Good morning, robotics enthusiasts. Meta just acquired Assured Robot Intelligence, a San Diego startup building foundation models for humanoids — and folded its two elite founders directly into Superintelligence Labs.

The move comes days after Meta committed up to $145B to AI infrastructure this year. What, exactly, it plans to build is still murky — but the humanoid race just got a new heavyweight.

In today’s robotics rundown:

• Meta snaps up robotics startup ARI

• 1X opens massive NEO humanoid factory

• Figure claims it can build a robot every hour

• Uber to turn its drivers into an AV sensor grid

• Quick hits on other robotics news

LATEST DEVELOPMENTS

META

🤖 Meta snaps up robotics startup ARI

Image source: Reve / The Rundown

The Rundown: Meta just acquired humanoid startup Assured Robot Intelligence for undisclosed terms, bringing two elite roboticists into its Superintelligence Labs to build foundation models for whole-body humanoid control.

The details:

• Meta bought San Diego-based ARI, a 20-person startup that focuses on foundation models enabling humanoids to handle household tasks.

• The founders: Lerrel Pinto, an NYU professor who co-founded Fauna Robotics (acquired by Amazon), and Xiaolong Wang, a former Nvidia researcher.

• The deal folds ARI into Meta’s Superintelligence Labs division and comes days after Meta raised its 2026 AI infra capex to $125–145B.

• A leaked 2025 internal memo revealed Meta is developing consumer humanoid hardware, though the company has not confirmed the plan yet.

Why it matters: Meta’s acquisition positions it to compete with Tesla, Figure AI, and Boston Dynamics in commercializing humanoids — if it wants to. But regardless, many AI researchers believe that achieving AGI requires training models through physical interaction, making embodied AI a strategy beyond large language models.

1X

🔥 1X opens massive NEO humanoid factory

Image source: 1X

The Rundown: Humanoid startup 1X opened its NEO factory in Hayward, California. The 58K-square-foot facility, billed as the most vertically integrated humanoid factory in the U.S., has commenced full-scale production of NEO.

The details:

• The plant has the capacity to produce 10K NEO units in its first year, with a target of 100K units annually by 2027.

• 1X is using in-house manufacturing for key components like motors, batteries, and transmissions to reduce reliance on Chinese suppliers.

• NEO runs on NVIDIA’s Jetson Thor platform, with behaviors trained in simulation, and is pitched as a mobile assistant for light household tasks.

• The robots are expected to cost around $20K or be available via subscription, with customer shipments expected to begin in 2026.

Why it matters: If 1X can ship at scale, it transforms humanoids from demo reel to actual product — and the data flywheel could matter more than the hardware. With a second San Carlos plant set to come online next year, 1X is betting that vertical integration outpaces Tesla’s factory muscle and Figure’s deep pockets.

FIGURE

🛠️ Figure claims it can build a robot every hour

Image source: Figure / YouTube

The Rundown: Humanoid startup Figure said its San Jose, California-based BotQ factory has hit a 24x production jump in under four months — and it’s using every robot it makes to train the next generation of AI.

The details:

• Figure has ramped BotQ from one Figure 03 per day to one per hour — a 24x throughput jump in under 120 days — with 350-plus units already shipped.

• Each robot reportedly clears 80 functional tests before leaving the floor, with end-of-line yield topping 80%; the battery line runs at 99.3%.

• BotQ’s 150 networked workstations have produced 9K actuators across 10 component types, targeting 12K robots per year at full capacity.

• Every unit that ships is also a data engine: real-world fleet signal feeds Helix, Figure's AI model, enabling OTA updates across the entire fleet.

Why it matters: Hard production numbers for humanoids come with a lot of caveats, of course. Tesla missed its 10K-unit 2025 target badly, and 1X’s new Hayward factory hasn’t shipped to customers yet. Figure’s 350 units are mostly internal too — but it’s the only one publishing yield rates, throughput curves, and a credible production ramp.

UBER

🚕 Uber to turn its drivers into an AV sensor grid

Image source: Images 2.0 / The Rundown

The Rundown: Uber is pitching its human drivers as roaming data collectors, using their everyday trips to feed sensor data into an “AV cloud” that self-driving companies can tap to train and test their autonomous systems, TechCrunch reports.

The details:

• Uber CTO Praveen Neppalli Naga says the company aims to equip human drivers’ cars with sensor kits, so routine trips feed a shared AV data pool.

• He says AV development is now bottlenecked by high-quality driving data, and that Uber can fill the gap cheaper than AV startups deploying their own fleets.

• Uber is already running an “AV cloud,” a library of labeled sensor data that some 25 autonomous-vehicle partners can query.

