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AI

AI takes center stage at Davos

Zach Mink • 6 minutes

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Good morning, AI enthusiasts. The world's elite converged on Davos this week for the World Economic Forum, and there was one topic on everyone's minds — AI.

The takeaway from the industry's top leaders? Disruption is coming faster than expected, and the window for both individuals and companies to adapt is closing fast.

P.S.: We are sitting down for a Q&A with Jeetu Patel, President and Chief Product Officer at Cisco, and want our community to participate in the action! Submit any AI questions on the industry, security, future predictions, company workflows, etc., here.

In today’s AI rundown:

  • AI takes center stage at WEF in Davos

  • 'Human-centric' AI startup raises $480M

  • Get better AI outputs using multiple choice

  • LTX launches audio-to-video generation

  • 4 new AI tools, community workflows, and more

LATEST DEVELOPMENTS

AI & THE WORLD ECONOMIC FORUM

🌎 AI takes center stage at WEF in Davos

Image source: WEF / The Rundown

The Rundown: The World Economic Forum kicked off this week in Davos, featuring an intense focus on AI that included discussions with the industry’s top minds, including Anthropic’s Dario Amodei, Google’s Demis Hassabis, and Microsoft’s Satya Nadella.

The details:

  • Amodei took a shot at U.S. President Donald Trump’s recent policy allowing AI chip sales to China, likening it to “selling nuclear weapons to North Korea”.

  • Hassabis believes this year could see AI-driven slowdowns in junior hiring, but that AI tools could ultimately enable more skill creation than traditional paths.

  • Nadella said no company can “just coast” in the AI era, stating that big companies that don’t keep up will “get schooled by someone small.”

  • Amodei also said we may be just 6-12 months away from models that do “most, maybe all” of what software engineers do end-to-end.

Why it matters: Davos talks often stay abstract, but Amodei's timeline for full AI-powered coding puts a tight deadline on the disruption we're already seeing with tools like Claude Code. Between geopolitical warnings, labor shifts, and software upheaval, the message from AI's leaders is clear: the window to adapt is shrinking rapidly.

TOGETHER WITH MONGODB

📈 Startup support that delivers results

The Rundown: Let MongoDB for Startups partner with you as you build the next big thing with the tools, support, and go-to-market opportunities you need to accelerate from idea to IPO.

MongoDB for Startups includes:

  • Built-in vector search using VoyageAI

  • Real-time data streaming

  • Baseline credits and technical expertise

Get started today for free.

HUMANS&

🤝 'Human-centric' AI startup raises $480M

Image source: Humans&

The Rundown: A new AI startup founded by researchers from Anthropic, xAI, and Google, just raised $480M in seed funding at a $4.48B valuation, pushing to build AI that helps people collaborate better over automation and full replacement.

The details:

  • Humans& aims to build AI that functions like an intelligent group chat, requesting context, storing memory, and coordinating teams.

  • Co-founder Andi Peng left Anthropic over its autonomy focus, saying they “loved to highlight how its models churned for 8, 24, 50 hours by themselves."

  • The team includes Google's seventh employee, Georges Harik, two former xAI researchers who worked on Grok, and Stanford professor Noah Goodman.

  • The $480M seed round was led by SV Angel and its co-founder Harik, alongside Nvidia, Jeff Bezos, and Google Ventures.

Why it matters: A $4.48B value for a 3-month old startup is wild, but shows the investor appetite for any team with a frontier lab pedigree. The "human-centric" angle is a shot at the autonomy-driven gains most labs are chasing, though we’ve seen similar framing from the likes of Microsoft AI (and even Anthropic in its own ads).

AI TRAINING

📝 Get better AI outputs using multiple choice

The Rundown: In this tutorial, you will learn a universal strategy to get better outputs from any AI model at a fraction of the cost by minimizing the amount of unhelpful context you add to the AI’s “brain”.

Step-by-step:

  1. Open any chat-based AI and break your idea into Goal, Task, and Next Steps to "minimize unhelpful messages". The task will be to interview to build context

  2. Prompt using the Goal→Task→Next Steps pattern, e.g.: "Your job is to generate a logo... Interview me with 5-10 MCQs about my brand, vision to build context"

  3. Respond to Qs with simple choices (e.g., “A, B, A, C…”). This removes miscommunication and ensures that the AI has a better understanding

  4. Once it generates concepts, prompt to "Generate a 4x4 grid with each concept in a separate grid cell" to save on tokens, then ask for standalone images

Pro tip: If you get great results from this method, export and re-use the context by asking the AI to "extract the context as system instructions in markdown.”

PRESENTED BY MAULT

💻 The real-time governance layer for AI-generated code

The Rundown: Mault is a VS Code extension that applies real-time architectural guardrails to prevent drift as code is generated.

Unlike linters or CI checks, Mault operates at the point of change:

  • Detects structural and config mismatches

  • Enforces file structure and naming

  • Flags deprecated or unsafe dependencies

  • Works alongside AI coding tools

Click here to download the extension.

LIGHTRICKS

🎵 LTX launches audio-to-video generation

Image source: LTX

The Rundown: AI creative platform Lightricks just released a new Audio-to-Video feature, allowing users to start with voice, music, or sound effects and then generate the video output to accompany it.

The details:

  • The tool syncs motion, lip movements, and camera work directly to the uploaded audio, keeping consistency across generations.

  • Users can upload files, record directly, or use a built-in text-to-speech tool powered by ElevenLabs’ Scribe V2 model.

  • LTX said the model can understand rhythm and beat, making it capable of music videos and timing/pacing outputs to align with audio.

  • LTX called being able to start from audio “the third paradigm in AI video generation,” allowing for more consistent and natural outputs.

Why it matters: Starting with sound opens up brand new creative pathways — with the ability to build around existing audio assets rather than roughly fitting dialogue onto AI-generated clips. While AI video has already hit such a high bar, tools enabling consistency and customization are the next lever to take models to new heights.

QUICK HITS

🛠️ Trending AI Tools

  • 💡 Skills - Vercel’s open ecosystem for finding and sharing agentic skills

  • 🎥 LTX Audio to Video - Generate videos directly from audio inputs

  • 👁️ Step3-VL-10B - StepFun’s open-source SOTA vision language model

  • 💦 LFM2.5-1.2B-Thinking - Liquid AI’s new on-device reasoning model

📰 Everything else in AI today

OpenAI’s Chris Lehane revealed during a talk at Davos that the company is “on track” to unveil its Jony Ive-led physical AI device in the second half of 2026.

Node.js creator Ryan Dahl declared the era of humans writing code over, arguing that software engineers still have work, but writing syntax directly is no longer the job.

Liquid AI released LFM2.5-1.2B-Thinking, a reasoning variant small enough to run on smartphones while matching larger rivals on math and problem-solving benchmarks.

