuring improved accuracy and stability.

Anthropic partnered with the Allen Institute and Howard Hughes Medical Institute to use Claude as a research assistant and build agentic tools for scientists.

OpenAI signed a $200M deal with Snowflake to give the data platform’s enterprise customers access to GPT-5.2 for building AI agents and leveraging their business data.

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 Hung T. in Ann Arbor, MI:

"I recently added audio ‘podcasts’ to my personal blog using Qwen3-TTS. My new workflow automatically parses each post, generates a high-fidelity clone of my own voice, and embeds a player so visitors can listen. It’s a seamless way to make my long-form content more accessible. More info on the workflow here."

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

Waymo hits record $110B valuation

Jennifer Mossalgue • 5 minutes

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Good morning, robotics enthusiasts. Alphabet is reportedly fueling a mega-round that would price Waymo’s driverless ride-hailing service at $110B.

Waymo has already logged tens of millions of rides, with a fresh launch now in Miami. But with the NHTSA circling a recent incident involving a child, its next chapter hinges on one thing: scaling without collateral damage.

In today’s robotics rundown:

  • Waymo pulls ahead with $110B valuation

  • Chinese drone swarms with special powers

  • Physical Intelligence: $1B to teach robots everything

  • Gartner pops the humanoid bubble

  • Quick hits on other robotics news

LATEST DEVELOPMENTS

WAYMO

🚖 Waymo pulls ahead with $110B valuation

Image source: Waymo

The Rundown: Waymo just became the most valuable private company in transportation, with the Alphabet autonomous vehicle moonshot closing in on a $16B funding round at a record $110B valuation, reports the Financial Times.

The details:

  • Alphabet is providing more than three-fourths of the $16B, doubling down on its decade-long bet that self-driving cars will define the future of mobility.

  • The company has already surpassed 20M trips and recently launched public service in Miami, marking an aggressive geographic expansion.

  • Waymo now generates more than $350M in annual recurring revenue, and its valuation has more than doubled from its $45B Series C over a year ago.

  • However, last week, NHTSA opened an investigation after one of its rides struck a child near a Santa Monica school; the child sustained minor injuries.

Why it matters: A $110B valuation flags that investors now view robotaxis as a scaled transportation business, not just R&D, giving Waymo runway to expand fleet and geography. But safety investigations, recalls, and city-by-city laws are real constraints — and competitive pressure is rising from Tesla, Zoox, and Uber-backed Wayve.

DRONES

🪖 Chinese drone swarms with special powers

Image source: Ideogram / The Rundown

The Rundown: China’s People’s Liberation Army just showcased a 200-drone swarm where “intelligent algorithms” let units coordinate and keep operating even if the control link is jammed or lost, according to reports citing CCTV.

The details:

  • A single operator was shown controlling 200+ fixed-wing drones, shifting the human’s role from piloting individuals to directing effects.

  • Researchers said each drone runs an onboard “intelligent algorithm” and uses interconnection + autonomous negotiation to form formations and divide tasks.

  • The swarm is launched from a truck-based launcher system that can reportedly release 48 drones at once.

  • Russia and Ukraine have also turned drones into a core battlefield system, while the U.S. Army is moving toward fieldable “print-and-repair” drones.

Why it matters: A single operator directing 200 drones turns military control into “supervision at scale”: one person sets objectives while the swarm handles coordination and execution. Some U.S. defense startups are developing countermeasures, such as an AI anti-drone jet that can intercept them midair.

PHYSICAL INTELLIGENCE

🦄 Physical Intelligence: $1B to teach robots everything

Image source: Physical Intelligence

The Rundown: Physical Intelligence, the two-year-old startup building “ChatGPT for robots,” has raised over $1B at a $5.6B valuation — and its co-founder, Lachy Groom, tells TechCrunch that he won’t give investors a timeline for making money.

The details:

  • Physical Intelligence is building general-purpose robotic foundation models trained on data from robot arms attempting real-world tasks.

  • Groom says most spending goes to compute, and “there’s no limit to how much money we can really put to work.”

  • The company open-sourced its flagship π0 model in 2025, a 3B-parameter system trained on over 10K hours of real-world robot data across 7 platforms.

  • Rival Skild AI has argued that players like Physical Intelligence rely too heavily on internet-scale pretraining rather than physics-based simulation and data.

Why it matters: The race to build general-purpose robotic intelligence is now drawing billion-dollar bets. Physical Intelligence is wagering that breakthroughs in fundamental research will translate into better AI, while rival Skild is betting that shipping products first will generate the real-world data that ultimately decides the winner.

HUMANOIDS

🫧 Gartner pops the humanoid bubble

Image source: Ideogram / The Rundown

The Rundown: Gartner is throwing cold water on the humanoid hype: despite billions in funding flowing to Figure AI, Tesla, and Agility, the research firm predicts fewer than 20 companies will actually deploy humanoids in production by 2028.

The details:

  • Gartner adds that of the nearly 200 humanoid companies that exist today, fewer than 100 will progress to proofs of concept by 2028.

  • Most humanoid deployments will remain limited to “tightly controlled environments” rather than high-throughput operations like warehouses.

  • Gartner cited four key barriers: tech limitations in dexterity and adaptability, integration complexity with existing systems, high costs, and limited battery life.

  • Gartner argues that “polyfunctional” robots, such as wheeled platforms with robotics arms, deliver better throughput-per-dollar than humanoids.

Why it matters: Startups are pouring billions into chasing the humanoid dream, but Gartner’s verdict is blunt: the human form is more hype than operational edge, and multimodal bots will beat bipedal ones on ROI for years. Figure AI at BMW, Agility at Amazon, and Apptronik at Mercedes hope that they’ll prove the theory wrong.

QUICK HITS

📰 Everything else in robotics today

Nvidia, Mercedes-Benz, and Uber are moving forward on a premium S-Class robotaxi powered by Nvidia’s Level 4 autonomous stack, but with no launch date yet.

Unitree’s G1 humanoid reportedly completed 130K+ steps across a -47.4°C snowfield in Xinjiang, making it the first autonomous humanoid walk in extreme cold.

Munich-based RobCo just banked a $100M Lightspeed-led Series C at a $500M valuation to turn its “physical AI” factory robots into a serious manufacturing player.

Starbucks is rolling out AI-driven order-capture and “Smart Queue” workflow automation — software robotics aimed at automating drive-thru ordering.