• Companies can even use it in “shadow mode” to see how their models would have handled real Uber rides without putting a robotaxi on the road.

Why it matters: This could turn Uber’s global fleet into the gatekeeper for real-world driving data, giving it leverage over any AV player that wants to train or deploy on its network. That shift would let Uber profit from autonomy whether or not it owns robotaxis, while tightening its grip on the data layer that future AV competitors need.

QUICK HITS

📰 Everything else in robotics today

Chinese robotics firm Unitree launched a low-cost, modular upper-body-only humanoid starting at about $4,290, targeting researchers and developers.

A Waymo robotaxi drove off with a San Jose passenger’s luggage at the airport, and customer service reportedly said the car couldn’t be turned around.

Uber is partnering with Hertz’s new Oro Mobility unit to handle charging, cleaning, maintenance, and depot staffing for its upcoming robotaxi fleet in the Bay Area.

German auto supplier Schaeffler plans to roll out at least 1K Hexagon/AEON humanoids across its global factories by 2032 after a successful 2025 pilot program.

Dutch startup VNYX raised €1M ($1.1M) to scale its AI‑powered robotics systems that automate fashion resale of returns, overstock, and second‑hand garments.

MIT developed microscopic magnetic hydrogel robots — smaller than a grain of sand — that can perform complex maneuvers when controlled by an external magnet.

A humanoid named Bebop caused a Southwest flight delay after airline staff discovered its lithium battery exceeded size limits and confiscated it before departure.

COMMUNITY

🎓 Highlights: News, Guides & Events

• Read our last AI newsletter: AI shows its skills in the emergency room

• Read our last Tech newsletter: SpaceX is about to crash into the Moon

• Read our last Robotics newsletter: A humanoid baggage handler has landed

• Today’s AI tool guide: Create converting landing pages in Claude

See you soon,

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

Good morning, AI enthusiasts. AI just beat two attending emergency room physicians across real patient cases in a new Harvard study. The model? OpenAI’s o1-preview, released in… 2024.

Millions of users are already turning to ChatGPT for health advice every day, but the data shows that AI models (preferably not several generations behind) may be ready for a more formal seat in the exam room alongside the doctor as well.

In today’s AI rundown:

• Old AI model tops doctors in ER trial

• The Rundown Roundtable: Our AI use cases

• Create converting landing pages in Claude

• Pentagon announces new AI partners

• 4 new AI tools, community workflows, and more

LATEST DEVELOPMENTS

OPENAI

🏥 Old AI model tops doctors in ER trial

Image source: Images 2.0 / The Rundown

The Rundown: A Harvard study published in Science just put OpenAI's o1-preview (released in 2024) through 76 real ER cases, with the AI diagnosing patients more accurately than two physicians, despite using only raw electronic health-record text.

The details:

• The study compared OpenAI's o1-preview model with two attending physicians across 76 real ER cases and three decision stages of patient care.

• At initial ER triage, the model gave the correct diagnosis 67.1% of the time, compared to 55.3% and 50.0% for the two physicians.

• The two separate physician reviewers tasked with scoring couldn't tell which diagnoses came from the model and which came from the humans.

• In one case, the AI flagged a rare flesh-eating infection in a transplant patient roughly 12 to 24 hours before the treating doctor caught it.

Why it matters: Millions of people are already using AI daily for health questions, but studies like these are showing the usefulness can also flow the other way to the doctors themselves. If a model generations behind is already beating ER doctors, imagine what the frontier could look like inside the patient care process.

TOGETHER WITH UNWRAP

⚡️ See how Oura automates customer feedback analysis

The Rundown: Unwrap’s customer intelligence platform that pulls all your feedback – surveys, reviews, support tickets, social comments– into one view, then uses AI to surface the most actionable insights to deliver them to your inbox. Teams at Perplexity, Stripe and DoorDash rely on Unwrap to ensure no customer voice gets lost.

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 15 minutes 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.

Jennifer, Tech & Robotics Writer: Last year, my daughter was diagnosed with a rare autoimmune disease. Like any parent in that situation, I wanted to understand everything I could so we could make the best decisions for her care. I used both Gemini and ChatGPT to help me sort through the medical literature, treatment options, possible side effects, and how other countries approach treatment.

I also turned to ChatGPT to identify the leading specialists in the country — thankfully, our referred doctor turned out to be one of them, which gave us even more reassurance. More than anything, it helped demystify the disease and make us feel confident that we were doing everything we could. She’s doing really well on her medications, and seeing her recover has been an enormous relief.

Shubham, Editor: I use ChatGPT as a label-reading filter for packaged snacks, uploading product photos and asking it to flag hidden sugars, oils like palm, and preservatives, then compare options against a strict checklist of clean ingredients, minimal processing, and decent macros.

