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Tech

This startup wants to hack the night sky

Jennifer Mossalgue • 5 minutes

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Good morning, tech enthusiasts. A California startup wants to turn satellites into giant mirrors and aim them at Earth after dark, lighting up everything from construction sites to public events.

Reflect Orbital is seeking FCC approval to launch thousands of light-redirecting spacecraft to illuminate paying customers on the ground. But top scientists around the globe warn that “daylight on demand” shouldn’t be up for sale.

In today’s tech rundown:

  • This startup plans to light up the night

  • Apple’s foldable iPhone hits engineering snag

  • Netflix launches ad-free gaming app for kids

  • The smart glasses without ‘creepy’ vibes 

  • Quick hits on other tech news

LATEST DEVELOPMENTS

SPACE

🪩 This startup plans to light up the night

Image source: Reflect Orbital

The Rundown: California startup Reflect Orbital is seeking FCC approval to launch thousands of orbital mirrors that would redirect sunlight for paying customers on Earth after dark — and top scientists are sounding the alarm.

The details:

  • Reflect Orbital, founded in 2021 with $35M in funding, is building satellites with large mirrors designed to redirect sunlight onto the Earth’s surface after dark.

  • Earendil-1, its demo satellite, would deploy 60-foot mirrors from a 625 km orbit to illuminate 5 km ground targets, with a target launch this year.

  • Presidents of four international scientific societies, representing 2,500 researchers in 30+ countries, have sent letters of concern to the FCC over this.

  • The company says it has received more than 260K service requests for uses including construction, public events, and a $1.25M Air Force contract.

Why it matters: Critics warn that a single company, with one federal agency’s approval, could reshape the night sky for everyone on Earth. With Reflect Orbital aiming for 50K satellites by 2035, scientists warn of “major adverse health consequences” for humans and massive disruption for hundreds of species.

APPLE

🍎 Apple’s foldable iPhone hits engineering snag

Image source: Lovart / The Rundown

The Rundown: Apple’s rumored foldable iPhone has hit unexpected hinge and display durability snags that could delay its planned 2026 debut, according to a report first broken by Nikkei Asia.

The details:

  • Apple’s first foldable iPhone has run into tougher‑than‑expected hinge and display issues in early test production, raising the risk for a delayed launch.

  • Suppliers have reportedly been warned that mass production and initial shipments may be pushed back if engineering fixes take longer.

  • Earlier reports said that the Cupertino giant plans to anchor a 2026 lineup around the foldable plus two iPhones with bigger screens.

  • Apple is experimenting with advanced hinge designs and new materials like liquid‑metal components to tame creasing and stress on the ultra‑thin glass.

Why it matters: Apple hopes its foldable iPhone will jolt a slowing premium smartphone market, but engineering snags show that even its famously controlled hardware machine can struggle when it tries to reinvent the form factor. Samsung Display has meanwhile locked in orders for up to 20M foldable OLED panels.

NETFLIX

🖍️ Netflix launches ad-free gaming app for kids

Image source: Netflix

The Rundown: Netflix is turning its kids’ tab into a training ground for the next generation of streamers with the launch of Netflix Playground, an ad‑free mobile gaming app for kids aged eight and under.

The details:

  • The standalone gaming app comes bundled with every Netflix subscription at no extra cost, but requires parental sign-in.

  • It launches first in the U.S., Canada, the UK, Australia, the Philippines, and New Zealand on iOS and Android, with global rollout scheduled for April 28.

  • Every title in Playground is playable offline, with parental controls in place and no ads, in‑app purchases, or additional fees of any kind.

  • At launch, the catalog centers on games based on familiar brands like Peppa Pig, Sesame Street, StoryBots, Dr. Seuss, and coloring or puzzle apps.

Why it matters: Playground is Netflix’s first real hit at Apple Arcade and Amazon Kids+, folding an ad‑free kids’ game bundle into a subscription that rivals still upcharge for. If it hooks young kids on playing inside the same franchises they watch, Netflix tightens its grip on family time.

EVEN REALITIES

👓 Meet the smart glasses without ‘creepy’ vibes

Image source: Even Realities

The Rundown: Chinese upstart Even Realities is taking aim at Meta’s Ray‑Ban smart glasses by selling camera‑free specs that promise all the AI assistance with none of the “creepy lens on your face” surveillance vibes, the Financial Times reports.

The details:

  • Even’s $600 G2 glasses skip the front‑facing camera entirely, using a mic and a floating 3D heads-up display for email, maps, and real-time translation.

  • The company positions the glasses as a direct foil to Meta’s Ray-Bans, arguing most people don’t want “a camera on face” in everyday use, even if creators do.

  • It also launched Even Hub, an app store that turns the G2 into an open platform, with 50+ third‑party apps and an SDK used by 2K developers.

  • Meta is meanwhile working to scale its AI glasses production toward 20M pairs a year by 2026 while packing them with camera‑driven Meta AI features.

Why it matters: Smart glasses are having a genuine breakout moment — Meta’s Ray-Ban, Chinese rival Rokid, and a wave of Android XR devices are all competing to build the next iPhone, but one you’d wear. Even is making a different bet: that most people want a quiet AI assistant on their face, not a surveillance device.

QUICK HITS

📰 Everything else in tech today

NASA’s Artemis II crew flew the Orion to 252,700 miles from Earth, setting a new record for the farthest distance humans have ever traveled from the planet.

Elon Musk is reportedly requiring banks and other advisers working on SpaceX’s planned IPO to purchase subscriptions to his Grok AI chatbot service.

Oracle reportedly laid off 30K employees by email as part of a cost-cutting push despite reporting a 95% surge in profit and heavy investment in an AI data center.

Maine is poised to become the first U.S. state to temporarily ban the construction of large new data centers to study their environmental and power-grid impacts.

Amazon and the US Postal Service reached a deal that will cut Amazon’s USPS package deliveries by 20%.

High gas prices in the U.S. are making EVs more attractive again, potentially helping Tesla reverse its recent sales slump, Axios reported.

Apple is again asking the U.S. Supreme Court to review its App Store fight with Epic Games over commission limits.

Scientists built a tiny implant that keeps drug‑producing cells alive for weeks to deliver controlled treatments inside the body.

Satellite startup Impulse Space is partnering with Anduril to develop experimental space-based interceptor tech for Trump’s planned Golden Dome missile defense shield.

COMMUNITY

🎓 Highlights: News, Guides & Events

See you soon,

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

AI

Sam Altman's new 'social contract' for AI

Zach Mink • 7 minutes

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Good morning, AI enthusiasts. Sam Altman wants the U.S. government to tax robots, create a national wealth fund, implement a 4-day workweek, and start planning for AI that can't be shut off. He also wants you to know this is urgent.

OpenAI's 13-page policy document lays out ideas behind the "new social contract," which Altman says is needed for a world adjusting to superintelligence — a transition he says has already begun.

In today’s AI rundown:

  • OpenAI’s new ‘social contract’ ideas for society, ASI

  • New Yorker surfaces secret memos behind Altman's firing

  • Stress test business ideas with Perplexity

  • Wang's first Meta models getting ready to ship

  • 4 new AI tools, community workflows, and more

LATEST DEVELOPMENTS

OPENAI

📜 OpenAI’s new ‘social contract’ ideas for society, ASI

Image source: OpenAI

The Rundown: OpenAI just published a 13-page policy document with ideas to help society navigate superintelligence and its societal impacts, asking Washington to tax AI-driven profits, create a wealth fund, implement a 4-day workweek, and more.