OpenAI introduced a new age prediction feature on ChatGPT to help automatically apply underage-specific safeguards to younger users.

AI inference company Baseten is raising $300M in funding, with half coming from an investment by Nvidia, valuing the startup at $5B.

Anthropic announced a new partnership with Teach For All to train more than 100k educators across 63 countries on AI tools for the classroom.

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 Matt R. in London, UK:

"I was making my annual family calendar and found that a number of my wife's Apple photos were in HEIC format, which weren't accepted by Snapfish. I looked for a file converter to get them into JPGs, and was quickly browsing the spate of 'free' options that don't tell you that to convert more than one file, you have to hand over your credit card.

I asked Mocha to build me a HEIC to JPG converter, and 5 minutes later, it was ready and operational!"

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

Biotech's big 3 (and they're wild)

Jennifer Mossalgue • 5 minutes

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Good morning, tech enthusiasts. Things are getting wild in biotech — and fast. Gene editing is going bespoke, extinct species are getting a second act, and embryo screening now offers trait predictions for height and IQ.

MIT’s 2026 forecast lays out the trends reshaping biology, with startups outpacing regulators at every turn.

P.S. — The Rundown is hiring for several new roles across marketing, community, social, and more! Learn more and apply here.

In today’s tech rundown:

  • Biotech’s biggest 3 trends to watch

  • Canada opens doors to Chinese EVs

  • Threads overtakes X on mobile

  • TikTok’s answer to ReelShort is here

  • Quick hits on other tech news

LATEST DEVELOPMENTS

BIOTECH

🧬 Biotech’s biggest 3 trends to watch

Image source: Ideogram / The Rundown

The Rundown: Biotech is entering a new phase — one defined by customization, resurrection, and optimization. MIT Technology Review reports the biggest trends this year include personalized gene editing, species revival, and custom embryo screening.

The details:

  • A one-off “base-edited baby” case has become a template for custom gene therapies, using CRISPR tools to fix a child’s DNA for a rare metabolic disease.

  • Startups are racing to scale that model, pitching regulators on streamlined approvals for custom edits for rare-disease patients.

  • De-extinction companies like Colossal are now stitching genes from extinct species like the mammoths and dire wolves into living animals.

  • IVF clinics are rolling out embryo scoring that goes beyond disease risk to statistical bets on traits like height, eye color, and even IQ.

Why it matters: The science is thrilling — but decisions about who gets edited, which species return, and what traits get optimized are being made by startups and clinicians long before regulators weigh in. Biology’s new powers are testing the limits of the institutions meant to govern them. That tension is about to get loud.

EVS

🍁 Canada opens doors to Chinese EVs

Image source: Ideogram / The Rundown

The Rundown: Canada just slashed its 100% tariff on Chinese EVs to 6.1%, opening a new North American portal for BYD, Geely, and Xiaomi — and putting fresh pressure on the U.S. to respond.

The details:

  • Prime Minister Mark Carney announced the tariff cut alongside an initial cap of 49K vehicles annually, rising to about 70K within five years.

  • The move comes as the EU weighs lowering its own Chinese EV tariffs, and Trump said he’s open to Chinese automakers building U.S. factories.

  • Chinese EV exports to Mexico boomed in 2025, and Geely showcased vehicles at CES with executives hinting at a U.S. market entry within two to three years.

  • Tesla may be the first winner, with its Shanghai plant already configured to export Canadian-specific Model Ys and with 39 stores already operating there.

Why it matters: Canada just became a test market for Chinese EVs on America’s doorstep — giving U.S. consumers a front-row seat to the cars they can’t buy. If BYD and Geely start winning fans in Toronto and Vancouver, Washington’s 100% tariff wall might be a lot harder to justify.

THREADS

🧵 Threads overtakes X on mobile

Image source: Reve / The Rundown

The Rundown: Meta’s Threads has overtaken Elon Musk’s X in daily mobile users worldwide, hitting 141.5M to X’s 125M — a significant milestone in the platforms’ rivalry that reflects months of steady gains rather than any single viral moment.

The details:

  • Threads crossed ahead of X on mobile sometime between late October and early November 2025, following a prolonged period of steady growth.

  • Market research firm Similarweb reports that Threads has grown 37.8% YOY on mobile, while X’s daily users dropped 11.9% in the same period.

  • X maintains a decisive lead when web usage is included, attracting an estimated 145.4M daily web visitors compared to some 8.5M for Threads.

  • While X still attracts more mobile users than Threads in the U.S., X’s U.S. daily active mobile user base has declined to about half of what it was a year earlier.

Why it matters: Threads’ mobile growth has been supported by Meta’s ability to funnel users from Instagram and Facebook, alongside a rapid expansion of features aimed at making the app stickier for daily use. X still leads overall, but Threads is winning on mobile, where most social media use happens.

TIKTOK

🍿 TikTok’s answer to ReelShort is here

Image source: TikTok

The Rundown: TikTok quietly launched PineDrama, a standalone app for binge-worthy one-minute drama episodes, directly challenging upstarts ReelShort and DramaBox in the fast-growing microdrama market.

The details:

  • The free, ad-free app is now available on iOS and Android in the U.S. and Brazil, serving up bite-sized fictional series across different genres.

  • PineDrama delivers vertical, algorithmically tailored recommendations —essentially TikTok’s addictive scroll mechanics applied to serialized storytelling.

  • The launch follows TikTok’s December rollout of “TikTok Minis,” an in-app microdrama section that tested the format before this dedicated spinoff.

  • The microdrama industry is projected to hit $26B in annual revenue by 2030, having cracked the formula that sank Jeffrey Katzenberg’s $1.75B Quibi.

Why it matters: TikTok already dominates short-form social video; PineDrama marks its push to own short-form entertainment content as well. If the company that perfected the infinite scroll can make serialized storytelling just as addictive, ReelShort and DramaBox may find themselves outplayed before they ever reach scale.

QUICK HITS

📰 Everything else in tech today

Elon Musk dropped $10M into a pro-Trump super PAC backing Kentucky Senate hopeful Nate Morris, signaling he’s all-in on boosting Republicans in the midterms.

Meta’s Oversight Board is reviewing a high-profile Instagram permanent ban for abusive and threatening content, its first-ever case on account disabling.

Global execs at this year’s Davos are reportedly less dazzled by AI hype and are zeroed in on the work of scaling it.

Elon Musk’s Boring Company is working on a feasibility study for a tunnel under I-80 to connect Reno to Tesla’s Gigafactory, nine miles away.

Sphere Entertainment is bringing a smaller, 6K-seat version of its Las Vegas venue to National Harbor, Maryland — its first expansion toward the DC market.

GSK is buying U.S.-based biotech firm Rapt Therapeutics for $2.2B to acquire its long-acting experimental food allergy drug ozureprubart.

U.S. safety regulators gave Tesla a five-week extension to respond to an investigation into whether its Full Self-Driving system is linked to traffic law violations.