It’s especially useful for decoding lesser-known, jargon-heavy terms on the back label, translating things like INS numbers, stabilizers, and emulsifiers into plain English so it’s clear what’s actually being consumed. Instead of trusting front-of-pack claims like “multigrain” or “sugar-free,” it breaks down what’s inside, surfaces trade-offs, and narrows choices to the best options available online

AI TRAINING

🎨 Design converting landing pages in Claude

The Rundown: In this guide, you will learn to use Anthropic’s new AI design tool — Claude Design — to generate four, high-converting mockup variations of your website’s landing page.

Step-by-step:

1. Go to claude.ai/design, select wireframe, click create, and describe who the page is for, the product, and the action visitors should take. Don’t hit “Send”

2. Screenshot a landing page you like (search top pages in your niche), as well as a page that does millions of daily transactions, like Amazon or eBay

3. Hit send with the brief and screenshots. Tell Claude to give four variations of the mockup. Answer any follow-up questions and wait 2-5 minutes

4. Refine with comments. Click any element and leave a note like "rewrite this CTA to be outcome-specific" or "add a testimonial here." Claude applies the change

Pro tip: Click Share > Handoff to Claude Code > Send to Claude Code Web to get Claude Code to build and deploy the final website for you.

PRESENTED BY SCRUNCH

🏆 AI is your new VIP visitor

The Rundown: Scrunch is the AI Customer Experience Platform that optimizes your site for AI bots — the new VIPs deciding whether your brand gets named, cited, or skipped when someone asks ChatGPT, Perplexity, or Claude about your category.

With Scrunch, you'll:

• See how AI reads your site today

• Spot the blockers and content gaps

• Deliver optimized pages straight to AI agents

• Show up in more AI answers

Click here to see how AI reads your site.

AI & THE PENTAGON

🏛️ Pentagon announces new AI partners

Image source: Images 2.0 / The Rundown

The Rundown: The Pentagon added 8 AI companies to its classified networks while excluding Anthropic, even as the Washington Post reports the new contracts have the same autonomous-weapons and surveillance limits for which Anthropic was blacklisted.

The details:

• The official agreement list names SpaceX, OpenAI, Google, Nvidia, Reflection, Microsoft, AWS, and Oracle as the companies added to classified networks.

• The Department of War said the new deals will “accelerate the transformation toward establishing the U.S. military as an AI-first fighting force”.

• DoD CTO Emil Michael told CNBC that Anthropic’s supply-chain risk label still stands, but called its Mythos model a "separate national security moment."

• Anthropic’s exclusion comes days after the White House came out against a broader Mythos rollout over compute concerns impacting its own access.

Why it matters: The White House seemingly wants to have its cake and eat it too — both continuing to shun Anthropic while also wanting priority access to its Mythos model despite the blacklist. There are also some interesting names on that list, namely Reflection, which raised $2B from 1789 Capital, a Donald Trump Jr.-backed fund.

QUICK HITS

🛠️ Trending AI Tools

• 🗣️ Custom Voices - Clone voices with short clips for use in Grok applications

• 🦮 Codex Pets - OAI's animated companions for tracking active Codex work

• 🎶 ElevenMusic - Platform for AI song generation, remixing, creator payouts

• 🚀 MiMo-V2.5-Pro - Xiaomi's powerful new open-source model

📰 Everything else in AI today

OpenAI shipped Codex Pets, animated desktop companions that let you track agent progress without switching back to the app.

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman announced that OpenClaw users can use their ChatGPT subscriptions within the agentic tool, taking a stance against Anthropic’s restrictions.

Maryland signed the U.S.’s first ban on AI-driven grocery pricing, with fines up to $25K for stores caught using personalized shopper data to mark up prices.

SAG-AFTRA secured new AI guardrails in its four-year studio deal, with the guild's negotiator refusing to sign until Hollywood studios made concessions on AI protections.

A Chinese court ruled that replacing a worker with AI does not legally justify firing them, ordering a tech firm to pay wrongful termination damages.

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 Olli T. in Finland:

"I'm a new real estate investor, and what I'm struggling with is market insights, as in our county, there is no transparency or proper historical information available. With Gemini Pro, I created a concept that analyzes the market information.

The tool displays all relevant renovation history and future needs and can also generate an investment calculation. I then refined the concept with multiple free AIs (Claude, Codex), one prompt per day, to have a product that fits my needs."

How do you use AI? Tell us here.