The details:

  • The proposal said we are “beginning a transition toward superintelligence”, with Altman telling Axios the moment requires a new “social contract” for society.

  • The most aggressive idea: a sovereign-style fund seeded by AI firms that would pay dividends to every American, as Alaska does with oil revenue.

  • Other ideas include taxes on robot labor, a 4-day workweek, "Right to AI" access for all, and containment playbooks for rogue autonomous AI.

  • Axios called it "the most detailed blueprint any tech titan has ever published for how to tax, regulate, and redistribute wealth from the technology he's building."

Why it matters: The CEO of an $852B company is asking the U.S. to prepare for a future where his own tech breaks the economic system — and you don't make that pitch unless you believe it's actually coming. But with the way things are moving, coupled with the slow-moving gears of the government, the clock is ticking.

TOGETHER WITH YOU.COM

🤑 Get the most out of your AI investment

The Rundown: Successful AI transformation starts with deeply understanding your organization’s most critical use cases. This practical guide from You.com walks through a proven framework to identify, prioritize, and document high-value AI opportunities.

In this AI Use Case Discovery Guide, you’ll learn how to:

  • Map internal workflows and customer journeys to pinpoint where AI can drive measurable ROI

  • Ask the right questions when it comes to AI use cases

  • Align cross-functional teams and stakeholders for a unified, scalable approach

Get the Guide.

SAM ALTMAN

🔍 New Yorker surfaces memos behind Altman's firing

Image source: The New Yorker

The Rundown: The New Yorker published an investigation into Sam Altman, drawing on 100+ interviews, unseen memos from ex–chief scientist Ilya Sutskever, and notes from Dario Amodei — alleging a long-running pattern of deception at the top of OpenAI.

The details:

  • The reporting spans Altman's full career arc, including conflicts at his startup Loopt, Y Combinator partners trying to push him out, and the OAI board drama.

  • Sutskever's memos, built from 70 pages of Slack messages and HR docs, allege Altman misrepresented safety protocols to the board.

  • Amodei's private notes, kept for years, reach the same conclusion as Sutskever independently: "The problem with OpenAI is Sam himself.”

  • A Microsoft exec told the reporters there's "a small but real chance" Altman is "remembered as a Bernie Madoff, Sam Bankman-Fried-level scammer.”

Why it matters: While there is no ‘smoking gun’ in this piece, there is a vastly detailed and concerning pattern of deception that seems to span across Altman’s career. But for every detractor, you also have fiercely loyal supporters and coworkers – making the CEO of the nearly trillion-dollar AI giant one of the most polarizing figures in the world.

AI TRAINING

🤔 Stress test business ideas with Perplexity

The Rundown: In this guide, you will learn how to use Perplexity Deep Research to stress test any business idea. Save the prompt below once and rerun it on every idea you have to see what’s feasible to build.

Step-by-step:

  1. Open Perplexity and switch to Deep Research mode. This works on the free plan (5 queries/day) and is basically a hidden version of Perplexity Computer

  2. Paste this prompt with your idea in the chat, hit run, and walk away for 5 to 6 minutes. Perplexity does the research and builds the slide deck in the same run

  3. Save the prompt somewhere you will actually use it again, like in a dedicated Perplexity space

  4. Then, every Saturday morning, take one idea off your list and run it. You will burn through a year of half-evaluated ideas in a month

Pro tip: Build variants. A 6-slide version for a co-founder pitch, a version that compares two ideas, or a 90-day MVP plan for ideas that already cleared validation.

PRESENTED BY IBM

⛳ IBM helps the Masters bring the fairway to every fan

The Rundown: There’s so much more to watching sports than watching. When every shot, by every player, on every hole produces more than 30 data points, the Masters and IBM turn golf into a data-rich, AI-powered immersive experience.

In the series, you'll explore:

  • Shots matter: Enhanced insights tell you why

  • Landing forecast: Score outcomes predicted by data and AI models

  • Round in 3 Minutes: Recap reels produced minutes after play

Get the full story.

META

 🚀 Wang's first Meta models getting ready to ship

Image source: Lovart / The Rundown

The Rundown: Meta is set to release the first AI models developed by Alexandr Wang’s Superintelligence team, with Axios reporting the company will make some of them available as open source — though the largest models will reportedly stay closed.

The details:

  • Meta and Wang’s codenamed ‘Avocado’ model was delayed in March over benchmark performances that fell short of rival models across the board.

  • The company is reportedly planning a consumer-focused, hybrid approach that includes both open and closed models for broad distribution across its apps.

  • Axios said Meta “knows its new models may not be competitive across the board” but “believes it will have areas of strength that appeal to consumers.”

Why it matters: This report doesn’t inspire confidence for a release that has already been delayed for poor performance, and after all the money spent and the high-profile new team brought in, another flop would be a painful one for a tech giant pushing desperately to enter the frontier AI race.

QUICK HITS

🛠️ Trending AI Tools

  • 🔒 Incogni - remove your personal data from the web so scammers and identity thieves can’t access it. Use code RUNDOWN to get 55% off.*

  • 🎥 VOID - Netflix’s open-source, physics-aware AI for video editing

  • 🗣️ AI Edge Eloquent - Google’s free voice dictation app that runs fully offline

  • 🎆 MAI-Image-2 - Microsoft’s image AI with upgraded realism and creativity

*Sponsored Listing

📰 Everything else in AI today

The Information reported that Sam Altman and OpenAI CFO Sarah Friar are not on the same page regarding IPO timing, though OpenAI denied the claim.

Iran's military singled out the $30B Stargate data center in Abu Dhabi as a target, publishing satellite footage and vowing to destroy U.S. infrastructure across the region.

OpenAI Head of Business Finance Chengpeng Mou posted new stats on ChatGPT’s use for healthcare questions, with the platform getting 2M insurance messages weekly.

Google released AI Edge Eloquent, a free iOS dictation app that cleans up raw speech into polished text entirely on-device.

Legion Health won approval to let its AI app directly refill psychiatric medications, the first time a state has greenlit AI to do the process without clinician oversight.

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 Wayne F. in the United Kingdom:

"I use AI as my "Workhorse" to act as a one-person eLearning agency. I host SME lessons in NotebookLM as a reference library. Using Kolb’s Learning Cycle, I map complex 5-part Pentad scenarios on a digital canvas, replacing physical rooms once filled with hundreds of post-its and flip charts.

I maintain strict control via a command-driven workflow, only generating assets when I trigger "VEO" or "create-image" using Nano Banana and Veo 3.1. Finally, I use Perplexity with NotebookLM to audit my work against the QM Rubric, Moore’s Theory of Transactional Distance, and Kolb’s cycle. AI allows me to collapse an entire production team into a single pipeline where I am simultaneously Creator, Designer, and Lead Auditor."

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

UBTech offers $18M a year for AI scientist

Jennifer Mossalgue • 5 minutes

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Good morning, robotics enthusiasts. Chinese robotics firm UBTech is offering up to $18M a year for a single AI scientist to help power its humanoid ambitions.