Asus effectively hit pause on its smartphone business, with its chairman saying the company will stop making new Zenfone and ROG Phone models.

ClickHouse, an open-source database provider spun out of Yandex and a rival to Snowflake and Databricks, raised $400M at a $15B valuation.

A CoinGecko report found that over half of the 20.2M tokens launched since 2021 — most of them memecoins from 2025’s Pump.fun boom — have effectively died.

COMMUNITY

🎓 Highlights: News, Guides & Events

See you soon,

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

AI

🧑‍💻 Claude Code sparks 'selfware' era

Zach Mink • 6 minutes

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Good morning, AI enthusiasts. Claude Code is having its "ChatGPT moment" — and it's not just developers paying attention.

From CEOs scrapping engineering hires to hobbyists building custom apps, Anthropic's tool is fueling a wave of "selfware" that puts software creation in the hands of anyone.

P.S. — The Rundown is hiring for several new roles across marketing, community, social, and more! Learn more and apply here.

In today’s AI rundown:

  • Claude Code's virality rattles software stocks

  • Ex-OpenAI policy lead’s new AI safety nonprofit

  • Optimize prompting with this Markdown strategy

  • Anthropic’s first Economic Index of 2026

  • 4 new AI tools, community workflows, and more

LATEST DEVELOPMENTS

ANTHROPIC

📉 Claude Code's virality rattles software stocks

Image source: Anthropic

The Rundown: Anthropic's Claude Code is having its "ChatGPT moment" among both developers and hobbyists, with the viral excitement fueling a selloff in traditional software stocks and investors fearing a new era of AI-built 'selfware.'

The details:

  • A Morgan Stanley SaaS index is down 15% YTD, with stocks from major software companies like Intuit, Adobe, and Salesforce dropping double digits.

  • Vercel’s CTO used Claude to finish a year-long project in a week; another CEO scrapped plans to hire engineers after the tool made him ‘5x more productive’.

  • Others went viral for building apps entirely with Claude Code, from custom MRI viewers to handling self-sustaining tomato growth.

  • One financial analyst said investors have largely abandoned software stocks regardless of valuation amid existential AI fears.

Why it matters: Software stocks have held sky-high valuations thanks to predictable recurring revenue, logic that suddenly breaks down when AI can build custom tools on demand. Whether this is the actual beginning of a "selfware" era or just a hype-fueled blip, traditional SaaS faces major disruption from tools that turn everyone into a builder.

TOGETHER WITH YOU.COM

🧠 Tinkering with prompts can only get you so far

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

In this guide, you’ll learn:

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

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

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

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

AI SAFETY

🔍 Ex-OpenAI policy lead’s new AI safety nonprofit

Image source: Lovart / The Rundown

The Rundown: Former OpenAI policy lead Miles Brundage just launched AVERI, a new nonprofit pushing for independent third-party audits of frontier AI models instead of letting labs self-certify their own safety claims.

The details:

  • Brundage left in October 2024 during OAI’s cut of its ‘AGI Readiness’ team, saying no frontier labs were ready on the safety front for advanced systems.

  • AVERI will focus on establishing audit standards and policies rather than conducting evaluations itself, acting as a ‘think tank’ over an actual auditor.

  • The institute received donations from employees at leading AI labs — people Brundage says "know where the bodies are buried."

  • The org published a framework of "AI Assurance Levels" — ranging from today's self-testing (Level 1) to treaty-grade international verification (Level 4).

Why it matters: “Where the bodies are buried” is an ominous quote, but the AI industry has largely relied on self-reported safety testing thus far — with trust placed on whatever labs choose to publish. AVERI's insider-backed push for external scrutiny could mark the beginning of a shift toward real third-party accountability.

AI TRAINING

📈 Optimize prompting with this Markdown strategy

The Rundown: In this tutorial, you will learn how to extract any completed AI task into reusable markdown instructions — making valuable tasks portable and repeatable across any AI tool.

Step-by-step:

  1. Create a Notebook in NotebookLM and complete your task (e.g., upload email to create variations), specifying word count, tone, rules, target, brand details

  2. Prompt: "Take the task and extract the context into instructions for AI in markdown format. The goal is to drop these into any AI with different variables and receive polished output with one prompt.”

  3. Create a new project in NotebookLM and paste the markdown instructions as text — now you've turned hours of prompting into a versatile project template

  4. Start a new chat with custom input variables to achieve the same outputs as your original chat

Pro tip: After creating markdown instructions, save them to a database like Notion.

PRESENTED BY UNWRAP

⚡ Powerful insights for powerful brands

The Rundown: Unwrap aggregates all your customer feedback (surveys, reviews, support tickets, social, sales calls, etc.) into a single AI-powered view, helping product, support, and CX teams at Southwest Airlines, Stripe, lululemon, and DoorDash turn every customer signal into actionable insights.

With Unwrap, you get:

  • All customer feedback auto-categorized into a single view

  • Natural language queries to explore feedback instantly

  • Real-time alerts, custom reporting, and clear sentiment tracking

Grab time directly with the team to talk through how Unwrap can automate your customer feedback analysis.

AI RESEARCH

📊 Anthropic’s first Economic Index of 2026

Image source: Anthropic

The Rundown: Anthropic published its fourth Economic Index, providing a deep dive into 2M Claude chats — revealing that most AI usage still looks more like collaboration than replacement, with humans in the driver's seat for the majority of tasks.

The details:

  • AI handles around 1/4 of tasks in almost 50% of all jobs, up from 36% last year, but full role replacement is happening at under 10% of firms.

  • Tasks requiring high-school skills are sped up 9x faster with AI, and 12x for college-level tasks, with Claude’s gains increasing for difficult use cases.

  • Claude’s ability to handle longer tasks continues to rise, with Anthropic’s data showing a 50% success rate for tasks as long as 19 hours.

  • Coding tasks still dominate Claude usage, though augmentation (learning, feedback, iteration) overtook pure automation-related tasks.

Why it matters: Productivity gains are happening fast, but the panic of AI completely taking over jobs doesn’t match the data (yet). The issue is for junior employees — if AI handles the grunt work usually used to train and provide experience, an entire generation of young talent might be stuck in a completely new economic reality.

QUICK HITS

🛠️ Trending AI Tools

  • 🤖 GLM-4.7 Flash - Z AI’s fast, efficient variant of its SOTA open-source model

  • 🗣️ TranslateGemma - Google’s new family of open-source translation models

  • ⚙️ Claude Code - Anthropic’s deep-context AI coding assistant

  • 🗣️ Scribe V2 - ElevenLabs’ SOTA transcription model

📰 Everything else in AI today

Z AI released GLM-4.7-Flash, a 30B, speed and efficiency-focused variant of its powerful open-source model that leads its size class across a series of benchmarks.