🎓 Highlights: News, Guides & Events

• Read our last AI newsletter: The White House rethinks its Anthropic fight

• Read our last Tech newsletter: SpaceX is about to crash into the Moon

• Read our last Robotics newsletter: A humanoid baggage handler has landed

• Today’s AI tool guide: Create converting landing pages in Claude

See you soon,

Rowan, Joey, Zach, Shubham, and Jennifer — the humans behind The Rundown

Good morning, tech enthusiasts. A dead SpaceX Falcon 9 upper stage — left to drift for two years after delivering two commercial moon landers — is now on an unplanned collision course with the lunar surface.

The 45-foot booster will slam into the Moon at Mach 7 on August 5, in what will be one of the most closely tracked crashes in spaceflight history. No one will get hurt, but the Moon will sport a new crater.

In today’s tech rundown:

• SpaceX rocket to slam into the Moon

• Meta loses 20M users this quarter

• AI glasses that listen all day, rival Meta

• Drone strikes hit Big Tech’s Gulf buildout

• Quick hits on other tech news

LATEST DEVELOPMENTS

SPACEX

🌜 SpaceX rocket to slam into the Moon

Image source: Bill Gray / Images 2.0

The Rundown: A dead SpaceX Falcon 9 upper stage that launched two commercial moon landers in 2025 is now on track to slam into the lunar surface at roughly Mach 7 — 7x the speed of sound — on August 5.

The details:

• A spent SpaceX Falcon 9 upper stage that launched two commercial lunar landers in January 2025 has been left drifting in a chaotic orbit.

• After more than a year of tracking by independent orbital analyst Bill Gray, calculations now show the booster is on a collision course with the moon.

• The 45 ft. booster is expected to slam into the lunar surface near Einstein crater on August 5, at about Mach 7 — roughly 2.4 km/s.

• The impact poses no risk to people or satellites but will blast out a new crater and briefly throw up a plume of dust that NASA spacecraft can later image.

Why it matters: The crash will give scientists a rare, precisely timed impact experiment on the moon, letting orbiters study how high‑velocity strikes excavate material and alter the surface in real time. It also spotlights how commercial lunar missions are forcing space agencies to confront space junk well beyond low Earth orbit.

META

📉 Meta loses 20M users this quarter

Image source: Getty Images / Reve AI

The Rundown: Meta posted its fastest revenue growth since 2021 in Q1 2026 — and simultaneously shed roughly 20M daily users across Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, and Messenger, marking one of the rarest reversals in the company’s history.

The details:

• Meta lost roughly 20M daily users across Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, and Messenger in Q1 2026, marking a rare drop in its combined audience.

• Despite the user decline, Meta delivered its fastest revenue growth since 2021, with Q1 2026 sales jumping about one-third year over year.

• The company raised its planned 2026 AI infrastructure spending, guiding total investment as high as $145B to fund data centers and compute.

• Execs said they had underestimated AI demand and now need to catch up on servers, chips, and data center buildouts to support new AI products.

Why it matters: Meta attributed the user drop in its family of apps to the Iran war’s internet disruptions and a WhatsApp ban in Russia — not organic churn. The real jolt is the AI bill of up to $145B in 2026, raising the question investors can’t stop asking: how long can Meta keep feeding the machine before the machine feeds back?

MIRA

👓 AI glasses that listen all day, rival Meta

Image source: Mira

The Rundown: Mira, the startup founded by Harvard dropouts AnhPhu Nguyen and Caine Ardayfio, just unveiled its first product — camera-less AI glasses that listen to your entire day and act as a "second brain" to help with day-to-day tasks.

The details:

• Priced at $649, Mira glasses listen continuously and become personalized to the wearer’s habits/preferences, surfacing answers at the tap of a paired ring.

• They can translate 60+ languages in real time and come with unlimited memory, letting users search through full conversations or summaries.

• Users also get an agent (controlled with the ring) that uses the glasses' context for tasks like sending emails, booking rides, or shopping on Amazon.

• The glasses connect to apps like Slack, Notion, and Gmail for added context, with answers also appearing in front of users’ eyes via an AR display.

Why it matters: Unlike Meta’s Ray-Bans, Mira is pushing the no-camera approach. All recordings are deleted; only transcripts are saved. The founders are betting this is the version of AI glasses people want to wear. If successful, Mira could define the next generation of personal AI in what’s set to become a very crowded market.

DATA CENTERS

🛑 Drone strikes hit Big Tech’s Gulf buildout

Image source: Ideogram / The Rundown

The Rundown: A strike that damaged Pure DC’s Abu Dhabi data center during the Iran war has pushed the company to freeze new Middle East projects, exposing how fragile Big Tech’s trillion‑dollar AI infrastructure bet is to real‑world conflict, CNBC reports.