In a talent market where Silicon Valley giants have reportedly put $20M annual pay packages — and even $100M-plus incentives — on the table for elite AI researchers, the price of winning is starting to look absurd. Is this hype, or is the humanoid race getting very real?

In today’s robotics rundown:

  • UBTech offers $18M a year for one AI scientist

  • This tiny bot grows its own nervous system

  • Japan’s new workforce: robots wanted

  • New gig economy teaches humanoids how to work

  • Quick hits on other robotics news

LATEST DEVELOPMENTS

UBTECH

🤖 UBTech offers $18M a year for one AI scientist

Image source: UBTech

The Rundown: Chinese humanoid maker UBTech is offering up to $18M annually for a single chief AI scientist, turning one job listing into a neon sign for just how extreme the global humanoid race has become.

The details:

  • The role will lead “embodied intelligence” research, translating VLA and robotics models into dependable software for full-size industrial humanoids.

  • In January, Airbus deployed UBTech’s Walker S2 robots on aircraft production lines, proving these machines can handle real factory floors, not just demos.

  • The company says full-size humanoid revenue has surged, with sales climbing more than 50% and claiming a growing slice of total income.

  • By dangling CEO-level pay, UBTech looks to be turning a single AI scientist role into a spectacle meant to signal dominance while attracting talent.

Why it matters: UBTech is racing against OpenAI, Google DeepMind, Tesla’s humanoid push, and fast‑moving rivals like Geekplus-W — backed by Beijing’s 2026 robotics priority and Geekplus-W’s February hire of Tsinghua’s Dr. Zhao Hao — making its blockbuster talent grab a matter of survival.

BIOTECH

🔬 This tiny bot grows its own nervous system

Image source: Haleh Fotowat

The Rundown: Researchers at Tufts and Harvard just created “neurobots,” microscopic living machines built from frog cells that develop their own nervous systems, reorganizing their bodies and behavior in ways evolution never produced.

The details:

  • These engineered neurobots are tiny living robots assembled from frog cells that autonomously grow rudimentary nervous systems from scratch.

  • As neurons spread through each bot, they wire directly into the outer cell layer and begin influencing how the organism moves.

  • Unlike earlier frog-cell bots, neurobots swim with greater intensity and display varied, unpredictable movement patterns rather than looping the same motion.

  • Once the nervous system emerges, gene activity shifts — switching on pathways associated with brain formation and even eye development.

Why it matters: Neurobots demonstrate that a cluster of frog cells can self-organize not only a functional body but a nervous system capable of reshaping that body’s behavior. The implications are early-stage but could hint at a coming class of engineered life that thinks and repairs like tissue but deploys like hardware.

JAPAN

💼 Japan’s new workforce: robots wanted

Image source: Ideogram / The Rundown

The Rundown: With a working-age population that makes up just 59.6% of the country’s total, Japan is reportedly running out of humans to do the work. Robots are filling roles no one is left to take, Techcrunch reports.

The details:

  • Japan faces such an extreme labor shortage that companies are rolling out robots not to cut jobs, but because there are no workers left to hire.

  • Robots are filling frontline roles in convenience stores, logistics, and hospitality, from stocking shelves and cleaning floors to delivering room service.

  • Elderly care facilities are adopting robotic assistants to lift patients, monitor vital signs, and provide companionship in a rapidly aging society.

  • Policymakers and business leaders are reframing automation as critical economic infrastructure rather than a threat to employment.

Why it matters: Japan is becoming a real-time lab for how advanced economies can survive when demographics make full employment mathematically impossible, with nearly a third of citizens already over 65. How it balances robots, regulation, and human dignity could set expectations for aging countries everywhere.

HUMANOIDS

🤖 New gig economy teaches humanoids how to work

Image source: Micro1

The Rundown: Around the world, gig workers are strapping cameras to their chests and filming themselves doing dishes, folding laundry, and stocking shelves for roughly $15 an hour — all to train the robots that may one day replace them.

The details:

  • Palo Alto startup Micro1 has recruited thousands of "robotics generalists" across 50+ countries to film tasks for humanoid training datasets.

  • Encord and Scale AI run robotics programs that pay people to record manipulation tasks, claiming up to 100K hours of robot-training video.

  • DoorDash has also paid drivers to film themselves doing chores, turning its workforce into an embodied-AI data pipeline.

  • Stealth robotics startups are reportedly posting Craigslist-style ads offering $10–$20 an hour for people to record everyday tasks on their phones.

Why it matters: Training humanoids on human movement is the robotics equivalent of what scraped text did for LLMs: source the raw material cheaply, capture the value at the top. Meanwhile, workers in Nigeria and India filming themselves folding laundry are training machines that could one day automate the very jobs they rely on.

QUICK HITS

📰 Everything else in robotics today

Rivian spinoff, Also, raised $200M at a $1B valuation and partnered with DoorDash to build autonomous last‑mile delivery vehicles.

Waymo began offering robotaxi pickups and drop-offs at San Antonio International Airport — its first airport service in Texas and fourth major airport overall.

Uber and WeRide began fully driverless, fare‑charging robotaxi operations in several districts of Dubai via the Uber app.

San Francisco startup NomadicML raised $8.4M at a $50M valuation to grow its platform that converts autonomous‑vehicle video into training data for fleet monitoring.

Researchers developed pasta-shaped, air-powered artificial muscles that let robots lift up to 100x their own weight.

A fleet of Maximo construction robots installed 100 megawatts of utility-scale solar capacity, marking one of the largest robotic solar deployments to date.

Robot “police dogs” are patrolling Atlanta streets to deter crime, sparking debate over surveillance, civil liberties, and the privatization of law-enforcement tech.

A homemade solar-powered quadcopter set an unofficial multirotor endurance record by flying for over five hours using 28 solar panels and a small backup battery.

Georgia Tech researchers built tiny vibration-powered robot swarms that can latch, release, and reorganize without any electronics or batteries.

Cornell researchers developed MirrorBot, a small robot with dual mirrors that uses shared reflections and eye contact to spark conversations and social connections.

U.S. researchers created a new silicone actuator that stays resilient in extreme cold, heat, and near-vacuum, showing promise for soft robots in space missions.

Chinese researchers developed a new soft optical sensor that lets a robot hand sense finger positions precisely enough to perform delicate, human-like tasks.

U.S.-based entertainment startup Dollhouse unveiled Belmont, a cute robot butler that can be rented to roam parties serving guests snacks and drinks.

COMMUNITY

🎓 Highlights: News, Guides & Events

See you soon,

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

AI

Anthropic tells OpenClaw users to pay up

Zach Mink • 7 minutes

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Good morning, AI enthusiasts. First came tighter rate limits. Then came the backlash. Now Anthropic is going a step further, cutting off third-party agent platforms like OpenClaw from Claude's subscription plans entirely.

It's a pricing correction the company says is about sustainability, but the timing couldn't be worse — with OpenAI aggressively courting the same developer audience Anthropic has built its reputation on.