Business insights firm Gartner projected that worldwide AI spending will reach $2.52T in 2026, a 44% jump driven largely by massive infrastructure buildouts.

South Korea is currently holding an AI competition to elevate the country’s top homegrown AI models, with LG, SK, and startup Upstage remaining in contention.

Anthropic published research showing AI can slip into playing other characters during long chats, and introduced a fix that halved harmful responses.

xAI engineer Sulaiman Ghori announced that he left the company, coming on the heels of a revealing viral interview detailing the startup’s inner workings.

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 Prateek M. in India:

"I recently went on a trip… and was looking for a new way to remember our moments. When I came across music/song creation AI tools, I realized a song would be a great way to cherish those memories. I went to ChatGPT and explained our trip. I uploaded both the inputs (lyrics & music description) onto Suno and… got the perfect trip song!"

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

Ads are officially coming to ChatGPT

Zach Mink • 6 minutes

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Good morning, AI enthusiasts. Sam Altman once called ads in ChatGPT a "last resort" — but now, they're officially on the way.

OpenAI will begin testing targeted ads for free and budget tier users in the U.S., marking a controversial monetization shift that could set the tone for how the entire AI industry balances user trust with revenue pressures.

In today’s AI rundown:

  • OpenAI officially bringing ads to ChatGPT

  • The Rundown Roundtable: Our AI use cases

  • Code from your phone with OpenAI’s Codex

  • Musk, OpenAI trade (more) public blows

  • 4 new AI tools, community workflows, and more

LATEST DEVELOPMENTS

OPENAI

📢 OpenAI officially bringing ads to ChatGPT

Image source: OpenAI

The Rundown: OpenAI just announced it will begin testing targeted advertisements in ChatGPT for free and Go tier users in the U.S. — putting into motion a major (and controversial) monetization shift for the AI giant as it eyes a late-2026 IPO.

The details:

  • Ads will appear below responses as "Sponsored Recommendations," targeted based on conversations but excluded from health, politics, and underage users.

  • The move coincides with the company’s $8/month ChatGPT Go tier launching globally, with ads included to offset the lower price point.

  • Premium tiers (Plus, Pro, Business, Enterprise) remain ad-free, with OAI pledging to never sell user data or let ads influence ChatGPT's answers.

  • Sam Altman had said in 2024 that ads in ChatGPT would be a “last resort”, but more recently said he “wasn’t totally against it” if it didn’t violate user trust.

Why it matters: We’ve heard conflicting statements from OAI’s leadership in the past on ads, but the March hiring of Instacart’s Fidji Simo hinted at both the IPO and advertising route. Ads in AI assistants are a slippery slope, so the execution will be a nuanced moment to watch — potentially setting the tone for the industry as a whole.

TOGETHER WITH THOUGHTWORKS

📈 Unify data, delivery and human expertise

The Rundown: AI/works is Thoughtworks’ agentic development platform that unifies expert technologists and decades of engineering excellence so you can build, modernize, and evolve enterprise systems faster.

Discover how it enables you to:

  • Move from spec to code

  • Build once, reuse everywhere, compound speed over time

  • Integrate seamlessly with your stack

See AI/works in action.

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.

Rowan, Founder & CEO: Granola AI has become my meeting recorder outside of just Zoom meetings. I recently had a 3-hour meeting with legal for business structuring, and I turned on Granola AI on my phone (with other parties' consent), and it picked up the entire transcript nearly word for word (for over 3 hours!), which I later pasted into ChatGPT to go back and forth on things that I didn't fully grasp in the moment.

Joey, Head of Partnerships: I have been looking around at new apartment development projects, looking to potentially buy in the next two years. I used ChatGPT Deep Research to help compare the cost, the quality of the appliances and materials the builders are using, and chart out the overall cost.

Jennifer, Tech & Robotics Writer: I use Ideogram and Reve for newsletter images, and they’re impressively good even with minimal prompts. I’ll set a general style and tone, and they consistently deliver solid renderings of the tech personalities we cover — the style has become part of our storytelling.

AI TRAINING

📱Code from your phone with OpenAI’s Codex

The Rundown: In this tutorial, you’ll learn how to 10× your code output with Codex by setting it up in Cursor, running it in the cloud from anywhere (even your phone), and configuring an agent that automatically reviews your code for you.

Step-by-step:

  1. Install Codex by going to the Codex quickstart, selecting your IDE (Cursor), and launching a new Codex Agent inside that editor

  2. Ask Codex to generate an agents.md file from your project (or a PRD/spec if starting fresh), then initialize Git so Codex understands your codebase, rules

  3. Explore slash commands (like /review, /status, and /context) to review changes, manage context, and control how Codex reasons across your files

  4. Push the project to GitHub and connect it to Codex to access from anywhere, and enable automatic PR reviews so every pull request is reviewed in the cloud

Pro tip: Code locally in Cursor, then hand off reviews to cloud Codex — cloud runs don’t count against your local usage.

PRESENTED BY GURU

🧠 Your AI source of truth

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

Guru allows you to:

  • Connect all knowledge with permission-aware access

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

  • Experience knowledge that improves and verifies itself

Learn more about Guru.

ELON MUSK & OPENAI

⚔️ Musk, OpenAI trade (more) public blows

Image source: Screenshots from X, OpenAI

The Rundown: Elon Musk and OpenAI continued to spar ahead of their April trial, with Musk sharing anecdotes from Greg Brockman’s 2017 private journal and Sam Altman accusing Musk of "cherry-picking" and OAI releasing correspondence of its own.

The details:

  • The file details Brockman’s convo with Ilya Sutskever on OAI’s structure and their desire to become a B-Corp, along with concerns over Musk’s involvement.

  • Altman posted notes of Musk wanting to “accumulate $80B for a self-sustaining city on Mars” and a succession plan for his children to control AGI.

  • OpenAI published a blog of its own highlighting context and discrepancies between Musk’s filing and Brockman’s notes, calling it “The truth Elon left out”.

  • Musk tweeted, "Can't wait to start the trial. The discovery and testimony will blow your mind", and is reportedly seeking $134B in damages in the lawsuit.

Why it matters: Get the popcorn ready, folks. If the early discovery nuggets are any indication, we're in for the messiest, most expensive AI lawsuit ever — and a front-row seat to the origin story of tech's biggest current arch-rivalry. Both sides clearly think the full record helps them, which means April is about to get VERY entertaining.

QUICK HITS

🛠️ Trending AI Tools

  • 🧠 Scroll.ai - Turn any knowledge base into enterprise-grade chatbots, with accuracy and depth far beyond generic models*

  • 💼 Claude Cowork - Claude Code’s agentic abilities, now available to Pro tier

  • ⚙️ Replit - New capabilities to easily build and deploy mobile apps

  • 📸 FLUX.2 Klein - BFL’s new ultra-fast, powerful AI image editing model

*Sponsored Listing

📰 Everything else in AI today

Black Forest Labs released FLUX.2[klein], a new speed-focused variant of the company’s powerful AI editing model.

DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis said that China’s models “may be only a matter of months behind” U.S. labs, but have yet to show innovation surpassing the frontier.

Elon Musk announced that xAI’s Colossus 2 supercomputer powering Grok is now live, marking the world’s first operational gigawatt cluster in the world.

The Wikimedia Foundation announced new AI partnerships with Amazon, Meta, Microsoft, Perplexity, and Mistral, enabling training on the company’s 65M+ articles.

OpenAI CFO Sarah Friar published a blog revealing the company hit $20B+ in annualized revenue for 2025, tripling YoY, with compute expanding 10x since 2023.

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 Forest in Texas:

"I was sick of ‘Scam Likely’ ruining my dinner. So, instead of getting mad, I got even. I built a digital bodyguard named Forest. He uses OpenAI and a custom voice model to sound exactly like a confused elderly man.

His instructions are simple: be polite, be interested, but never, ever let them close the deal. The Outcome: Sweet, sweet revenge. I get to listen to recordings of scammers losing their minds arguing with an AI about armadillos, and I didn't have to lift a finger."

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

Wikipedia inks deals with Amazon, Meta

Jennifer Mossalgue • 5 minutes

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Good morning, tech enthusiasts. Wikimedia just put a price tag on one of the internet’s most scraped resources.

The nonprofit behind Wikipedia has signed licensing deals with Amazon, Meta, and Microsoft, turning what was once free-for-all — 65M articles, zero compensation — into a paid offering. As AI chatbots siphon off human readers, the question now is whether Wikipedia can turn this leverage into a sustainable future in the AI age.

In today’s tech rundown:

  • Wikipedia inks deals with Big Tech

  • Amazon’s data centers get copper from bacteria

  • News Corp brings AI into the newsroom

  • Tiny scanner detects allergens in minutes

  • Quick hits on other tech news

LATEST DEVELOPMENTS

WIKIPEDIA

🤝 Wikipedia inks deals with Big Tech

Image source: Wikipedia / Reve

The Rundown: Wikimedia just announced licensing deals with Amazon, Meta, Microsoft, Perplexity, and Mistral AI, formalizing what had long been a one-sided relationship where tech giants scraped its 65M articles without compensation.

The details:

  • The foundation reported an 8% decline in human traffic, attributed to AI chatbots that answer questions directly without sending users to sources.

  • Disguised bots have been heavily taxing Wikipedia’s servers as they scrape massive amounts of content to train large language models.

  • Founder Jimmy Wales endorsed the arrangement, noting he’s happy AI trains on Wikipedia's human-curated content compared to alternatives like X.

  • Wikipedia is also exploring AI tools that could reduce tedious editor tasks, like automatically updating dead links by scanning surrounding text.

Why it matters: The new partners join Google, which signed a deal with Wikimedia in 2022, and should help offset infrastructure costs for the nonprofit, which relies on small public donations. Meanwhile, Wikipedia’s editors are pushing back on its testing of generative AI, calling it a “ghastly idea” that could undermine trust in the platform.

AMAZON

🦠 Amazon's data centers get copper from bacteria

Image source: Nuton (harvesting copper cathode)

The Rundown: Amazon Web Services is buying copper extracted by bacteria from an Arizona mine that recently became the U.S.’s first new source of the metal in more than a decade, locking in a lower-carbon supply to feed its voracious AI data centers.

The details:

  • Amazon has signed a two-year deal to buy copper from Excelsior Mining’s Gunnison project in Arizona, the first new U.S. copper output in 10+ years.

  • The copper will be produced using Rio Tinto’s Nuton bioleaching tech, which is billed as having a smaller environmental footprint than conventional mining.​

  • The project targets approximately 30K tonnes of refined copper over four years, enough for perhaps power a single mammoth data center.

  • AI sector growth is expected to boost global copper demand 50% by 2040, though analysts warn supplies could fall far short.

Why it matters: Amazon is reaching past utilities and chipmakers into the dirty, capital-intensive world of mining — a sign that Big Tech now sees raw materials as strategic assets. AI data centers are copper-hungry beasts, and with EVs and clean energy already straining supply, expect more cloud giants to lock in deals before rivals do.

SYMBOLIC AI

🗞️ News Corp brings AI into the newsroom

Image source: Symbolic AI

The Rundown: Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp just signed a major deal with Symbolic, a stealthy AI startup founded by former eBay CEO Devin Wenig and Ars Technica co-founder Jon Stoke to slash newsroom research time by up to 90%.

The details:

  • Symbolic says it functions as an automated AI editor that unifies research, writing, and publishing into a single platform.

  • Dow Jones Newswires — the service behind the Wall Street Journal, Barron’s, and MarketWatch — will be the first to deploy the tech as part of its workflow.

  • The platform tackles everything from audio transcription and document extraction to fact-checking, headline optimization, and SEO guidance.

  • Wenig calls the partnership “a watershed moment” and predicts no media or communications business will stay competitive without a similar approach.

Why it matters: Major outlets like the New York Times, BBC, and Reuters have already built proprietary AI tools into their workflows — and News Corp itself signed a multi-year licensing deal with OpenAI in 2024. If Symbolic’s 90% productivity claim holds at scale, it could reshape how publishers think about AI investment.

TECH FOR GOOD

😋 Tiny scanner detects allergens in minutes

Image source: Allergen Alert

The Rundown: A French diagnostics firm has turned a decade of allergy research into a pocket-sized lab called Allergen Alert, a battery-powered scanner that gives people with severe allergies a way to verify their food instead of trusting packaging or waitstaff.

The details:

  • Launched at CES, the device analyzes a tiny food sample in a disposable pouch and returns allergen results in about two minutes via screen or app.

  • The first-gen model, due for pre-orders later this year, detects milk and gluten using immunoassay tech borrowed from clinical labs.

  • The roadmap targets all nine major allergens by 2028, adding peanuts, tree nuts, eggs, shellfish, wheat, soy, and sesame to the list.

  • Test pouches run under $10 each, with a subscription tier aimed at high-volume users like restaurants.

Why it matters: Beyond the obvious lifesaving potential, Allergen Alert signals a future where portable biosensors become standard kitchen gear — driven by rising allergy rates and brutal medical costs pushing both restaurants and households toward always-on food safety. Water and environmental testing could be next.

QUICK HITS

📰 Everything else in tech today

Customers affected by Verizon’s wireless outage can access a $20 account credit via the myVerizon app, after the disruption left around 170K users without service.

Amazon is fighting Saks Global’s bid for up to $1.75B in bankruptcy financing, telling a judge the deal would leave its own $475M equity stake effectively worthless.

Spotify is hiking U.S. Premium subscription prices again in February, raising the individual plan from $11.99 to $12.99 a month.