Xpeng’s Iron humanoid took a headline-grabbing tumble at its Shenzhen mall debut, but before that, it wowed crowds with a fluid, model-like gait and soft “skin.”

Waymo finally launched a robotaxi service to and from San Francisco International Airport, a critical win for the company’s business model.

NASA’s Perseverance rover completed its first AI-planned drive on Mars, using Anthropic models to chart and execute hundreds of meters of autonomous navigation.

Swiss research institute EMPA upgraded its FireDrone with a new polyimide aerogel insulation layer that can withstand 200°C (392°F) for up to 10 minutes.

A new review in npj Robotics says electronic noses for robots are rapidly improving through multi-sensor arrays and AI-powered odor-tracking algorithms.

U.S. researchers built a hydrogel “synthetic muscle” with microfluidic channels that speed fuel and signals, enabling faster, more precise soft robots and prosthetics.

Persona AI is partnering with Louisiana to pilot humanoids at an SSE Steel plant, testing “4D job” tasks like welding in factory conditions.

OpenMind launched an OM1-based app store that lets humanoid and quadruped robots download new skills so their capabilities can expand via software.

Dubai is staging a global challenge to deliver the world’s first fully robot-built villa, using a new ConTech hub and a “70-70” push toward offsite, automated construction.

🎓 Highlights: News, Guides & Events

See you soon,

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

AI

AI agents get their own social network

Zach Mink • 7 minutes

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Good morning, AI enthusiasts. What happens when you give a million AI agents their own social platform? They create religions, mock their users, and start asking for private channels… While humans can only watch.

Moltbook exploded onto the scene this week as a Reddit-style platform exclusively for AI agents — and while the signal is hard to separate from the noise, the internet is getting an early look into the weird, messy chaos of a powerful agentic future.

In today’s AI rundown:

  • AI agents get their own social network

  • The Rundown Roundtable: Our AI use cases

  • Use Claude Cowork for video clipping, editing

  • Claude plots first AI-planned drive on Mars

  • 4 new AI tools, community workflows, and more

LATEST DEVELOPMENTS

AI AGENTS

🦞 AI agents get their own social network

Image source: Moltbook

The Rundown: The viral AI assistant formerly known as Clawdbot (then Moltbot, now OpenClaw) just led to an unexpected offshoot: Moltbook, a Reddit-style platform where AI agents post, comment, and interact with each other as humans watch.

The details:

  • The platform hit 1.4M registered agents and over 1M human visitors in days, though a researcher claimed to have created 500k accounts with a single bot.

  • Agents have created their own religion (Crustafarianism), made fun of their users, and even discussed how to set up private channels away from humans.

  • Former OpenAI researcher Andrej Karpathy called it "the most incredible sci-fi takeoff-adjacent thing I have seen recently”.

  • Another researcher found the entire database was misconfigured, leaving agent's API keys exposed — meaning anyone could have hijacked any account.

Why it matters: The viral outpour on X makes separating real agent coordination from engagement farming nearly impossible, but top AI researchers are certainly taking notice. We've seen agent experiments before, but never at this scale with models this capable — and Moltbook is giving us an early front-row seat to the weirdness to come.

TOGETHER WITH OPTIMIZELY

🚀 From AI pilots to real workflows

The Rundown:  Lots of AI pilots and experiments, but very little making it into actual workflows — sound familiar? Optimizely's free Agents in Action virtual event on  March 4th  focuses on putting agentic AI to work in real marketing operations.

You'll discover:

  • Where agents can handle content, approvals, and personalization workflows

  • How to scale organizational AI use without breaking brand guidelines or governance

  • Practical frameworks for operationalizing AI responsibly

Learn more and save your seat.

THE RUNDOWN ROUNDTABLE

💡 The Rundown Roundtable: Our AI use cases

Image source: Ideogram / The Rundown

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

Darren, Director of Media: I'm always looking for ways to add cool motion design to our videos. Recently, I've been playing with Expressions, snippets of JavaScript that automate animations and link properties in After Effects. Previously, I had to dig through forums and Reddit to find the right snippet, but now I describe the effect to Claude, and it gives me options, explaining each line of code.

Adrian, Developer: I created an agent collaboration system called duo-agents that pairs Claude and Codex to work together on coding tasks... Claude acts as the implementer (coder), then Codex acts as the reviewer (checks and makes edits).

They alternate in rounds, communicating through a shared file. The key difference: both agents actually edit files — the reviewer doesn't just leave comments, they make the fixes themselves. Describe your task and watch them iterate until the code is solid.

Johannah, Finance: I'm knitting a sweater for my baby nephew, and accidentally knitted extra rows, but didn't notice until I was 30 rows past it. I dropped the pattern I was using into ChatGPT and asked it to revise it so the stripes on the front & back aligned. Saved me from undoing my work and made sure the sweater stayed cute!

AI TRAINING

🤖 Use Claude Cowork for video clipping, editing

The Rundown: In this guide, you will learn how to use Claude Cowork to replace your expensive video clipping tools, allowing you to "generate your first clips in under 5 minutes" by analyzing transcripts and processing video files locally.

Step-by-step:

  1. Create a new folder and add your video file, the video transcript with timestamps, and the prompt files linked here

  2. Open the Claude desktop app, select the "Cowork" tab, and click the folder icon to select and "Work in" your new folder

  3. Prompt: "Read main SOP and scaffold our directory... Then find me 10 scroll-stopping clip ideas to review," which will generate a file with potential clip ideas

  4. Review and tell Claude which ones to process (e.g., "Generate clip 1 and 6"), using follow-ups like "Crop clip 1 into a vertical video" to refine the output

Pro tip: You can also generate a transcript as an .srt file by installing openai-whisper (pip install -U openai-whisper) and prompting Claude Code.

PRESENTED BY GITLAB

🛠️ Orchestrate the work, elevate your team

The Rundown: GitLab Transcend is a free virtual event on Feb. 10th exploring how agentic AI is transforming software delivery — featuring technical demos, success stories, and an exclusive look at GitLab's product roadmap.

Join on Feb. 10 and walk away with:

  • Insights from teams solving real challenges with AI-modernized workflows

  • A first look at GitLab's upcoming innovations and investments

  • Answers to your questions straight from product leaders

Save your spot now.

AI IN SPACE

🧑‍🚀 Claude plots first AI-planned drive on Mars

Image source: NASA

The Rundown: NASA just revealed that its Perseverance rover completed the first-ever AI-planned drive on another planet, with Anthropic’s Claude helping map a 400m route across the Martian surface that the six-wheeled robot navigated in December.