In today’s AI rundown:

  • Anthropic boots third-party agents from Claude plans

  • The Rundown Roundtable: Our AI use cases

  • How to take AI notes on phone calls

  • Netflix opens physics-aware AI for video editing

  • 4 new AI tools, community workflows, and more

LATEST DEVELOPMENTS

ANTHROPIC

🦞 Anthropic boots third-party agents from Claude plans

Image source: Lovart / The Rundown

The Rundown: Anthropic just blocked agent platforms like OpenClaw from running on Claude plans, requiring users to pay separately via usage add-ons or API keys, as the company confronts agent-driven demand its flat-rate pricing was never built to absorb.

The details:

  • Agent tools hit Claude with nonstop requests that exceed what its normal plans typically cover, despite Anthropic models being the leading driver for the tech.

  • Anthropic’s Boris Cherny announced the change, saying it is a step towards “managing growth to continue to serve our customers sustainably long-term”.

  • Anthropic is handing out credits worth a month's subscription, discounting add-ons up to 30%, and offering refunds amid cancellation requests.

  • OpenClaw creator Peter Steinberger criticized the step, saying, “First they copy popular features into their closed harness, then they lock out open source."

Why it matters: Anthropic was already catching heat over tighter rate limits, and walling off its agentic power-user community won't help the goodwill problem. It’s a tough situation with Anthropic’s agent usage likely playing a role in degrading normal user experience, but OAI is now there as the alternative at a crucial time in the rivalry.

TOGETHER WITH UNWRAP

⚡ See how Perplexity automates customer feedback

The Rundown: Unwrap is a customer intelligence platform that pulls your feedback – surveys, reviews, support tickets, social comments – into one view, using AI and NLP to surface actionable insights and deliver them straight to your inbox.

With Unwrap, you get:

  • All customer feedback automatically categorized

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

  • Real-time alerts from feedback as they arise

  • A clear view of customer sentiment

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

THE RUNDOWN ROUNDTABLE

💡The Rundown Roundtable: Our AI use cases

Image source: Ideogram / The Rundown

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

Joey, Head of Partnerships: I have set up Claude to give me a daily outfit recommendation based on the local weather and the type of brands that fill 70% of my closet. I've provided examples and feedback, so suggestions become more and more accurate to my style and what I would normally wear without needing to think about it.

Nate, University Educator: Opposite of high school science class, I love that I never have to worry about being embarrassed to ask Claude when I don't understand something. The icing on the cake is to have it use the new chat visualizations feature.

After watching (the wonderful) Hail Mary Project Movie with my kids, I needed some help trying to explain the science of Time Dilation. It helped me get a little closer.

Billy, University Educator: I used AI (Perplexity Computer) to buy jeans for myself because I hate online shopping. It hunted for deals on the brands I like and even double checked each link was in stock for my size. Great success.

AI TRAINING

📞 How to take AI notes on phone calls

The Rundown: In this guide, you will learn how to set up an AI notetaker that works with any call on your iPhone. You probably know about AI notetakers for web, but most people don't know that you can also do it on both outbound and inbound phone calls.

Note: Check the recording consent laws for your state before recording your calls.

Step-by-step:

  1. Install Granola from the App Store, open it, tap the phone icon in the bottom left to set up. Enter your number, then follow the verification instructions

  2. To make a call, tap the phone button, pick a contact/type a number, and call. The call works like a normal one, but Granola is listening in the background

  3. After hanging up, wait a minute. Granola will give a summary with action items and anything worth remembering. No need to stay on screen during processing

  4. If you want to use Granola for an inbound call, you can open the app and create a new note. It will only be able to transcribe your voice though

Pro tip: Name notes in a format like [name] @ [company], create folders for work and personal calls. You can also connect Notion, Zapier, Slack, HubSpot, or your CRM.

PRESENTED BY GOOGLE CLOUD

⚡️ Ship your AI agent before your competitors do

The Rundown: The AI race is won by shipping fast and scaling seamlessly. Google Cloud’s Startup technical guide cuts through the noise, giving technical founders pre-built frameworks to design, build, and deploy intelligent autonomous systems in record time.

Inside the updated guide, you’ll discover:

  • Pre-built frameworks to accelerate autonomous agent design

  • Streamlined prompt engineering workflows to save developer hours

  • Frictionless deployment strategies using Google Cloud infrastructure

Get the guide.

AI RESEARCH

🎬 Netflix opens physics-aware AI for video editing

Image source: Netflix Research

The Rundown: Netflix just released VOID, an open-source framework built to erase video objects while rewriting the physics associated with them, instead of typical erasing and inpainting tools.

The details:

  • Existing removal tools just paint over backgrounds, without actually reasoning about the cause-and-effect those edits introduce across the broader scene.

  • VOID uses a mask that maps what to erase, what's physically affected, and what to keep, with a judge model then charting the consequences.

  • VOID can handles physics it never trained on, with demos like a balloon floating when a holder is removed or blocks not falling when one in the chain is erased.

  • 25 evaluators compared VOID against six baseline models including Runway, preferring Netflix’s results nearly 2/3 of the time.

Why it matters: This is Netflix Research’s first public AI release, and its a sign of where the video space is heading — intuitive systems that don’t just erase objects in footage like an image editor, but can actually simulate and alter the physics of the scene based on the changes for more controllability and real production use.

QUICK HITS

🛠️ Trending AI Tools

  •  🔀 Merge Gateway - Control plane for production AI: routing, cost, and reliability in one API*

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

  • 🎥 PikaStream 1.0 - Pika's video chat AI that gives any AI agent a face, voice

  • 💎 Gemma 4 - Google's new open-weight AI with SOTA intelligence for its size

*Sponsored Listing

📰 Everything else in AI today

OpenAI is navigating a leadership change, with Fidji Simo on medical leave, COO Brad Lightcap on special projects, and CMO Kate Rouch stepping down for cancer recovery.

Anthropic acquired startup Coefficient Bio for roughly $400M, folding the team into its healthcare and life sciences group focused on drug discovery.

Mercor confirmed a data breach tied to an attack on open-source library LiteLLM, with hackers claiming access to up to 4 TB of data from the $10B AI training startup.

Pika Labs released PikaStream 1.0 in beta, a real-time model that lets AI agents join Google Meet calls as video avatars with voice cloning and live conversation.

OpenAI rolled out ChatGPT in CarPlay, allowing users to access Voice Mode in their supported vehicle for hands-free use.

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 Kevin R. in Terre Haute, IN:

"My main passion is building and modifying RC cars. I've been in the hobby for 40+ years. I am also a moderator on one of the longest running RC forums.

A radio system came out from Radiomaster with a very powerful open source firmware by EdgeTX. This radio has a steep learning curve, so the surface based RC guys and gals are not too keen to learn it. So I decided to build a wizard to program various car models, but I am definitely not a coder.

I have been using Claude, Gemini, and Grok to help me. When Claude generated the first working version of the app, it blew me away. Finally, I could bring my ideas to life. Now I am completely hooked, and learning so much. Your email sub has been a HUGE help! So thank you!"

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

Google's Texas-sized data center problem

Jennifer Mossalgue • 6 minutes

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Good morning, tech enthusiasts. Google is reportedly tying its AI expansion in Texas to a giant gas plant that could belch 4.5M tons of CO₂ a year — more than some U.S. cities.