Elon Musk posted on X that Tesla will stop selling its Full Self‑Driving (Supervised) package outright after Feb. 14 and will only offer it as a monthly subscription.

Billionaire tech investor Peter Thiel made his biggest political donation in years, writing a $3M check to fight the state’s proposed 2026 Billionaire Tax Act.

Indian launch startup EtherealX quintupled its valuation to $80.5M as it races to build a fully reusable, Falcon 9–class rocket that can return its booster and upper stage.

YouTube is adding new parental controls that let you set daily time limits or block access entirely for kids watching Shorts on supervised accounts.

German investor DTCP is raising a €500M (~$580M) fund that it says will be Europe’s largest dedicated defense-tech vehicle for dual‑use and military startups.​

NASA cut short the Crew-11 mission and brought four astronauts back from the ISS on SpaceX Dragon in the agency’s first-ever medical evacuation from space.

Telecoms giant Ericsson plans to cut about 1,600 jobs in Sweden as part of a cost-saving drive.

Thailand approved 96.9B baht (~$3.1B) in new data center and data-hosting projects, reinforcing the country’s push to become a regional tech hub.

COMMUNITY

🎓 Highlights: News, Guides & Events

See you soon,

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

AI

Murati's co-founders return to OpenAI

Zach Mink • 6 minutes

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Good morning, AI enthusiasts. OpenAI used to say it was "nothing without its people" — and now it's getting a few big ones back in dramatic fashion.

Former CTO Mira Murati’s Thinking Machines just fired co-founder and CTO Barret Zolph over alleged misconduct, only for him and several others to land back at OAI in the industry’s latest AI talent shakeup.

Reminder: Our next workshop is today at 4 PM EST — join and learn how to leverage Projects and Deep Research in your workflows to upgrade working with AI. RSVP here.

In today’s AI rundown:

  • Thinking Machines loses co-founders to OAI

  • Cursor builds browser with AI agents

  • Run parallel media tasks with Claude Cowork

  • OpenAI invests in Altman’s Neuralink rival

  • 4 new AI tools, community workflows, and more

LATEST DEVELOPMENTS

THINKING MACHINES & OPENAI

🚨 Thinking Machines loses co-founders to OAI

Image source: Lovart / The Rundown

The Rundown: Mira Murati's Thinking Machines Lab just parted ways with co-founder and CTO Barret Zoph amid misconduct allegations (H/T to Kylie Robison for breaking the news), with Zoph and several other former staffers returning to OAI just hours later.

The details:

  • Murati announced the split at an all-hands meeting and on X, with Zoph reportedly accused of sharing proprietary information with competitors.

  • OAI applications CEO Fidji Simo welcomed the trio back in a post on X, revealing the company had been in discussions with Zoph for weeks.

  • Murati elevated longtime Meta AI researcher and PyTorch framework creator Soumith Chintala as Thinking Machines' new CTO.

  • The departures mark Thinking Machines’ third co-founder exit in under a year, following Andrew Tulloch's move to Meta in October.

Why it matters: In 2024, Murati's OAI departure was a shock to the AI world, and now her own co-founders are boomeranging back to her former employer under ugly circumstances. OAI is “nothing without its people,” as the old saying goes, and now it’s getting a few big ones back (and potentially more) — albeit in a dramatic fashion.

TOGETHER WITH HUBPSOT

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CURSOR

🤖 Cursor builds browser with AI agents

Image source: Cursor CEO Michael Truell (@mntruell on X)

The Rundown: Cursor published a new blog revealing it ran hundreds of AI coding agents autonomously for weeks on end — with one experiment producing a 3M+ line web browser built entirely from the ground up using GPT 5.2.

The details:

  • Cursor organized agents into planners, workers, and judges (similar to the viral Ralph Wiggum technique), allowing hundreds to run and collaborate together.

  • The browser was built in under a week by the agents from scratch, with the final output actually loading simple websites correctly.

  • Other experiments included a Windows 7 emulator, an Excel clone, and an internal migration of Cursor's codebase, each spanning a million+ lines of code.

  • The team also noted that GPT-5.2 handled long autonomous runs significantly better than Claude Opus 4.5, which tended to take shortcuts.

Why it matters: The current frontier generation of coding agents has broken through an invisible capability wall, and we’re seeing it everywhere from viral Claude Code use cases to AI agent swarms crushing 1M line projects over weeks. With increased agent coordination and durations of work, the entire economics of development start to shift.

AI TRAINING

🤓 Run parallel media tasks with Claude Cowork

The Rundown: In this tutorial, you’ll learn how to use Claude Cowork to process images and videos in parallel — compressing files, extracting audio, and handling media-heavy tasks automatically on your computer.

Step-by-step:

  1. Update your Claude desktop app (requires a Claude Max subscription at $100/month) and open the new Cowork tab

  2. Put one or two images and videos in a new folder, then click "Work in a folder" and select that folder

  3. Give Claude this prompt: "Save copies of the images in this folder, then reduce the file size of each by at least 50%"

  4. Before it finishes, add another prompt: "Extract the audio from the small steps video and save it as an MP3" — Claude will power through both tasks in parallel

Pro tip: Add Context7 extension to give Cowork access to open source documentation.

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MERGE LABS & OPENAI

🧠 OpenAI invests in Altman’s Neuralink rival

Image source: Lovart / The Rundown

The Rundown: OpenAI announced a new seed investment into Merge Labs, a brain-computer interface startup co-founded by Sam Altman that emerged from stealth alongside its $252M raise, with the AI giant becoming the company’s largest backer.

The details:

  • Merge is aiming to boost BCI bandwidth using ultrasound and engineered proteins, skipping the surgical brain implants required by rivals like Neuralink.

  • The founding team includes World/Tools for Humanity's Alex Blania and Sandro Herbig, plus researchers from Caltech and the nonprofit Forest Neurotech.

  • OAI will work on AI models and tools to help Merge read brain signals and ramp R&D, saying BCIs will be “natural, human-centered way” to interact with AI.

Why it matters: OAI’s investment continues the circular merry-go-round of dealmaking, this time on a more personal level for Altman. But the bigger story may be the turf he’s encroaching on, bringing his feud with Elon Musk into the brain-computer interface sector — and likely making for a whole new round of drama in the process.

QUICK HITS

🛠️ Trending AI Tools

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  • 💬 ChatGPT Translate - Translate text, voice, or images across 50+ languages

  • 🔊 TranslateGemma - Google’s new family of open translation models

  • 💼 Claude Cowork - Bring Claude Code’s agentic capabilities to everyday tasks

*Sponsored Listing

📰 Everything else in AI today 

ByteDance released SeedFold, a new open-source protein structure prediction model that outperforms Google’s AlphaFold3 across several benchmarks.

Elon Musk revealed that Grok 4.20 will lag behind Claude in coding, saying Anthropic has “done something special” but that cutting off xAI was “not good for their karma”.