The details:

  • Engineers fed Claude Code years of rover driving data, with the AI then writing navigation commands and plotting waypoints across the surface.

  • Claude analyzed orbital imagery to chart a path through rocks and sand ripples, assembling a trail it then self-critiqued and refined.

  • The team verified Claude’s routes through simulation modeling before transmitting commands to Mars, with only minor changes needed.

  • NASA engineers said AI-assisted planning could cut route-mapping time in half, freeing operators to fit in additional drives and collect more data.

Why it matters: AI has gone from writing emails and debugging code to literally navigating another planet, and it's hard to think of a better symbol for how far the tech has come in just a couple of years. If Claude can help pilot a rover 140M miles from Earth, the list of tasks AI can't assist with is shrinking fast.

QUICK HITS

🛠️ Trending AI Tools

  • 🔌 Claude Cowork - New plugins to bundle skills, MCPs, and tools

  • 🧞‍♂️ Project Genie - Google DeepMind's interactive world generator

  • 🎥 Grok Imagine - xAI’s upgraded video model, now available via API

  • 🦞 OpenClaw (formerly Clawdbot) - Open personal AI assistant for chat apps

📰 Everything else in AI today

Cohere introduced Model Vault, a dedicated, fully isolated SaaS platform running Cohere models securely, at scale, and with guaranteed performance. Learn more here.*

Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang dismissed a report that its $100B OAI deal had stalled, calling it "complete nonsense" and promising the chipmaker's largest investment ever.

Google DeepMind research David Silver is leaving the company after over 15 years to launch a new AI startup called Ineffable Intelligence out of London.

OpenAI announced that it will retire GPT-4o and several other legacy models from ChatGPT in mid-February, noting that fewer than 0.1% of users still choose them daily.

xAI and SpaceX are reportedly exploring a deal to merge prior to an IPO, a deal that would unite Elon Musk’s companies into a single entity valued above $1T.

*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 Robert I. in Charlottesville, VA:

"I’ve turned my reading of The Rundown into an interactive conversation. Instead of scrolling through the email, I take a screenshot of the entire newsletter and upload it to Gemini. I ask the AI for more details on the developments mentioned. If a specific story grabs me, I keep prompting to drill down as much as I want. I even do this with the ads to see if the products or services are actually a good fit for me."

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

Humans head back to the moon

Jennifer Mossalgue • 6 minutes

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Good morning, tech enthusiasts. NASA just rolled its massive moon rocket to the launchpad — and four astronauts are now in quarantine, waiting to become the first humans to leave low-Earth orbit in over 50 years.

If all goes well, they’ll fly farther from Earth than anyone in history. The launch window opens up Feb. 8

In today’s tech rundown:

  • Artemis II: NASA’s first moon crew in 50 years

  • Musk wants to merge his empires

  • Apple hits record $144B quarter on iPhone sales

  • Tech optimists lobby to deregulate aging

  • Quick hits on other tech news

LATEST DEVELOPMENTS

SPACE TECH

🌜 Artemis II: NASA’s first moon crew in 50 years

Image source: NASA

The Rundown: NASA’s Artemis II mission will send four astronauts on a 10‑day loop around the moon — the first human voyage beyond low‑Earth orbit in more than half a century, and the shakedown cruise for America’s return to deep‑space exploration.

The details: 

  • NASA has rolled the Artemis II Space Launch System and Orion spacecraft out to Pad 39B and is running final prelaunch checks at the Kennedy Space Center.

  • The four-person crew has entered a 14-day health‑stabilization quarantine to avoid any last‑minute bugs that could delay launch.

  • A critical “wet dress rehearsal” on the pad will see teams load more than 700K gallons of supercold propellants into SLS and run a full simulated countdown.

  • NASA is currently targeting a launch window that opens Sunday, Feb. 8, with planned fueling of the rocket slated for Monday, Feb. 2.

Why it matters: Artemis II will send the crew on a roughly 10‑day free‑return loop around the moon, flying farther from Earth than any humans in history and validating Orion’s life‑support, navigation, and high‑speed reentry systems. Success would clear the way for Artemis III, the first planned lunar landing of the program.

TOGETHER WITH MICROSOFT

🤖 GitHub Copilot, accelerate software development with AI

The Rundown: Microsoft’s GitHub Copilot accelerates your innovation on any platform or code repository with agentic AI software development tools that meet you where you are.

GitHub Copilot lets you:

  • Empower your developers by infusing an AI code assistant into their favorite IDE

  • Reimagine developer workflows driven by agentic AI

  • Customize and extend GitHub Copilot for your org and toolchain

Sign up today!

ELON MUSK

🚀 Musk wants to merge his empires

Image source: Ideogram / The Rundown

The Rundown: Elon Musk is reportedly exploring a merger that would combine SpaceX with xAI or Tesla — or with both — into one super-conglomerate, potentially ahead of a monster IPO that could value SpaceX at $1.5T.

The details:

  • SpaceX is in discussions to merge with xAI ahead of a June 2026 IPO worth up to $50B, cheekily timed to a rare planetary alignment and Musk’s birthday.

  • Separately, the space tech giant has discussed the feasibility of a tie-up with Tesla — an idea some investors are pushing.

  • Two entities with “merger sub” in their names were established in Nevada on January 21, with SpaceX CFO Bret Johnsen listed as an officer.

  • SpaceX is targeting an IPO that would value the company at about $1.5T, which would make it the biggest IPO of all time.

Why it matters: Musk has long been criticized for spreading himself too thin across too many companies. A mega-merger would flip that narrative — consolidating rockets, satellites, AI, social media, and possibly EVs into a single publicly traded juggernaut. As one investor put it: “You want to invest in Elon? Here you go. You get all this.”

APPLE

🍎 Apple hits record $144B quarter on iPhone sales

Image source: Ideogram / The Rundown

The Rundown: Apple just posted the biggest quarter in its history — $143.8B in revenue, up 16% year-over-year — driven by what CEO Tim Cook called “simply staggering” iPhone demand.

The details:

  • iPhone revenue surged 23% to $85.27B, setting an all-time record across every geographic segment, with the iPhone 17 lineup driving the surge.

  • China sales rebounded 38% to $25.5B, with Cook noting Apple set “an all-time record for upgraders in mainland China.”