That’s a jarring turn for the company that spent years evangelizing 24/7 carbon-free energy, especially since this plant appears to have no carbon capture at all. But Google, like the rest of Big Tech, says that AI’s appetite for power is growing faster than the clean grid can supply it.

In today’s tech rundown:

  • Google to power Texas AI data center on gas

  • Artemis II astronauts head to the moon

  • Amazon is coming for Walmart — with robots

  • Whoop is now a $10B fitness tracker

  • Quick hits on other tech news

LATEST DEVELOPMENTS

GOOGLE

😷 Google to power Texas data center on gas

Image source: Ideogram / The Rundown

The Rundown: Google reportedly plans to power a new AI data center in Texas with a gas power plant that could emit about 4.5M tons of CO₂ a year, in what critics say is a major rollback from its earlier 2030 carbon‑free energy goals.

The details:

  • Google confirmed it is partnering with Crusoe on the Goodnight data center campus in Texas, where Crusoe has filed for a 933 MW gas plant.

  • The data center could cost nearly $30B, and the gas plant could emit roughly 4.5M tons of CO₂ annually — more yearly emissions than San Francisco.

  • Unlike Google’s recent gas deal in Illinois, the Goodnight plant reportedly has no carbon capture technology whatsoever.

  • Google confirmed the partnership but says no offtake agreement for the gas plant has been signed.

Why it matters: Google built its brand on climate leadership — it pioneered 24/7 carbon-free energy and has signed more than 22 gigawatts of clean energy power purchase agreements. A bare-gas, no-capture plant of this scale is a different animal entirely, but Google says surging AI demand is outpacing the clean energy buildout.

TOGETHER WITH KESTRA

⚒️ Fix your broken automation stack

The Rundown: Kestra is an open-source workflow orchestration platform that replaces scattered scripts and cron jobs with one unified layer. With 26k+ GitHub stars, it’s already trusted by Apple, JPMorgan Chase, Toyota, and BHP for mission-critical workflows.

Do more with Kestra:

  • Orchestrate any language, tool, or service

  • Deploy on-prem, hybrid, or any cloud

  • Build from the UI or code, fully in sync

Explore Kestra.

NASA

🌝 Artemis II astronauts head to the moon

Image source: NASA

The Rundown: NASA’s Artemis II mission has just launched four astronauts into a looping flyby of the Moon, rebooting crewed deep‑space exploration more than half a century after Apollo’s final flight.

The details:

  • The Space Launch System mega-rocket lifted off on April 1, sending four astronauts aboard Orion on a 10-day test flight around the Moon and back.

  • A roughly six-minute translunar injection burn broke the crew free of Earth orbit — the first time humans have departed Earth orbit since Apollo 17 in 1972.

  • Updated trajectory data puts the crew’s maximum distance from Earth at 252,021 miles — surpassing the Apollo 13 distance record by 3,366 miles.

  • The lunar flyby is scheduled for Monday, April 6, when the crew will photograph areas of the far side never directly seen by human eyes.

Why it matters: What’s learned on this flight is critical to future Artemis missions — NASA is targeting Artemis III for lunar technology demonstrations in 2027 and a crewed surface landing with Artemis IV in 2028. Every telemetry point from this mission could write the rulebook for what comes next. 

AMAZON

🛒 Amazon is coming for Walmart — with robots

Image source: Reve AI / The Rundown

The Rundown: Amazon has been developing a network of massive, robot-heavy hybrid supercenters under an internal initiative called Project Kobe — and leaked documents obtained by Business Insider reveal just how serious the bet is.

The details:

  • Each store would clock in at 225K square feet, with nearly half the floor plan dedicated to back-of-house robotics and fulfillment infrastructure.

  • AutoStore robotic systems handle warehouse operations; a future in-house platform called Orbital is also in the pipeline.

  • An AI tool named Frida is designed to help category managers automate inventory decisions at the local level.

  • The first approved site is in Orland Park, Illinois (late 2027 opening), with additional locations in New Jersey and Illinois on the table.

Why it matters: Amazon and Whole Foods hold just 3% of the U.S. grocery market versus Walmart’s 21% — and Project Kobe is Amazon’s most ambitious attempt yet to close that gap, by collapsing the e-commerce fulfillment center and the big-box store into one. If the pilots work, Amazon is prepared to roll the format out at scale.

WHOOP

🏋🏽‍♂️ Whoop is now a $10B fitness tracker

Image source: Whoop

The Rundown: Whoop just closed a massive $575M Series G round that nearly triples its valuation to $10.1B — a sign the market is backing its pivot from elite fitness tracker to full-blown health platform.

The details:

  • Diagnostic device maker Abbott and Mayo Clinic joined as strategic investors, alongside athletes Cristiano Ronaldo, LeBron James, and Rory McIlroy.

  • The platform already includes FDA-cleared ECG, blood pressure insights, and Advanced Labs blood biomarker analysis, with Whoop promising “more to come.”

  • Abbott’s move mirrors Dexcom’s 2024 investment in Oura’s smart ring, a pattern of medtech players buying strategic footholds in consumer biometric platforms.

  • Whoop now counts 2.5M members and exited 2025 with a $1.1B annualized bookings run rate, up 103% year over year.

Why it matters: Whoop’s new backers aren't typical venture money — Abbott makes diagnostic devices, Mayo Clinic runs hospitals. Whether that translates into actual regulated products or just credibility remains to be seen. The FDA’s 2025 warning letter to Whoop over its blood pressure claims is also a hint of the hurdles ahead.

QUICK HITS

📰 Everything else in tech today

Amazon is in talks to acquire satellite telecoms group Globalstar in a deal worth about $9B, aiming to build a rival to Elon Musk’s Starlink satellite internet network.

Microsoft will invest about $10B in Japan from 2026 to 2029 to expand AI infrastructure, train 1M tech workers, and deepen cybersecurity cooperation.

Google is now rolling out a feature that lets users in the U.S. change their existing Gmail address without creating a new account.

SpaceX confirmed that one of its Starlink satellites suffered an unexplained anomaly that caused it to break apart into debris fragments in low Earth orbit.

London-based hardware company Nothing is reportedly planning to launch AI-powered smart glasses in 2027 and AI earbuds in 2026.

Amazon will start adding a 3.5% “fuel and logistics” surcharge to fulfillment fees it charges many third‑party sellers, blaming higher fuel costs linked to the Iran war.

China’s cyberspace regulator issued draft rules to tightly control “digital humans,” requiring clear labeling and banning features that could addict children.

The New York Times dropped freelance critic Alex Preston after he admitted using an AI tool that inserted language from a Guardian review into his own book review.

Alexa+ subscribers with Echo Show displays can now link their Uber Eats or Grubhub accounts and order delivery in a natural, back‑and‑forth conversation.

Lucid Motors is recalling more than 4K Gravity SUVs because a supplier improperly welded some of their second-row seat belt anchors.

Chinese researchers developed a new electrolyte for lithium batteries that more than doubles energy density and EV range while still working reliably in extreme cold.

Renewable power made up nearly half of the world’s electricity capacity in 2025, reaching 49.4% after solar additions drove renewable capacity to 5,149 GW.

Newsletter platform Beehiiv is launching podcast hosting so creators can produce podcasts alongside newsletters on one platform, to challenge Patreon and Substack.