Replit launched mobile app creation, letting users build, test via QR code, and publish directly to the App Store from a single platform.

Airbnb appointed Ahmad Al-Dahle as Chief Technology Officer, bringing in Meta's former head of generative AI and the leader behind the Llama model family.

AI creative platform Higgsfield announced a new $130M funding round at a $1.3B valuation, with the company claiming to be the fastest scaling AI company in history.

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 John D. in Daytona Beach, FL:

"As the IT guy, I enjoy showing coworkers what AI can do. For our accounting team, I fed a CSV file of our annual Business Prime account activity into Claude, and it created a colorful summary with charts & graphs and broke down spending by month, who spent what, product categories we spent most on, and where we can save money.”

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

1X now has a world model

Jennifer Mossalgue • 5 minutes

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Good morning, robotics enthusiasts. 1X wants its Neo humanoids to learn the way humans do: by watching. The Norwegian startup just unveiled a physics-based world model that lets robots learn tasks from video instead of code.

Right now, that means Neo is learning high fives and handling air fryer baskets, but the approach puts 1X in serious company.

In today’s robotics rundown:

  • 1X releases a world model for Neo

  • Skild AI hits $14B for building robot brains

  • Motional robotaxis target Vegas comeback

  • Robot learns to lip sync by watching YouTube

  • Quick hits on other robotics news

LATEST DEVELOPMENTS

1X

🌎 1X releases a world model for Neo

Image source: 1X / YouTube

The Rundown: Humanoid maker 1X just released a physics-based world model that uses video and prompts to teach its Neo robots new tasks, moving closer to bots that can learn by observation rather than pre-programming.

The details:

  • The company unveiled its 1X World Model as it prepares to ship Neo to customers who preordered the home robots in October.

  • Neo captures video data linked to prompts and feeds it back into the model, which then distributes learned behaviors across the entire network of bots.

  • 1X joins competitors like Skild AI (more on it below) and Field AI in pursuing adaptive robotic software that learns from observation.

  • The world model represents a step toward robots that teach themselves rather than requiring exhaustive pre-programming for each action.

Why it matters: While 1X claims Neo can “transform any prompt into new actions” and “master nearly anything you could think to ask,” the actual learned tasks remain limited to basics like removing air fryer baskets and making toast. Still, the ability to learn simple tasks from observation puts 1X in direct competition with major players.

SKILD AI

🧠 Skild AI hits $14B for building robot brains

Image source: Skild AI

The Rundown: Skild AI, a Pittsburgh-based startup building foundation models to let robots learn by watching humans, tripled its valuation to $14B in seven months on the promise of general-purpose robot brains.

The details:

  • Skild builds foundation models that retrofit existing robots with adaptive capabilities, allowing machines to learn new tasks without extensive retraining.

  • Its valuation jumped from $4.5B last summer, reflecting investor confidence that learn-as-you-go software represents the breakthrough needed for robots.

  • The startup’s models learn by observing human demos, addressing the core bottleneck that keeps robots locked into narrow, pre-programmed routines.

  • Skild was founded in 2023 by Carnegie Mellon roboticists Deepak Pathak and Abhinav Gupta, and has raised over $300M in a single Series A round.

Why it matters: The sheer amount of training required for robots to learn each new task remains the biggest hurdle to adoption. Adaptive software that lets machines learn as they go could clear the path for broader deployment, though Skild AI faces growing competition from rivals like Field, Physical Intelligence, Figure, and (now) 1X.

MOTIONAL

🎰 Motional robotaxis target Vegas comeback

Image source: Hyundai Motor Group

The Rundown: Motional, the struggling autonomous vehicle company born from Hyundai and Aptiv’s $4B joint venture, is rebooting its robotaxi ambitions with an AI-first self-driving system and a plan to launch driverless service in Las Vegas.

The details:

  • The company paused operations in 2024 after missing deadlines and cutting 40% of staff, prompting Hyundai to inject $1B after Aptiv withdrew backing.

  • Motional ditched its complex web of machine learning models for an end-to-end foundation model that adapts to new cities through retraining.

  • The company will launch IONIQ 5 robotaxi rides with safety drivers later this year, then remove human operators by December 2026 for driverless service.

  • Test rides showed progress in navigating chaotic Las Vegas hotel pickup zones, though the system still struggled around double-parked delivery vans.

Why it matters: Motional’s promise arrives as Zoox already operates a free public robotaxi service on the Las Vegas Strip and Waymo offers commercial rides in other cities. Whether foundation models can compress years of development into months will determine if Motional survives or becomes another pricey cautionary tale.

ROBOTICS RESEARCH

👄 Robot learns to lip sync by watching YouTube

Image source: Columbia / Reve

The Rundown: The team at Columbia Engineering’s Creative Machines Lab developed a flexible silicone robotic face with 26 tiny motors, then let it learn lip syncing by watching YouTube videos rather than preprogrammed rules.

The details:

  • The robot first spent hours making random expressions in front of a mirror to learn how its own face moves.

  • It then watched videos of humans talking and singing to map those movements to speech sounds, an approach dubbed a "vision-to-action" language mode.

  • The system outperformed five existing approaches and generalized across 11 languages without requiring language-specific training data.

  • When paired with ChatGPT, the lip-syncing skill creates what the researchers call “a whole new depth to the connection” between robots and humans.

Why it matters: Robots like Hanson’s Sophia have been lip-syncing to speech for nearly a decade, but rule-based systems still deliver stiff, uncanny results. Columbia’s learning-based approach could finally narrow that gap — though making robots this emotionally convincing raises concerns of its own.

QUICK HITS

📰 Everything else in robotics today

German auto supplier Schaeffler inked a deal with London-based startup Humanoid to deploy hundreds of bipedal machines across its factories over the next five years.

New York Governor Kathy Hochul is moving to legalize robotaxis statewide, except in New York City, where Waymo and others remain stuck in regulatory limbo.

NYU engineers developed fluid-driven gears that use spinning liquid instead of interlocking teeth, a breakthrough that could make robots more immune to wear.

Shanghai-based AgiBot reportedly captured 39% of the global humanoid robot market in 2025 with over 5,100 units already shipped.

Autonomous trucking startup Kodiak is tapping automotive supply giant Bosch to build production-grade sensors and steering systems for its driverless rigs.

A Nature review of 47 ray-inspired underwater robots found that researchers are still struggling to find effective actuators for mid-sized designs.

China’s Matrix Robotics unveiled MATRIX-3, a humanoid with synthetic skin, 27 DoF hands, and a brain that learns new tasks from spoken commands without training.

Dutch robotics firm Vitestro released its first public video demonstrating Aletta, an autonomous robot that performs diagnostic blood draws without human intervention.

Japanese researchers developed a machine learning system that lets robots learn human grasping techniques from minimal training data, cutting motion errors by 74%.