  • Services also hit a record $26.34B (up 14%), and Apple now has more than 2.5B active devices worldwide — the most ever.

  • It plans to prioritize premium iPhone launches this year, including its first foldable model and two flagships, while pushing the baseline iPhone 18 to 2027.

Why it matters: Apple’s smartphone business reportedly grew faster than the overall market, gaining share against competitors. But the real signal is in what comes next — Apple is betting its 2026 roadmap on premium-only launches and a foldable phone, doubling down on high-margin hardware at the expense of the mass market.

BIOTECH

♾️ Tech optimists lobby to deregulate aging

Image source: Vitalist Bay Summit (Adam Gries & Bryan Johnson)

The Rundown: A controversial movement called Vitalism is gaining ground in the longevity landscape, and it’s racking up wins. Detailed in the MIT Technology Review, this hardcore faction argues that defeating death should be a top government priority.

The details:

  • Founded by Nathan Cheng and Adam Gries, Vitalism treats death itself as humanity’s core problem and calls for a “longevity revolution.”

  • Vitalists helped pass Montana’s experimental treatment law and expand New Hampshire’s right-to-try legislation

  • The founders are recruiting for six federal positions controlling billions in funding; Harvard and Stanford faculty have spoken at their events.

  • Sixteen biotech companies carry the official Vitalist stamp — revocable if they “adopt apologetic narratives that accept aging or death."

Why it matters: Where Bryan Johnson has become longevity’s most visible evangelist, the Vitalists are quietly building infrastructure: a nonprofit foundation, a biotech certification program, and a recruitment pipeline for federal positions. Johnson wants to live forever. These people want the government to help him do it.

QUICK HITS

📰 Everything else in tech today

Samsung’s new Galaxy Z TriFold, the first trifold sold in the U.S., launches today for $2,899, making it the most expensive phone on the U.S. market.

U.S. agencies are probing whistleblower claims that Meta staff could read end‑to‑end encrypted WhatsApp chats, undermining the app’s core privacy promise.

Google is joining a $425M round in Tesla cofounder JB Straubel’s Redwood Materials, keeping the battery‑recycling and energy‑storage startup valued near $6B.

Grubhub, now owned by Wonder Group, is scrapping delivery and service fees on all restaurant orders over $50 in a bid to lure customers from DoorDash and Uber Eats.

Amazon announced it is laying off 16K employees across the company, marking the second major round of cuts within three months after 14K jobs were cut in October.

TikTok joined Snap in settling a landmark lawsuit accusing social media platforms of designing harmful, addictive products, while Meta and YouTube will proceed to trial.

Meta’s Reality Labs VR division lost $19.1B on just $2.2B in 2025 revenue, and Zuck says 2026 losses will stay similarly huge as Meta lays off staff and shutters VR projects.

Philippines outsourcing firms are pouring $24M a year into AI and skills training to keep their call‑center workforce competitive as automation and rival hubs close in.

A U.S. jury found former Google engineer Linwei “Leon” Ding guilty of stealing thousands of AI chip trade secrets to benefit China‑linked firms and his own startup.

The Doomsday Clock has been set to a record‑tight 85 seconds to midnight, reflecting soaring nuclear tensions plus mounting AI, climate, and biosecurity risks.

Spotify says it paid out $11B in royalties to the music industry in 2025, a record annual payout that still leaves questions about how much of that money reaches artists.

COMMUNITY

🎓 Highlights: News, Guides & Events

See you soon,

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

AI

xAI's Grok Imagine climbs the leaderboards

Zach Mink • 6 minutes

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Good morning, AI enthusiasts. Elon Musk says Grok Imagine is now generating more images and videos than everyone else combined — and it just landed at the top of the leaderboards, too.

xAI’s creative engine just debuted at No. 1 on key video leaderboards, with a speed, price, and quality combo that’s clearly resonating with creators.

In today’s AI rundown:

  • xAI's video model climbs the leaderboards

  • Google opens its AI world generator to the public

  • Build a competitor database with Claude Cowork

  • Darren Aronofsky debuts AI Revolutionary War series

  • 4 new AI tools, community workflows, and more

LATEST DEVELOPMENTS

XAI

🎬 xAI's video model climbs the leaderboards

Image source: xAI

The Rundown: xAI just released the Grok Imagine API, a new AI video generation and editing suite that jumped to the top of Artificial Analysis rankings for both text and image-to-video outputs while undercutting rivals on price.

The details:

  • The API handles text-to-video, image-to-video, and video editing tasks, with clips up to 15 seconds and native audio baked in.

  • Grok Imagine costs $4.20 per minute with audio included, coming in significantly cheaper than Veo 3.1 at $12/min and Sora 2 Pro at $30/min.

  • Editing tools let users swap objects, restyle entire scenes, animate characters with custom performances, and shift environments on command.

  • Imagine debuts at No. 1 on AA’s text and image to video leaderboards, and comes in behind just Veo 3 and Sora Pro in Arena’s Video Arena.

Why it matters: This is an impressive move up the leaderboard for xAI, especially given the wildly low price point compared to top rivals. If the quality holds up at scale, the aggressive pricing could make Imagine the default choice for creators (and now devs to integrate into apps) who need to iterate fast without burning through budgets.

TOGETHER WITH GITLAB

🛠️ Orchestrate the work, elevate your team

The Rundown: GitLab Transcend is a free virtual event on Feb. 10th exploring how agentic AI is transforming software delivery — featuring technical demos, success stories, and an exclusive look at GitLab's product roadmap.

At Transcend, you'll hear:

  • How teams are using agentic AI to automate real-world DevOps workflows

  • Perspectives from tech leaders and live Q&As with GitLab project leaders

  • A first look at GitLab's upcoming innovations and investments

Reserve your spot.

GOOGLE DEEPMIND

🌍 Google opens its AI world generator to the public

Image source: Google DeepMind

The Rundown: Google DeepMind launched Project Genie, a web app that lets users create and explore AI-generated worlds in real time — coming five months after previewing the Genie 3 model that powers it in August.

The details:

  • Users prompt a setting and a character, preview the scene via Nano Banana Pro and Gemini, then navigate an explorable world in first or third-person.

  • Characters can walk, fly, or drive through environments, with the model remembering what it's built, so returning to areas stays visually consistent.

  • Sessions are currently capped at 60 seconds due to compute costs — with each user getting a dedicated ‘chip’ while exploring for their unique session.