China’s CAS Space successfully launched its new Kinetica‑2 Y1 rocket at a cost reportedly comparable to SpaceX’s Falcon 9.

COMMUNITY

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

AI

AI just made the billion-dollar solo founder real

Zach Mink • 6 minutes

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Good morning, AI enthusiasts. It took $20K, two months, and a stack of AI tools for Matthew Gallagher to launch a telehealth startup from his house in LA. A year and a half later, Medvi is on pace to do $1.8B in sales.

Sam Altman predicted in 2024 that AI would make the solo billion-dollar company possible. Gallagher may have just delivered the proof — not by building AI himself, but by using it to move fast and replace an entire corporate workforce.

In today’s AI rundown:

  • AI turns solo founder into $1.8B operator

  • OpenAI acquires TBPN in first media deal

  • Turn any flat image into a fully editable design

  • Google’s powerful new open-source family

  • 4 new AI tools, community workflows, and more

LATEST DEVELOPMENTS

MEDVI

🚀 AI turns solo founder into $1.8B operator

Image source: Medvi / NYT

The Rundown: Matthew Gallagher just scaled his startup, Medvi, from a $20K AI experiment to $1.8B in projected annual sales, the NYT reported — becoming one of the first to fulfill Sam Altman’s prediction of AI-driven, solo billion-dollar companies.

The details:

  • Medvi sells GLP-1 drugs online, outsourcing doctors, prescriptions, and shipping to telehealth platforms CareValidate and OpenLoop.

  • Gallagher used ChatGPT, Claude, and Grok for code, Midjourney and Runway for ad creatives, and ElevenLabs and custom AI agents for customer service.

  • The whole operation took two months and $20K to stand up, with the company bringing in $401M in revenue in its first year.

  • He then brought on his brother as the only full-time hire, and uses contract engineers and account managers, with the team on pace for $1.8B this year.

Why it matters: Altman predicted that a one-person billion-dollar company "would have been unimaginable without A.I., and now it will happen." The first real example isn't some revolutionary AI product; it's selling weight-loss drugs from a living room. AI tools, combined with strong builder instincts and action, can yield pretty wild results.

TOGETHER WITH VANTA

🛡️ Turn compliance into a competitive advantage

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Join to learn how Vanta can help you:

  • Automate evidence collection, policies, and remediation across major frameworks

  • Build real security foundations, not check-the-box fixes

  • Show credibility faster with a public Trust Center and AI-powered questionnaires

  • Keep engineers focused with guided workflows and developer-native automation

Register here.

OPENAI & TBPN

🎙️ OpenAI acquires TBPN in first media deal

Image source: Jordi Hays on X

The Rundown: OpenAI just announced the acquisition of TBPN, the daily live tech talk show that's become a go-to for Silicon Valley CEOs, in a deal reportedly worth low hundreds of millions — marking the AI giant's first media acquisition.

The details:

  • TBPN goes live every weekday on YouTube and X, pulling around 70K viewers per episode and hosting major tech CEOs and figures.

  • Fidji Simo said “the standard comms playbook just doesn’t apply to us” with OAI driving a tech shift, aiming to foster real, constructive convos on AI.

  • TBPN's 11-person team will report to OAI chief of global affairs Chris Lehane, and will drop its ad business but retain editorial independence on the show.

  • Co-founders Jordi Hays and John Coogan debuted the live show 17 months ago, with the company reportedly on pace for $30M in revenue this year.

Why it matters: This is a fascinating one, with the AI leader buying a direct channel to both the cultural tech vibes TBPN has fostered and the founders and CEOs who tune in every day. OAI’s public perception has taken hits this year, and bringing in the team behind one of the tech bubble’s most beloved shows could help shake up the approach.

AI TRAINING

🌄 Turn any flat image into a fully editable design

The Rundown: In this guide, you'll learn how to use Canva's new Magic Layers feature to turn any flat AI image into a fully editable design — enabling you to fix small details in generations without recreating entire outputs.

Step-by-step:

  1. On the Canva homepage, select Magic Layers, click Select Media, and choose an image

  2. Wait 30-60 seconds while Canva processes the image. It reads the layout, identifies text, objects, and background, and splits them into individual layers

  3. Click any layer and edit it directly. Swap a date, change a tagline, fix a typo. Or click an object layer to move it, resize it, or delete it entirely

  4. Drop in a replacement image (new product photo, logo), and it slots into the existing layout. Adjust the background color using the color picker if needed

Pro tip: To use Magic Layers on an existing design, open the design, click Uploads to add your image, select it, click Edit in the toolbar, then select Magic Layers.

PRESENTED BY GOOGLE CLOUD

🧠 Build scalable AI agents faster

The Rundown: Google Cloud's updated Startup technical guide: AI agents is your essential blueprint, providing technical founders with the practical frameworks needed to design, build, and deploy intelligent autonomous systems that scale seamlessly.

Inside the updated guide, you’ll discover:

  • Frameworks to design autonomous agent architectures

  • Best practices for prompt engineering workflows

  • Scalable deployment strategies using Google Cloud

Get the guide.

GOOGLE

💎 Google’s powerful new open-source family

Image source: Google

The Rundown: Google DeepMind rolled out its Gemma 4 family, four open models with sizes for devices from phones to computers — released under Apache 2.0 for the first time to remove legal barriers that pushed enterprises toward Qwen/Mistral instead.

The details:

  • All four models handle code, vision, and multi-step agent tasks, with the smallest variants adding voice and running entirely offline on a phone.

  • Gemma 4’s 31B and 26B models place near rivals like Kimi K2.5, GLM-5, and Qwen 3.5 in terms of intelligence while coming in at a fraction of the size.

  • The switch from a custom license to Apache 2.0 means developers can modify, deploy, and sell commercially with zero legal friction, a first for the Gemma line.

Why it matters: Chinese models have dominated the open-source frontier, but this week has seen two U.S. releases to challenge them: Arcee AI’s Trinity-Large and now Gemma 4. Google is trending in the opposite direction of its Chinese rivals, who are moving towards closed systems, with Gemma getting an even more permissive license.

QUICK HITS

🛠️ Trending AI Tools

  • 🔀 Merge Gateway - Ship production AI faster. Routing, cost controls, and observability already built in*

  • 💎 Gemma 4 - Google's new open-weight AI with SOTA intelligence for its size

  • 🧠 Qwen3.6-Plus - Alibaba's reasoner with 1M context window, strong coding

  • 🎧 MAI-Transcribe-1 - Microsoft's speech-to-text model for 25 languages

*Sponsored Listing

📰 Everything else in AI today

ByteDance’s Seedance 2.0 AI video generator is now broadly available across major platforms, taking the top spot on Artificial Analysis’ video leaderboards.

Cursor unveiled Cursor 3, a new rebuilt interface that lets developers run fleets of local and cloud coding agents in parallel across multiple repos from one workspace.

Alibaba released Qwen3.6-Plus, a reasoning model that rivals Opus 4.5 on coding agent benchmarks while natively supporting 1M-token context and multimodal inputs.

Microsoft launched MAI-Transcribe-1 in public preview, a new speech-to-text model that tops benchmarks on accuracy across 25 languages.

Japanese AI startup Sakana AI opened beta testing for Marlin, an autonomous AI research assistant that can work up to 8 hours straight on business-related tasks.