The details:

• Iranian drone attacks in the Iran war have hit multiple data centers in the Gulf, including AWS facilities in the UAE and Bahrain, and an Oracle site in Dubai.

• Pure Data Centre Group (Pure DC), backed by Oaktree, reportedly says shrapnel from a strike damaged its Abu Dhabi data center on Yas Island.

• The company’s CEO told CNBC that “no one’s going to run into a burning building” and that investors are now cautious about putting capital in the region.

• The Gulf’s data center capacity is set to triple from 1 GW in 2025 to 3.3 GW by 2030, backed by a wave of landmark commitments.

Why it matters: The Gulf became one of the biggest destinations for AI and cloud money, with cheap energy, ample land, and aggressive national AI strategies. But those same facilities are now reportedly being treated as wartime targets, forcing investors to price in missile risk alongside megawatts.

QUICK HITS

📰 Everything else in tech today

Meta reportedly ended its contract with AI vendor Sama after some of its Kenyan workers said they had to review intimate footage, including videos of people having sex.

Orbital compute startup Starcloud is telling investors it is in talks to raise new funding at a roughly $2.2B valuation, The Information reports.

Apple posted a record March quarter with revenue up 17% to about $111B, as surging iPhone sales and strong Mac demand beat Wall Street expectations.

Beijing banned drone sales in the capital, designating the entire city a no-fly zone where all drones must be registered with the police and flights require permits.

Meta’s HR chief reportedly told staff that, on top of next month’s planned 10% job cuts, the company can’t rule out further layoffs.

Genome pioneer J. Craig Venter, who helped drive the first human genome sequence and created the first organism with a synthetic genome, died aged 79.

Spotify launched “Verified by Spotify” badges and tighter rules that block AI‑generated profiles from verification while downranking low‑quality AI music.

Divine, the Jack Dorsey–backed Vine reboot, launched publicly on iOS and Android, offering an archive of roughly 500K restored six‑second Vine videos and tools.

New Mexico is seeking court orders to force Meta to implement child safety measures, prompting Meta to threaten to withdraw its platforms from the state.

Motif Neurotech won FDA clearance to run the first U.S. clinical trial of a tiny wireless brain implant that targets treatment‑resistant depression.

EV maker Rivian reduced its U.S. Department of Energy loan from $6.6B to $4.5B for its Georgia factory.

COMMUNITY

🎓 Highlights: News, Guides & Events

• Read our last AI newsletter: The White House rethinks its Anthropic fight

• Read our last Tech newsletter: Samsung’s Meta Ray-Ban rival just leaked

• Read our last Robotics newsletter: A humanoid baggage handler has landed

• Today’s AI tool guide: Stress test business ideas with Perplexity

See you soon,

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

Good morning, AI enthusiasts. The government spent months escalating its fight with Anthropic. Then Mythos showed up with cyber capabilities powerful enough to make the feud look a lot less simple.

The White House is now trying to thread an awkward needle: keep the model close for national security, limit who else can use it, and avoid looking like it is fully backing down from the Pentagon's hard line all at the same time.

In today’s AI rundown:

• The White House’s Anthropic stance gets complicated

• Gemini comes into Google-powered cars

• Stress test business ideas with Perplexity

• OpenAI finds source of ChatGPT's goblin obsession

• 4 new AI tools, community workflows, and more

LATEST DEVELOPMENTS

ANTHROPIC VS. THE WHITE HOUSE

🔒 The White House’s Anthropic stance gets complicated

Image source: Images 2.0 / The Rundown

The Rundown: The White House is pushing back on Anthropic’s plan to more than double the private sector’s access to its Mythos AI over compute concerns for its own use, just as a national security memo prepares to address parts of the Pentagon feud.

The details:

• Anthropic wanted access expanded from about 50 firms to nearly 120, with U.S. officials citing compute strains that could impact government use.

• A White House AI memo will reportedly push multi-vendor AI adoption for agencies and address some of Anthropic's worries that led to the initial feud.

• Axios reported that the government action would “allow agencies to get around the supply chain risk designation”, despite the current legal battle.

• GPT 5.5 reached similar cyber capabilities to Mythos, with former AI czar David Sacks saying all frontier models will reach the level in 6 months.

Why it matters: The White House is changing its tune on Anthropic, seemingly largely in part to wanting more access of its own to the powerful Mythos. But with Sec. of War Pete Hegseth saying Thursday that Anthropic is “run by an ideological lunatic”, there is some internal division between wanting to bury the hatchet vs. continuing the fight.

TOGETHER WITH GOOGLE FOR STARTUPS

♻️ Automate your internal multimedia pipelines

The Rundown: Synthesia's CEO reveals how disappearing costs between text and video will soon replace standard slide decks with personalized, real-time multimedia for enterprise operations.