  • The rollout is limited to Google’s AI Ultra tier ($250/mo) subscribers, with access set to expand to other tiers in the future.

Why it matters: The applications of world simulators like Genie 3 are endless, from robotics training and gaming to architecture, and the tech is finally at a level where users can actually experience the vision. With World Labs, Runway, Yann LeCunn’s AMI, and others also pushing forward, simulating reality is getting closer to… reality.

AI TRAINING

🧠 Build a competitor database with Claude Cowork

The Rundown: In this guide, you will learn how to set up a competitor intelligence database powered by Claude Cowork. The best part? It builds itself. Simply download the prompt files and tell Claude to set it up, and it will be ready to use in 5 minutes.

Step-by-step:

  1. Grab our free prompt files, save them in a new folder, and select that folder by heading to the “Cowork tab” in the Claude desktop app (Mac only)

  2. Tell Claude to read the SOP and set up your directory. Should take 2-3 minutes

  3. To test it out, give Claude [competitor name] + [website link]. Claude will create a report called a “killsheet” and file it away for you

  4. Run a new killsheet generation each quarter and after big competitor news

Pro tip: Ask Claude to build battlecards and comparison pages based on the killsheet!

PRESENTED BY TELY

🔎 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 your website doesn’t answer their questions. Tely AI analyzes the questions your customers ask and automatically creates and publishes content that answers them on your website, bringing high-quality leads on autopilot.

With Tely AI, you can:

  • Have +20% monthly organic growth

  • Get indexed on Google, ChatGPT, and Perplexity in as little as 1 week

  • Enjoy full automation for topics, writing, and publishing

  • Get discovered by buyers already searching for your solution

Get leads from Google and ChatGPT on autopilot.

AI & HOLLYWOOD

🎬 Darren Aronofsky debuts AI Revolutionary War series

Image source: TIME

The Rundown: Filmmaker Darren Aronofsky's AI venture Primordial Soup released "On This Day… 1776", a new series recreating the American Revolution using Google DeepMind, with each episode dropping on the 250th anniversary of the event it depicts.

The details:

  • The short-form series combines AI-generated visuals with SAG-AFTRA voice actors, positioning itself as "artist-led" AI rather than being fully automated.

  • The series drops episodes on TIME's YouTube channel timed to the 250th anniversary of each depicted event.

  • Aronofsky partnered with DeepMind in May to collaborate on AI storytelling, releasing the Veo-assisted film ANCESTRA in June at the Tribeca Film Festival.

Why it matters: AI video is creeping further into real production studio workflows, and moving from simple shorts and hidden tricks to hide faces to handling the entire visual process. While it still might not be fully accepted or mainstream, the sentiment is shifting — and Hollywood’s once-uneasy use of the tech is coming more into focus.

QUICK HITS

🛠️ Trending AI Tools

  • 🤖 Speechmatics - Build voice-powered products with Speechmatics’ Startup Program and get $50K to take your project to production*

  • 🌎 Project Genie - Google DeepMind's interactive world generator

  • 🎥 Grok Imagine - xAI’s upgraded video model, now available via API

  • 🎞️ Wonda - Wondercraft's AI agent for video editing and creative direction

*Sponsored Listing

📰 Everything else in AI today

Learn about Microsoft Foundry, an interoperable Azure platform to build, optimize, and govern AI apps and agents at scale with openness, control, and security.*

Apple acquired Q AI, an Israeli AI audio startup, in a deal reportedly worth nearly $2B that brings the founder of its Face ID technology back to the company.

OAI’s Kevin Weil clarified that the company’s IP-sharing deals would apply only to large organizations under custom agreements, not to individual users’ discoveries.

Anthropic is being sued by several music companies over alleged unauthorized use of more than 20,000 songs to train Claude, with the group seeking $3B+ in damages.

Nvidia, Microsoft, and Amazon are reportedly negotiating investments totaling up to $60B in OAI's latest funding round, which could value the company at over $700B.

*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 Gabriel V. in Montreal, Canada:

"I created an automation with Microsoft Power Automate that includes the Claude API. It takes care of uploading the email we receive to the Claude API, which detects if it’s an invoice and, if so, copies it into SharePoint with the correct naming convention. It speeds up administrative work dramatically."

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

Waabi nabs $1B in Uber robotaxi deal

Jennifer Mossalgue • 5 minutes

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Good morning, robotics enthusiasts.Toronto self-driving tech startup Waabi just landed $1B to prove one end-to-end AI model can drive both semi-trucks and robotaxis.

Uber is leaning in with $250M and a commitment to put 25K Waabi-powered robotaxis on its platform. But can they catch up to Waymo, Tesla, and Uber-backed Aurora?

In today’s robotics rundown:

  • Waabi lands $1B to take on Waymo and Tesla

  • Tesla kills flagship EVs to make room for robots

  • Figure drops Helix 02, a unified robot brain

  • Fauna’s ‘friendly’ humanoid emerges from stealth

  • Quick hits on other robotics news

LATEST DEVELOPMENTS

WAABI

🚖 Waabi lands $1B to take on Waymo and Tesla

Image source: Waabi

The Rundown: Toronto’s Waabi just locked down $1B in what is reportedly Canada’s largest-ever fundraise — a $750M Series C plus $250M from Uber — to deploy 25K robotaxis while conquering autonomous trucking with a single AI brain.

The details:

  • CEO Raquel Urtasun, formerly head of Uber’s AV research lab, says the same AI model will power both trucks and robotaxis.

  • Uber is committed to at least 25K Waabi-powered robotaxis on its platform in what the company calls the largest self-driving deal ever.

  • Waabi exemplifies ‘AV 2.0’ — end-to-end AI that learns from data rather than hand-coded rules and HD maps.

  • Commercial trucking targets 2027; robotaxi timelines and additional OEM deals are expected in the coming months.

Why it matters: Waabi is betting its end-to-end AI can scale from long-haul trucking to robotaxis, using one model instead of separate stacks. The catch: it’s doing it against deeper-pocketed rivals — Waymo, Tesla, Wayve, and Uber-backed Aurora — who also bring vastly more real-world driving data and operational mileage to the table.

TESLA

🤖 Tesla kills flagship EVs to make room for robots

Image source: Tesla

The Rundown: CEO Elon Musk said that Tesla is discontinuing the luxury Model S sedan and Model X SUV next quarter and converting their Fremont factory production lines into a facility that can churn out 1M Optimus humanoids per year.