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 Phillip H. in Barcelona, Spain:

"I have a Claude Cowork automation that connects with my HubSpot, Slack, Gmail, Google Calendar, and Fellow AI. It runs automatically every workday at 8 AM to give me an update on anything I might have missed and what's on my plate for the day!"

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 500K weekly rides

Jennifer Mossalgue • 5 minutes

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Good morning, robotics enthusiasts. Waymo just hit half a million paid robotaxi rides a week across 10 U.S. cities — a 10x leap in under two years.

Meanwhile, Baidu is investigating a Wuhan outage that stalled 100 Apollo Go vehicles mid-traffic, Tesla’s robotaxi service remains limited to Austin, and Zoox still hasn’t started charging passengers. Autonomous vehicles are arriving, but the field is separating fast.

In today’s robotics rundown:

  • Waymo just hit 500K rides a week

  • Drones are learning to fly like bats

  • Europe’s biggest industrial bet is a humanoid

  • A bicycle robot that jumps and pops wheelies

  • Quick hits on other robotics news

LATEST DEVELOPMENTS

WAYMO

🚖 Waymo just hit 500K rides a week

Image source: Waymo

The Rundown: Alphabet’s Waymo says it is now completing 500K paid robotaxi rides per week across 10 U.S. cities — a 10x jump from 50K weekly trips just two years ago, and the clearest signal yet that autonomous ride-hailing is graduating to mainstream.

The details:

  • The fleet holding those numbers steady sits at roughly 3K vehicles equipped with Waymo’s 5th-gen self-driving system, per NHTSA filings.

  • In February, Waymo launched in Dallas, Houston, San Antonio, and Orlando, bringing its total to 10 U.S. markets, up from just 3 cities at the start of 2025.

  • Waymo’s numbers still barely register against Uber’s scale: Uber completed 13.5B trips in 2025, including more than 1M mobility rides per hour.

  • Waymo was among 7 AV companies, including Tesla and Zoox, that refused to tell a Senate investigation how often their cars use remote human assistance.

Why it matters: Waymo co-CEO Dmitri Dolgov has framed the shift starkly: eight years to reach riders in four cities, then four new markets launched in a single day. That kind of acceleration is what separates Waymo from a field where Tesla remains limited to Austin and Zoox is only beginning commercial rollout.

DRONES

🦇 Drones are learning to fly like bats

Image source: Worcester Polytechnic Institute

The Rundown: Researchers at Worcester Polytechnic Institute have built an AI-powered echolocation system that lets palm-sized quadcopters navigate in complete darkness like bats, with no cameras, lidar, or GPS required.

The details:

  • The system uses ultrasound speakers and microphones, paired with a compact neural network that interprets echoes in real time to construct a 3D map.

  • Acoustic baffles help the drone filter out the interference of its own propeller noise, isolating the faint reflections that bounce back from surfaces.

  • Trained largely in simulation, the AI then reads minute differences in echo timing and intensity to infer distance, shape, and even surface texture.

  • The researchers say their bat-style echolocation stack could scale to swarms of low-cost drones that slip through smoke, dust, and darkness.

Why it matters: The researchers say the stack is designed to scale: swarms of cheap, camera-free drones threading through smoke, caves, and rubble, where conventional sensors go blind. The applications aren’t hard to imagine: disaster search-and-rescue, underground infrastructure inspection, and, inevitably, defense.

HUMANOIDS

🤖 Europe’s biggest industrial bet is a humanoid

Image source: Neura Robotics

The Rundown: Europe has ceded ground on AI models to the U.S. and on EVs to China. Now it’s making a calculated play for a third front: humanoids on the factory floor, Bloomberg reports.

The details:

  • Sweden’s Hexagon has spun its factory-automation know‑how into the Aeon humanoid, now running pilot tasks at BMW’s Leipzig plant.

  • Germany’s Neura Robotics is raising about €1B ($1.1B) at a €4B ($4.3B) valuation, for a modular humanoid that can plug into existing assembly lines.

  • Schaeffler has partnered with Neura to co-develop compact actuators for humanoid joints, and plans to deploy thousands of Neura robots by 2035.

  • Bosch, via its newly formed robotics division, announced a collaboration with Neura to pool sensor data and jointly develop AI software.

Why it matters: Europe’s industrial giants — BMW, Bosch, Schaeffler — are using humanoid partnerships to hedge against labor shortages and foreign competition simultaneously, backing homegrown robotics startups. If the BMW pilot and Neura hit their targets, Europe could have its first credible answer to the physical AI race.

RAI

🚲 A bicycle robot that jumps and pops wheelies

Image source: Reve AI / The Rundown

The Rundown: Researchers at the Robotics and AI Institute have built a 52 lb. bicycle robot that hits 18 mph, clears 3-foot jumps, and performs wheelies — all via reinforced learning (RL) policies trained entirely in simulation.

The details:

  • The robot combines a bicycle frame with a reaction mass and a spatial linkage system that concentrates most of the robot’s weight in a movable head unit.

  • It hits a top speed of 8 m/s — roughly 18 mph — and can vault onto platforms up to 3 feet high, about 130% of its own nominal height.

  • Some behaviors, like the “shimmy-turn,” weren’t explicitly programmed but emerged as solutions the learning algorithm discovered on its own.

  • The team trained all RL policies using NVIDIA’s Isaac Lab, which uses a high-fidelity physics engine and randomized simulation parameters.

Why it matters: This is a big deal for robot control: this bot shows sim-trained RL can pull off wheelies, jumps, and other dynamic maneuvers on a super narrow two-wheel platform without hand-coded tricks. It’s still a custom robot, but it points toward a future where similar methods could unlock much more agile scooters and delivery bots.

QUICK HITS

📰 Everything else in robotics today

A system failure in Baidu’s Apollo Go network caused at least 100 robotaxis in Wuhan to suddenly freeze in place, trapping some passengers for up to two hours.

Disney’s newly debuted Olaf robot at Disneyland Paris went viral after freezing mid-sentence and collapsing backward on its first day of operation.

Figure CEO Brett Adcock said that he ended the OpenAI partnership because it brought “very little” value and turned OpenAI into a direct humanoid competitor.

Austin-based defense startup Saronic has raised $1.75B at a $9.25B valuation to scale production of its autonomous surface vessels and build AI-based shipyards.

Scientists are developing tiny DNA robots that could one day move through the body to deliver drugs, hunt viruses, and build ultra-precise nanoscale devices.

China has reportedly opened a new humanoid factory in Guangdong that can produce up to 10K robots a year and one humanoid every 30 minutes.

UK startup Humanoid has tested its HMND 01 robot in a car factory, where it followed warehouse software to handle real tote-picking and delivery tasks.

Chinese firm Ubtech Robotics’ share price reportedly jumped after the firm reported a 23-fold surge in 2025 sales of full-size humanoids.

Grab and WeRide have launched Singapore’s first public robotaxi service, starting with 11 autonomous cars running limited routes in the Punggol neighborhood.

Researchers created a control method that lets ultra-flexible, tendon-driven robots move accurately in tight spaces with under 1% error for more precise surgical tasks.

Voyager will help Icarus Robotics test its Joyride free-flying robot on the ISS in early 2027 to prove autonomous operation in microgravity.