In this new report, you’ll hear perspectives on:

• The vanishing cost gap between text and video

• Dynamic multimedia replacing standard slide decks

• Architecting just-in-time content generation pipelines

• Streamlining corporate knowledge-sharing operations

Download the Future of AI: Perspectives on generative media for startups report.

GOOGLE

🚗 Gemini moves into Google-powered cars

Image source: Google

The Rundown: Google is beginning its Gemini upgrade for vehicles with Google built-in, swapping out Assistant for a more conversational system that handles navigation, messages, music, vehicle questions, and hands-free controls across compatible cars.

The details:

• Drivers can ask for changes to car settings like temperature, control the radio, and pull from Google Maps for customized updates or route planning.

• A beta Gemini Live mode supports conversations for learning and brainstorming, with Gmail, Calendar, and Home integrations coming later.

• Gemini can also pull vehicle-specific answers from manufacturer manuals for car assistance and battery status or charging stations for EV cars.

• The rollout comes to compatible cars in the U.S. first, with General Motors also announcing the feature for ~4M of its vehicles from model year 2022 onward.

Why it matters: One day, AI integrations in cars will be as common as a radio (and eventually the systems will all be driving the cars, too) — but for now, we’re still in the infancy of the rollout. These initial features are fairly basic, but a step on the path towards ‘smart car’ systems of the AI age that provide a serious intelligence upgrade.

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 FUEL IX BY TELUS DIGITAL

🛡️ Is your AI safety strategy actually working?

The Rundown: Uncharted: The AI safety & security summit unites global leaders to bridge the gap between rapid innovation and production-grade governance. Join Fuel iX on May 5 to move beyond the hype and explore the technical frameworks and proprietary research required to secure the next generation of enterprise GenAI.

Why you should attend:

• Close the safety gap without slowing technical innovation

• Learn proven, practical strategies to protect users and secure AI applications

• Unlock exclusive insights from benchmark safety tests of leading LLMs

Register now.

AI RESEARCH

🧌 OpenAI finds source of ChatGPT's goblin obsession

Image source: OpenAI

The Rundown: OpenAI just traced ChatGPT's habit of peppering its responses with goblins, gremlins, and assorted fantasy creatures back to a single reward signal in its 'Nerdy' personality, which ended up bleeding into model behavior throughout releases.

The details:

• After ChatGPT-5.1's November launch, 'goblin' mentions jumped 175% in user conversations, with 'gremlin' up 52% and other creatures seeing similar spikes.

• When OpenAI mapped creature use across personalities, the Nerdy preset lit up, driving two-thirds of all goblin mentions from just 2.5% of traffic.

• Even users who skipped Nerdy got goblins, with fine-tuning loops recycling the creature-favored outputs back into ChatGPT's default mode.

• OpenAI retired Nerdy in March and shipped GPT-5.5 with a Codex prompt specifically banning goblins, gremlins, ogres, trolls, raccoons, and pigeons.

Why it matters: ChatGPT’s goblin-mode is a fun little quirk for your Friday, and another example of how weird LLMs can truly be. A reward in a single personality mode led to a pattern of creature preferences that trickled across chats around the globe. Just like Anthropic’s Golden Gate Claude, we might need a standalone GoblinGPT.

QUICK HITS

🛠️ Trending AI Tools

• 💳 Link - Stripe's wallet for AI agents with human approval on every purchase

• 🔐 Claude Security - Enterprise tool for scanning and patching vulnerabilities

• 🎨 Imagine Agent - xAI's agentic canvas in Grok for image and video creation

• 🤖 Cloud Computer - Manus's cloud for always-on agents, scrapers, more

📰 Everything else in AI today

Meta opened its ads platform to third-party AI tools via a new MCP server, allowing advertisers to manage campaigns through Claude, Cursor, or any connected agent.

OpenAI announced that it has already surpassed its 2029 Stargate goal of securing 10 GW of compute, with 3 GW added in the last 3 months.

Elon Musk revealed during questioning in his trial vs. OpenAI that xAI has used distillation techniques to train on OpenAI models.

Anthropic launched the public beta for Claude Security, a system that leverages Opus 4.7 to scan codebases for vulnerabilities and help enterprises generate patches.

Cursor released Security Review, which also deploys autonomous agents to check for vulnerabilities and run scheduled codebase scans with results posted to Slack.

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 Anonymous:

"Like millions around the globe, I am a recovering addict, more specifically an alcoholic. A lot of literature and studies are available. Some of the core writings go back to the 1930s and have been kept in their original format to preserve their meaning.