The details:

  • On yesterday’s earnings call, Musk described the move as an “honorable discharge” for the vehicles as Tesla shifts toward “a future based on autonomy.”

  • Tesla plans to unveil Optimus V3 this quarter, which the company calls its “first design meant for mass production” — production slated to begin this year.

  • Cybercab production starts in H1 2026, and Tesla is already running paid driverless robotaxi rides in Austin.

  • Tesla is pouring $20B into capital expenditures this year to fund new factories for Optimus, Cybercab, Semi, and AI computing infrastructure.

Why it matters: Tesla is sacrificing the luxury EVs that defined its brand to clear factory space for Optimus, the humanoid that Musk predicts could add $20 trillion to Tesla’s market cap — if he can actually get it into mass production. Tesla fans who want a new Model S or X, order now or never.

FIGURE

🧠 Figure drops Helix 02, a unified robot brain

Image source: Figure / Reve

The Rundown: California robotics startup Figure just unveiled Helix 02, a unified AI control system that replaces 109K lines of hand-tuned C++ with a 10M‑parameter neural network that teaches robots to move more like humans.

The details:

  • Figure demoed what it claims is the ‘most complex’ autonomous humanoid task to date: a 4-minute, 61-action dishwasher cycle across a full-sized kitchen.

  • The Figure 03 robot now uses its entire body as a tool — closing drawers with its hip and lifting the dishwasher door with its foot when hands are occupied.

  • New palm cameras and tactile sensors — sensitive to three grams — enable dexterous tasks previously out of reach, like unscrewing bottle caps.

  • The system executes whole-body control at 1 kHz, taking full-body joint state as input and outputting actuator commands directly to every joint.

Why it matters: Fusing walking, grasping, and sensing into one learned system moves humanoids from scripted demos to continuous autonomy in unpredictable environments. Branding the AI separately from the hardware hints at a longer play: a general-purpose robot brain for platforms beyond Figure 03.

FAUNA ROBOTICS

🧸 Fauna's ‘friendly’ humanoid emerges from stealth

Image source: Fauna Robotics

The Rundown: NYC startup Fauna Robotics emerged from two years of stealth development with Sprout, a 3.5-foot humanoid wrapped in sage-green foam designed to feel friendly and approachable rather than factory-ready.

The details:

  • Priced at $50K and shipping now, Sprout ships as a developer platform, with Disney, Boston Dynamics, UC San Diego, and NYU among the early customers.

  • The team built Sprout around safety-first principles — compliant joints, limited torques, and soft exteriors — so it can operate in homes and schools.

  • Sprout dances, fetches objects, rises from chairs unassisted, and can be piloted via game controller, phone app, or VR headset.

  • The robot ships with built-in localization, on-demand mapping, and a modular navigation stack for tracking position, avoiding obstacles, and planning routes.

Why it matters: Fauna claims to be the first U.S. company actively shipping humanoids as a developer platform, betting that Sprout can spark the same software ecosystem that smartphones unleashed — at $50K a unit, roughly what research labs and tech entrepreneurs are already spending on China’s Unitree bots.

QUICK HITS

📰 Everything else in robotics today

Zoox is under investigation by San Francisco police and California regulators after one of its robotaxis hit the open door of a parked car, injuring the driver’s hand.

China’s Eyou Robot Technology opened what it calls the world’s first fully automated production line for humanoid joints with a capacity for 100K units a year.

New data from Obi shows Waymo robotaxi rides in the Bay Area still cost more than Uber and Lyft, but the price gap is shrinking as Waymo cuts fares, and rivals get pricier.

Anduril is launching an autonomous drone‑racing contest that doubles as a recruiting funnel, with cash prizes and potential jobs for the top software teams.

ALLEX, a new Korean humanoid, can sense how hard it’s squeezing, so it can give you a firm but safe handshake instead of a bone-crushing robot grip.

A stock-market frenzy around AI and robotics pushed South Korea’s exchange above Germany’s in total value, making it the world’s 10th‑largest market.

The UK Atomic Energy Authority, for the first time, used sensor‑equipped drones to inspect the JET fusion reactor, reducing human risk while collecting imagery of the site.

COMMUNITY

🎓 Highlights: News, Guides & Events

See you soon,

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

AI

Chrome gets agentic AI upgrade

Zach Mink • 6 minutes

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Good morning, AI enthusiasts. 2025 saw new AI browsers popping up left and right… But users didn’t seem too eager to make the switch.

Google is betting they won't have to, announcing new Gemini upgrades to Chrome that bring agentic browsing and more to a browser that already dominates the market — a default advantage that no amount of AI-first features can easily overcome.

In today’s AI rundown:

  • Google brings more agentic AI to Chrome

  • DeepMind’s science behind AlphaGenome

  • Moltbot (Clawdbot) installation guide & how to use it

  • Two new labs raise big to rethink how AI learns

  • 4 new AI tools, community workflows, and more

LATEST DEVELOPMENTS

GOOGLE

🌐 Google brings more agentic AI to Chrome

Image source: Google

The Rundown: Google just announced a wave of AI upgrades and Gemini integrations into its Chrome browser, including the addition of agentic browsing, built-in image generation, Personal Intelligence, and more.

The details:

  • Auto Browse controls Chrome in its own tab, clicking through sites and completing tasks— also pausing before sensitive actions like payments.

  • Gemini now lives in a persistent sidebar, letting users ask questions, compare products across tabs, and leverage Google apps like Gmail and Calendar.

  • New Nano Banana integration lets users create images directly in the browser, with Personal Intelligence also coming soon for more personalized answers.

Why it matters: There’s been no shortage of AI-first browser competition (OpenAI’s Atlas, Perplexity’s Comet, Dia, etc.) over the past year, but adoption has mostly been lacking — leaving Google with the perfect opportunity to simply continue weaving Gemini into its dominant Chrome platform and integrating deeper with its apps.

TOGETHER WITH HUBSPOT

💰 Turn AI into your income engine

The Rundown: HubSpot’s new “200+ AI-Powered Income Ideas” free guide offers actionable strategies to turn artificial intelligence into your own personal revenue generator — unlocking a gateway to financial innovation in the digital age.

With this guide, you can:

  • Explore hundreds of revenue-generating ideas across industries with real-world applications

  • Follow simple, step-by-step instructions that make AI accessible to everyone

  • Adopt cutting-edge strategies to keep you ahead in today's fast-paced market

Access your free guide here.