COMMUNITY

🎓 Highlights: News, Guides & Events

See you soon,

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

AI

Dorsey makes the AI case against managers

Zach Mink • 7 minutes

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Good morning, AI enthusiasts. Every big company runs the same way: stack managers on top of managers until information flows. Jack Dorsey thinks AI just made that whole structure obsolete.

The Twitter founder and Block CEO just laid out a plan to replace his company’s entire management layer with AI, coming weeks after cutting nearly half of its workforce and betting a smaller, flatter team can move faster than any org chart ever could.

Reminder: Our next live workshop is today at 2 PM EST! Join and learn about the different AI tools for presentations out there, and get a pre-build workflow to leverage the tech to do the heavy lifting on your own slides. RSVP here.

In today’s AI rundown:

  • Block ditches managers for AI

  • SpaceX targets record $1.75T IPO debut

  • Build a productivity tool with Replit

  • OpenAI taps freelancers to teach ChatGPT their jobs

  • 4 new AI tools, community workflows, and more

LATEST DEVELOPMENTS

BLOCK

🏗️ Block ditches managers for AI

Image source: Lovart / The Rundown

The Rundown: Twitter founder and Block CEO Jack Dorsey just co-authored a post arguing AI can replace middle management, framing Block’s recent 40% workforce cut as the opening move in a massive workplace restructure for the AI era.

The details:

  • Block cut over 4K employees in February, over 40% of its staff — with Dorsey calling it a bet on AI, not a response to weakness.

  • Dorsey said managers exist to route information up and down a chain, and AI can now do that via a live “world model” of the business.

  • He said everyone at Block now falls into one of three roles: builders, problem-owners over specific outcomes, and player-coaches who develop talent.

  • Block is remote-first, and Dorsey says every decision, design, and plan already exists as a digital record, giving AI the raw material to replace managers.

Why it matters: Dorsey’s thesis is an interesting one, especially as lean, AI-first teams go head-to-head with bloated legacy firms that have layers of approval. Block’s bet is that remote work already generated the data, and AI just needed to catch up to use it — but not everyone is going to trust the tech to completely cut out the managerial layer.

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.

SPACEX

🚀 SpaceX targets record $1.75T IPO debut

Image source: Lovart / The Rundown

The Rundown: SpaceX just filed for what would be the largest IPO in history, targeting a valuation north of $1.75T and a raise of up to $75B — which would make Elon Musk’s rocket-AI-social media mega-company one of the most valuable on Earth.

The details:

  • The SEC filing sets up a June debut that would beat OpenAI and Anthropic to public markets, making Musk’s company the first U.S. AI-era mega-listing.

  • SpaceX is targeting a $1.75T+ valuation, and its $50B–$75B raise would more than double the largest IPO ever (Saudi Aramco’s $29B offering in 2019).

  • Musk absorbed xAI into SpaceX before filing, though the AI side reportedly pulls in under $1B in revenue against the rocket business’s roughly $20B.

  • About 30% of shares would be open to everyday investors, while a special two-tier voting structure lets Musk keep full control after going public.

Why it matters: After all of the talk surrounding AI mega-IPOs centering on OpenAI and Anthropic, it’s xAI (via SpaceX) that will be the first U.S. lab to hit the public markets. Despite now losing every one of his 11 co-founders, Musk’s vision and tie-in of rockets, AI, robotics, and data make for a combo few other rivals can match at scale.

AI TRAINING

🧑‍💻 Build a productivity tool with Replit

The Rundown: In this guide, you will learn how to build a lightweight work tracker that counts what you actually did each day and turns it into a clean weekly report.

Step-by-step:

  1. Open Claude or ChatGPT and ask it to interview you about your role. You want to find the 5 to 8 task types you repeat most often. Good outputs are things like sales calls, deliverables sent, client replies, internal meetings, or content published.

  2. Take that task list into Replit and tell it: Build me a simple tracker app with daily number inputs, an optional note field, a calendar heatmap, and a report generator for any date range.

  3. Log a few fake days first so you can see the app working right away.

  4. Click Generate Report and have the app output totals, daily averages, and a short summary for the week or month. This is the part that makes the tracker useful. The data is already formatted for a manager update, client recap, or team check-in.

  5. Deploy the Replit and save the url as a bookmark. Start using this every day at the end of your workday.

Pro tip: If you want to make it more powerful, add a client or project tag to each entry. That gives you filtered reports by account instead of one big pile of activity.

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Connect with Unwrap to get a free trial of the tools, exclusive to The Rundown AI readers.

OPENAI

🎭 OpenAI taps freelancers to teach ChatGPT their jobs

Image source: Lovart / The Rundown

The Rundown: A new report from Business Insider just revealed “Project Stagecraft,” an internal OpenAI effort paying as many as 4K freelancers at least $50/hr to build occupation-specific training data across a variety of jobs.

The details:

  • The project runs through Handshake AI, with freelancers from jobs including commercial aviation, pharmacists, plant scientists, and HR specialists.

  • The project focuses on “knowledge work, not manual labor,” aiming to map economically relevant tasks and gauge what ChatGPT can already handle.

  • Contractors create personas and simulate workflows, providing “context, goals, references, and deliverables” to help train models with human expertise.

  • One contractor who participated told BI, "We all were aware that we were basically training AI to replace us.”

Why it matters: AI training has gone from generalist data labeling to a more targeted cataloging of what professionals actually do, field by field, task by task. With OAI also drafting policy papers on economic disruption and “rethinking the social contract,” the AGI timelines may be going much faster than even they anticipated.

QUICK HITS

🛠️ Trending AI Tools

  • ⚙️ Strands Agents - frontier AI for everyone, from production backends and physical robots to code that writes itself*

  • 🧠 Trinity-Large-Thinking - Arcee AI’s new SOTA open-weight reasoning model for long-horizon agentic tasks

  • 🤏 LFM2.5-350M - Liquid AI’s small model built for tool use and on-device agents

  • 🎨 Wan2.7-Image - Unified image model for generation, editing, text rendering

*Sponsored Listing

📰 Everything else in AI today

Contra Labs emerged from stealth as a new evaluation platform for AI creative tools, with leaderboards, datasets, and benchmarks focused on human creative taste.

Z AI rolled out GLM-5V-Turbo, a new ‘vision coding’ model that reads screenshots, design drafts, and interfaces to generate runnable code directly from what it sees.

Liquid AI released LFM2.5-350M, a small open model that outperforms models twice its size on tool use and is able to run efficiently across consumer devices.

Arcee AI introduced Trinity Large-Thinking, a new open-weight reasoning model rivaling Opus 4.6 on agent benchmarks at roughly 1/20th the cost.

Alibaba launched Wan2.7-Image, a new image model that generates, edits, and renders text across 12 languages with up to 12 consistent images per prompt.

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 Thomas L. in France:

"We have a Discord server with friends where we discuss everything from video games to politics. Conversations can sometimes get heated, especially when opinions clash.

To help with that, I built a Taoist-inspired bot powered by Claude. When mentioned, it reads recent messages, uses context about participants and our shared vocabulary, and sends a prompt to Haiku via API.

It then returns a response meant to bring perspective, clarity, and occasionally a bit of humor!"

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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