The volume of information is amazing and use and nuance is essential to keep the message personal. To help my own journey, I created a notebook in NotebookLM referencing several books produced by Alcoholics Anonymous, clinical research studies, and work by independent authors.

This allows for daily motivational messages, key topics of a particular recovery step, or the clearing up of decisive material with pros and cons. Turning some of these subjects into an audible debate in NotebookLM is a great way to take on differing views and see differences and indeed similarities. It's also a real go-to for speaking notes, recovery workbooks, and deep research."

How do you use AI? Tell us here.

🎓 Highlights: News, Guides & Events

• Read our last AI newsletter: Zuckerberg’s $500M AI biology swing

• Read our last Tech newsletter: Samsung’s Meta Ray-Ban rival just leaked

• Read our last Robotics newsletter: A humanoid baggage handler has landed

• Today’s AI tool guide: Stress test business ideas with Perplexity

See you soon,

Rowan, Joey, Zach, Shubham, and Jennifer — the humans behind The Rundown

Good morning, robotics enthusiasts. Japan Airlines is about to let Chinese humanoids loose on the tarmac at Tokyo’s Haneda Airport, one of the world’s busiest.

Beginning in May, Unitree’s G1 and UBTECH’s Walker E will be put to work hauling luggage and loading cargo near aircraft stands, in an early test of whether bipedal machines can survive the chaotic reality of airport ground ops.

In today’s robotics rundown:

• Humanoids handle baggage at Tokyo airport

• SoftBank launches $100B robotics company

• Harvard’s ant bots rewrite swarm logic

• China freezes all robotaxi permits

• Quick hits on other robotics news

LATEST DEVELOPMENTS

JAPAN AIRLINES

✈️ Humanoids handle baggage at Tokyo airport

Image source: Images 2.0 / The Rundown

The Rundown: Japan’s largest carrier is deploying Chinese-made humanoids as bag handlers at Tokyo’s Haneda Airport — one of the world’s busiest airports — in a two-year trial that doubles as a stress test for the entire sector.

The details:

• Japan Airlines will start testing the robots as bag handlers from early May, in a trial to modernize ground operations and tackle staff shortages.

• The robots — Unitree’s G1 and UBTECH’s Walker E — will assist with cargo loading and unloading near aircraft stands, slotting into existing infrastructure.

• JAL chose humanoids so they can operate in tight spaces around planes and plug into existing conveyors, gates, and service areas without a major overhaul.

• Each robot can work for around two to three hours at a time before recharging, and humans will continue to supervise traffic management around aircraft.

Why it matters: The trial could expand well beyond baggage, eventually testing humanoids on aircraft cabin cleaning and ground support equipment. Humanoids have already begun pilot programs in automotive factories and warehouses, but international airports represent a far more challenging, higher-stakes proving ground.

SOFTBANK

🤖 SoftBank launches $100B robotics company

Image source: Kiyoshi Ota / Bloomberg / Getty Images / Reve AI

The Rundown: SoftBank is assembling a new company called Roze AI that would deploy fleets of autonomous robots to build data centers in the U.S., making AI infrastructure faster and cheaper to construct, the Financial Times reports.

The details:

• The venture’s focus is on making AI data-center construction more efficient and scalable, with fleets of robots handling repetitive and hazardous tasks.

• SoftBank is already preparing Roze for a U.S. IPO, with some execs pushing for a listing as early as the second half of 2026.

• The target valuation: at a staggering $100B — though insiders have raised doubts about both that figure and the proposed timeline.

• CEO Masayoshi Son has committed tens of billions to AI infrastructure, including a high-profile $41B investment in OpenAI.

Why it matters: Son has committed billions to AI infrastructure, and Roze extends that to the physical layer of construction itself. But given his track record has been uneven (he sank hundreds of millions into Zume, a failed AI pizza startup), insiders are already questioning whether a pricey new robotics spinout is worth the risk.

HARVARD UNIVERSITY

🐜 Harvard’s ant bots rewrite swarm logic

Image source: L. Mahadevan / Harvard SEAS

The Rundown: Harvard researchers just built a swarm of ant-inspired robots — dubbed “RAnts” — that can collectively construct and dismantle structures with no central command, blueprints, or pre-programmed coordination.

The details:

• Instead of pheromones, the robots communicate via light fields, with each bot responding to environmental changes triggered by its neighbors.

• Intelligence, rather than being embedded in hardware, emerges from the interaction between agents and their environment.

• Flipping just two parameters — cooperation strength and material deposition rate — switches the entire swarm from construction mode to demolition mode.

• Published in PRX Life, the research points toward applications in hazardous-zone construction or even planetary exploration.