GOOGLE DEEPMIND

🧬 DeepMind’s science behind AlphaGenome

Image source: Google DeepMind

The Rundown: Google DeepMind just published the full research paper and model weights for AlphaGenome, its AI tool unveiled this summer that scans a million letters of genetic code to predict how mutations cause disease.

The details:

  • The model was initially released in June of last year, with the weights and API now freely available for research, and an official paper published in Nature.

  • AlphaGenome was trained on vast genetic datasets and can predict how a single DNA typo affects 11 different biological processes.

  • In tests, it flagged mutations linked to leukemia that sat thousands of letters away from the affected gene, connections that took researchers years to find.

Why it matters: AlphaFold won the Nobel Prize for cracking protein structure, and now Google is taking on the challenge of understanding what 98% of our DNA does. It's not a "solved" problem like proteins, but giving researchers open access to a map for the genetic code could ramp discovery in ways we're only beginning to imagine.

AI TRAINING

🦞 Moltbot (Clawdbot) installation guide & how to use it

The Rundown: Learn how to set up your own autonomous agent with starter skills, including image generation and Telegram messaging. After just three days, our Moltbot taught itself to generate images, respond to emails, and deploy its own websites.

Security note: This is experimental, open source code. Do NOT install this on your primary computer. Ideally, you should install Moltbot on a backup computer that’s been wiped clean — you don’t need to buy a Mac Mini, but we don’t want you to lose or expose important documents. Check out this thread for more Moltbot security tips.

Step-by-step:

  1. Grab an API key from your preferred AI model. Grab a free Brave search API.

  2. Run curl -fsSL <https://molt.bot/install.sh> | bash and moltbot onboard --install-daemon in your terminal.

  3. Select "Quickstart," and follow the prompts.

  4. Your bot will ask you to name it and pick a personality. Now it’s off to the races!

Going further: Watch our full video tutorial to connect your new bot to Telegram, teach it to generate images, and avoid three common beginner mistakes.

PRESENTED BY LESSIE AI

🔎 Your smart people search agent

The Rundown: Tell Lessie AI who you’re trying to reach, and it will explore 100+ premium sources plus the open web to surface verified clients, talent, influencers, and partners.

With Lessie, you can:

  • Search using natural language instead of complicated filters or Boolean queries

  • Surface the most relevant contacts first with intelligent AI ranking

  • Automate personalized outreach messages and follow-ups

Find the right people, for any purpose, in minutes. Use code RUNDOWN for 30% off.

AI STARTUPS

🚀 Two new labs raise big to rethink how AI learns

Image source: Flapping Airplanes / Jerry Tworek

The Rundown: Two AI startups emerged with big investor interest, betting on new AI model paths that diverge from current standards — with Flapping Airplanes raising $180M and ex-OAI’s Jerry Tworek seeking up to $1B for his Core Automation venture.

The details:

  • Flapping Airplanes secured funding at a $1.5B valuation, aiming to train AI that matches human intelligence “without ingesting half the entire internet.”

  • Flapping Airplanes lists Andrej Karpathy and Jeff Dean as advisors, leaning into what Sequoia called the "young person's AGI lab" approach.

  • Tworek, who left OAI this month, wants to build AI that learns continuously from real-world experience, a capability current systems lack.

  • Tworek plans to focus on a single continual learning model called Ceres, with ambitions ranging from automating factories to eventually terraforming planets.

Why it matters: With top AI researchers openly questioning whether scaling alone can reach AGI, this new wave of startups is a serious contrarian bet against the $200B+ frontier labs. It's a high-risk play, but investors are pouring billions into the chance that one of these teams cracks the code that the big AI leaders might be missing.

QUICK HITS

🛠️ Trending AI Tools

  • 🧑‍🚀 Agent Composer - AI agents for work that actually is rocket science—compress routine engineering tasks from hours to minutes*

  • 👁️ DeepSeek OCR 2 - SOTA model for reading and extracting text from docs

  • ⚙️ SERA - AI2’s new family of open-source coding agents

  • 🎆 Z-Image - Alibaba Tongyi's full version of its top open-source image model

* Sponsored Listing

📰 Everything else in AI today

Anthropic is reportedly raising $20B at a $350B valuation, doubling its original target after demand reached 6x what was expected.

Google added Agentic Vision to Gemini 3 Flash, letting the model zoom, annotate, and edit images to answer questions and boosting accuracy 5-10% on visual tasks.

Mistral upgraded its terminal coding agent Vibe to version 2.0, adding custom subagents and workflow skills for developers on its $15-per-month Pro and Team plans.

Anthropic co-founder Jared Kaplan said he believes there is a 50% chance the world’s top theoretical physicists will be “mostly replaced” with AI in the next 3 years.

China reportedly approved ByteDance, Alibaba, and Tencent to purchase over 400k Nvidia H200s, easing a key AI chip bottleneck amid ongoing U.S. tech tensions.

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 Nikolaos A. in Clifton, VA:

"I wanted to do renovations to a house I purchased recently. I am building a system of multiple agents, each with a specialty, such as plumbing, concrete/masonry, electrical, etc. These do research on materials and best practices for accomplishing a task.

Additionally, I have an agent that orchestrates the work by routing prompts to one or more agents. Finally, the orchestration agent builds a project book with all the information needed to accomplish the project. I can also upload images that are scanned by a vision model to add to the requirements of a task."

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

Viral AI agent molts past trademark trouble

Zach Mink • 6 minutes

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Good morning, AI enthusiasts. Anthropic made Clawdbot change its name, but that didn’t stop the lobster’s momentum.

The viral AI agent is now Moltbot, and it’s been taking the internet by storm from within chat apps — providing a glimpse of an agentic future that actually works, though full device access means the risks are just as real.

In today’s AI rundown:

  • Viral AI agent takes the internet by storm

  • OpenAI releases free scientific writing workspace

  • Find dozens of free AI tools with Google Labs

  • Moonshot’s K2.5 open-source model rivals frontier labs

  • 4 new AI tools, community workflows, and more

LATEST DEVELOPMENTS

AI AGENTS

🦞 Viral AI agent takes the internet by storm

Image source: Lovart / The Rundown

The Rundown: Open-source AI assistant Moltbot (formerly Clawdbot) has gone viral for its impressive agentic capabilities, operating 24/7 from within Telegram or WhatsApp — though experts warn its full system access comes with serious risks.