The Association for Advancing Automation released a 403-page safety standard consolidating U.S. and international rules for industrial robots into one document.

COMMUNITY

🎓 Highlights: News, Guides & Events

See you soon,

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

AI

Gemini's ‘Personal Intelligence’ upgrade

Zach Mink • 6 minutes

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Good morning, AI enthusiasts. As frontier models converge on capability, the differentiator is becoming personal context — and no one has more of it across the internet than Google.

The company's latest ‘Personal Intelligence’ upgrade lets Gemini pull from Gmail, Photos, and YouTube automatically, turning the apps billions already use into an AI moat rivals will struggle to cross.

In today’s AI rundown:

  • Gemini’s new ‘Personal Intelligence’ upgrade

  • McConaughey trademarks himself to fight deepfakes

  • Get the most out of Google’s Gemini in Gmail

  • Z AI’s open image model trained on Huawei chips

  • 4 new AI tools, community workflows, and more

LATEST DEVELOPMENTS

GOOGLE

🧠 Gemini’s new ‘Personal Intelligence’ upgrade

Image source: Google

The Rundown: Google just launched Personal Intelligence, a new beta feature that lets Gemini reason across apps like Gmail, Photos, YouTube, and Search data to deliver more personalized responses without users needing to specify which app to pull from.

The details:

  • Personal Intelligence connects Google’s app suite to Gemini, letting the assistant understand, locate, and proactively use personalized details.

  • The tool can reason across text, images, and videos, with VP Josh Woodward detailing the AI referencing his photos and emails to help at a tire shop.

  • Personal Intelligence is off by default, with Google saying it won’t train its AI models directly on connected info like inboxes or photo libraries.

  • The feature is rolling out to Gemini AI Pro and Ultra subscribers in the U.S. first, with plans to expand to free tiers and AI Mode in the future.

Why it matters: This feels like Google is finally playing the card its AI rivals will always struggle to match: billions of users already living inside Gmail, Photos, and YouTube. As the frontier models all become extremely capable for the average user, deep integrations with personal context from widely used apps will be the big differentiator.

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  • Government: pull permit details and inspection dates to streamline compliance

  • Insurance: distill claims info from reports and images to accelerate processing

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AI & COPYRIGHT

⭐️ McConaughey trademarks himself to fight deepfakes

Image source: Lovart / The Rundown

The Rundown: Oscar-winning actor Matthew McConaughey secured eight trademark approvals from the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office covering his voice, likeness, and video clips, according to the WSJ, citing the need to combat AI deepfakes and misuse.

The details:

  • The approved trademarks include audio of his famous "Alright, alright, alright" catchphrase and short clips of him speaking and staring into a camera.

  • McConaughey told the WSJ that they “want to create a clear perimeter around ownership with consent and attribution the norm in an AI world.”

  • McConaughey's lawyers say the filings give them a federal court avenue to pursue AI misuse, rather than relying on state-by-state publicity laws.

  • The actor is an investor in AI voice startup ElevenLabs, as well as the face of Salesforce’s Agentforce TV campaigns.

Why it matters: The capabilities of AI image and video models are blurring reality more than ever, and newer, powerful releases have been far more lax on creating real likenesses and IP. McConaughey is right to push against the unclear ownership rules in the AI era, but thus far, it’s been a tough legal game to play without strong results.

AI TRAINING

📧 Get the most out of Google’s Gemini in Gmail

The Rundown: In this tutorial, you will learn how to use Google’s new Gemini features in Gmail, what is available right now, and the most beneficial and disappointing parts about this initial rollout.

Step-by-step:

  1. With a Google Workspace or “AI Pro” personal account, go to gmail.com and click on settings in the top right. Make sure all the "smart features" are enabled

  2. In your inbox, click the “Ask Gemini” button next to settings and ask anything about your inbox, like: “What emails do I have about [subject]?”

  3. In any draft, you can press Option + H (Mac) or Alt + H (Windows), or click "Help me write" to take Gemini’s help to write based on the email’s context

  4. After a reply is written, you can click “Recreate” to regenerate it or click “Refine” to change the tone or length of the reply.

Pro tip: Use “help me schedule” in the draft pane to have Gemini read the email thread, check the calendars, and suggest meeting times to whomever you’re emailing.

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  • 31% improvement in employee efficiency

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ZHIPU AI

🎇 Z AI’s open image model trained on Huawei chips

Image source: Z AI

The Rundown: Chinese AI startup Zhipu AI just released GLM-Image, an open-source image generator hailed as the first major model trained entirely on Huawei hardware — though early testing has not been positive despite strong benchmark scores.

The details:

  • The 16B-parameter model was developed using Huawei's Ascend chips and software, with zero reliance on US semiconductors.

  • Z AI claims GLM-Image excels at text-heavy images and beats Nano Banana Pro on accuracy benchmarks, though early user tests have not backed that up.

  • The model trails top options like Nano Banana Pro and Seedream on overall image quality, but is released fully open-source under a permissive license.

Why it matters: Zhipu made its AI presence felt with a powerful GLM-4.7 release in December (and a recent HK IPO), and now brings a capable, open image model debut trained entirely without Nvidia to the table. While it may not beat out closed rivals, it’s a sign that China's AI industry isn't waiting around for the chip war to end.

QUICK HITS

🛠️ Trending AI Tools

  • 👨‍💻 Thesys - Make AI apps respond with interactive UI instead of walls of text. Try one of the world's first Generative UI API for free*

  • 🧠 Personal Intelligence - Personalize Gemini with info from apps like Gmail

  • 🎇 GLM-Image - Z AI’s new open-source image generation model

  • 🩻 MedGemma 1.5 - Google’s newly updated open medical models

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📰 Everything else in AI today

OpenAI announced a deal with chipmaker Cerebras to deploy 750MW of dedicated processing power for faster AI responses, with capacity rolling out through 2028.

ElevenLabs is partnering with Deutsche Telekom to deploy AI voice agents for customer service, offering 24/7 support without wait times via app and phone.

Slack updated its Slackbot, now acting as a personal AI agent that taps into messages, channels, and files to answer and leverage context throughout work.

OpenAI made its GPT-5.2-Codex model available to developers via the Responses API, extending the model’s availability beyond the company’s Codex platform.

Microsoft reportedly became one of Anthropic’s top customers, according to The Information, ramping spending on its models to nearly $500M annually.

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 Jon M. in Wake Forest, NC:

"I coach youth basketball and always struggled with substitutions: how to give every kid fair playing time while keeping balanced lineups on the court… I built a simple roster table, rated each player on height, offense, and defense (1–10), and asked ChatGPT to design a single-page HTML app that would generate substitutions.

The first version worked, but I refined it using Claude for hands-on code edits, improving mobile usability and flow. Now I can toggle who’s present, choose starters, and instantly get a quarter-by-quarter substitution plan with clear tracking."

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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