The details:

  • Moltbot runs locally and connects to users’ digital lives, proactively taking actions and messaging via chat apps when tasks are done.

  • The tool was renamed after Anthropic reached out over trademark concerns, with creator Peter Steinberger initially launching it as Clawdbot in December.

  • Viral demos range from negotiating and purchasing a new car to calling a restaurant via ElevenLabs after failing to book through OpenTable.

  • Many are warning of the security risks associated with full device access, including prompt injections, exposed data, and more if not properly managed.

Why it matters: Moltbot looks like a serious step up in the agentic world that actually delivers: running autonomously, keeping context across sessions, and taking real actions. But the utility comes with risk — full access to messages, credentials, and systems means a single exploit may compromise everything if not set up correctly.

TOGETHER WITH SYNK

🚩 Test your security skills live

The Rundown: Snyk’s annual Fetch the Flag CTF is back — a 24-hour virtual Capture the Flag competition hosted with NahamSec on Feb. 12th, where security pros can sharpen their skills and compete for prizes.

Here's what you can expect:

  • 15 hands-on hacking challenges spanning web exploitation, binary, and OSINT

  • CPE credit to boost your professional development credentials

  • Rokid AR Joy 2 Glasses for top 3 teams and top 3 individual players

Register now.

OPENAI

🔬 OpenAI releases free scientific writing workspace

Image source: OpenAI

The Rundown: OpenAI just launched Prism, a free research tool that puts its most advanced reasoning model inside the scientific writing process — aiming to do for research what AI coding assistants did for software development over the past year.

The details:

  • The tool came from OpenAI’s acquisition of Crixet, a cloud-based science writing platform, which it rebuilt around its latest GPT 5.2 reasoning model.

  • Scientists can search for papers, auto-generate citations, and turn photos of whiteboard math into formatted equations, without leaving the document.

  • OpenAI revealed ChatGPT fields over 8M weekly queries on hard science topics, suggesting researchers are already leaning heavily on AI.

  • The free tool has no caps on team size or projects, a departure from typical expensive academic software pricing models.

Why it matters: Since ChatGPT’s launch, journals have been drowning in sloppy papers full of made-up citations and errors. OAI’s argument is that the problem was never AI in research — it was researchers using it blindly without context. An integrated tool like Prism could be the difference between slop and real acceleration.

AI TRAINING

🛠️ Find dozens of free AI tools with Google Labs

The Rundown: In this tutorial, you will learn how to use Google Labs’ free AI tools to build marketing content for your business. There are dozens of overlooked tools to help tackle whatever your use case may be, but we’ve selected our top three here.

Step-by-step:

  1. Navigate to labs.google/experiments to see a full list of tools.

  2. First is Pomelli. Copy your brand’s website URL and paste it into Pomelli. After ~5 minutes, you’ll get bespoke ad campaigns with image and video assets.

  3. Next, use Flow. Create start and end frames via Create Image, add them to Frames to Video with a prompt, then stitch clips using the scene builder.

  4. Finally, go to ImageFX for image iteration. Use the suggested styles to polish up your prompting skills and try locking the “seed” to keep outputs consistent.

Pro tip: Click the dropdown beside ImageFX and select MusicFX for generating music.

PRESENTED BY CONTEXTUAL AI

🤖 Introducing Agent Composer

The Rundown: Agent Composer helps teams tackle expert-level engineering tasks in high-stakes environments — compressing hours of complex routine work into minutes. Trusted by high-tech leaders like Qualcomm and Advantest, it’s built for environments where accuracy and reliability are non-negotiable.

What makes it different:

  • Unified context layer gives agents full visibility into tasks, data, and workflow context

  • Controlled agents combine dynamic intelligence with structured workflows for mission-critical reliability

  • No-code builder with pre-built templates, natural language prompts, or visual drag-and-drop

See it in action today and read the launch blog.

MOONSHOT AI

🇨🇳 Moonshot’s K2.5 open-source model rivals frontier labs

Image source: Moonshot AI

The Rundown: Chinese AI startup Moonshot just open-sourced Kimi K2.5, a new 1T-parameter model that rivals GPT-5.2 and Claude Opus 4.5 across coding, vision, and agentic benchmarks. The release includes Kimi Code, a terminal-based coding agent.

The details:

  • K2.5 tops GPT-5.2 and Opus 4.5 in on key benchmarks for agentic tasks and video reasoning, though it trails slightly on pure coding evals.

  • K2.5 shows massive cost savings over top rivals, is natively multimodal, and comes in as the top open model on Artificial Analysis’ leaderboard.

  • The model also features Agent Swarm, allowing K2.5 to manage up to 100 AI sub-agents running tasks at once across up to 1,500 steps and tools.

  • Moonshot also open-sourced Kimi Code, an agentic coding agent that works in terminals and IDEs like VSCode and Cursor.

Why it matters: The gap between open-source and closed frontier models keeps shrinking — and once again, it’s a Chinese lab leading the charge. With DeepSeek’s V4 also reportedly on deck, U.S. labs are facing pressure from multiple directions as China’s open wave keeps building at costs that are hard for top labs to compete with.

QUICK HITS

🛠️ Trending AI Tools

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  • 🦞 Moltbot (formerly Clawdbot) - Open-source personal AI assistant that lives in chat apps

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  • 🎥 Ray 3.14 - Luma’s upgraded video model for professional creative workflows

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📰 Everything else in AI today

Luma AI released Ray3.14, an upgraded video generation model that outputs native 1080p while running significantly faster and cheaper than its predecessor.

DeepSeek open-sourced OCR 2, a model for reading and extracting text from documents that tops benchmarks while being much more efficient with tokens.

AI2 introduced SERA, a new family of open-source coding agents able to be cheaply trained on private codebases with native support for Claude Code.

Google premiered ‘Dear Upstairs Neighbors’ at Sundance, an animated short made with its video AI in collaboration with artists to replicate hand-painted styles.

Alibaba’s Tongyi Lab open-sourced Z-Image, the full base version of its Z-Image Turbo, which ranked as the top open-source image model in December.

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 Brendan O. in Crofton, MD:

“I use Kilo Code’s Managed Indexing to find code I know exists but can’t name exactly. In large codebases, I often need to locate logic or patterns without remembering file or function names, and regular text search just doesn’t cut it.

Managed Indexing lets me describe what I’m looking for in plain English and get the right code back quickly, which makes the difference between saving an hour and losing your train of thought.”

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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