Why it matters: Harvard’s RAnts show that complex, adaptive behavior doesn’t require complex robots, a finding that reframes how engineers think about autonomy at scale. MIT and EPFL are also exploring decentralized coordination of swarm bots, with implications for everything from disaster response to off-world construction.

ROBOTAXIS

🚕 China freezes all robotaxi permits

Image source: Images 2.0 / The Rundown

The Rundown: China froze new permits for autonomous vehicles after more than 100 Baidu Apollo Go robotaxis abruptly stopped mid-traffic in Wuhan last month, stranding passengers on highways and triggering a national safety review.

The details:

• In March, more than 100 Baidu Apollo Go robotaxis stalled simultaneously in Wuhan, trapping passengers inside for up to two hours and disrupting traffic.

• China suspended all new autonomous vehicle permits nationwide, blocking companies from expanding fleets, launching pilots, or entering new cities.

• Regulators also convened emergency meetings with officials from cities running robotaxi programs, ordering comprehensive safety inspections.

• Baidu’s Wuhan operations — its largest hub with 400 fully driverless vehicles — remain suspended, while rivals WeRide and Pony have seen their shares drop.

Why it matters: Baidu’s Wuhan operations are suspended entirely while a broader freeze bars all operators from expanding fleets, launching new tests, or entering new cities — with no timeline for resumption. It’s the second such halt in under two years; the last one, triggered by job-displacement protests, took months to lift.

QUICK HITS

📰 Everything else in robotics today

MIT and DeepMind veterans just brought Eka Robotics out of stealth, with a simulation‑trained foundation model that aims to give robots high‑speed dexterity.

Medra AI opened Medra Lab 001 in San Francisco, a 38K-square-foot facility with 100+ robots running 24/7 experiments for biotech and drug discovery.

China’s State Grid is investing nearly $1B to roll out 8,500 AI robots to take over inspection and maintenance of its power grid.

Shenzhen‑based startup Kinetix AI unveiled KAI, an ultra‑high‑DoF humanoid aimed at the top end of dexterity and tactile sensing in the current humanoid wave.

REK is opening what it calls the first “humanoid store” in the U.S., a REK Shop in San Francisco that will sell, service, and showcase its VR‑piloted fighting robots.

France-based SquareMind raised $18M for Swan, an AI robotic platform that automates full-body skin imaging to help dermatologists detect skin cancer.

MIT researchers 3D-printed soft microscopic “magno-bots” whose moving parts can be remotely actuated by an ordinary magnet for tasks like gripping or drug delivery.

Amazon-owned Zoox started testing autonomous robotaxi rides for employees to and from Harry Reid International Airport in Las Vegas.

Researchers at the University of Turku developed a stretchable, transparent, eco-friendly electronic “skin” that gives a robotic hand pressure-sensitive touch.

Germany is building tele‑operated robotic excavators and arms to safely remove 126K corroding nuclear waste barrels from the unstable Asse II salt mine.

A French Navy-operated deep-sea robot retrieved delicate 16th‑century artifacts from a merchant shipwreck more than 1.5 miles beneath the Mediterranean.

The US Navy and Boeing completed the first two-hour test flight of the operational MQ-25A Stingray unmanned carrier-based refueling drone.

EPFL researchers built a “kinematic intelligence” control method that lets robots share and reuse human-taught skills without jamming their joints.

California approved regulations allowing manufacturers to test and deploy heavy-duty autonomous trucks, weighing over 10K pounds, on public roads.

COMMUNITY

🎓 Highlights: News, Guides & Events

• Read our last AI newsletter: Zuckerberg’s $500M AI biology swing

• Read our last Tech newsletter: Samsung’s Meta Ray-Ban rival just leaked

• Read our last Robotics newsletter: The Chinese robot ban is coming

• Today’s AI tool guide: Build a custom blog writing agent with no code

• RSVP to workshop today @ 2PM EST: Codex for non-technical operators

See you soon,

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

Good morning, AI enthusiasts. Google Deepmind’s Demis Hassabis has predicted that AI could eventually end disease, and Mark Zuckerberg and Priscilla Chan's Biohub just put $500M on the same bet.

Their new five-year Virtual Biology Initiative pairs major funding and a powerhouse of partners, all coordinated around the same goal: producing enough data to push AI to model how disease starts at the cell level.

Reminder: Our next live workshop is today at 2 PM EST! Join for a walkthrough of OpenAI’s Codex platform, its new features, and how to best leverage it as a non-technical user. RSVP here.

In today’s AI rundown:

• Zuckerberg’s Biohub funnels $500M into AI biology

• Mayo Clinic AI spots pancreatic cancer 3 years early

• Build a custom blog writing agent with no code

• Food AI’s ‘ChatGPT moment’ — tastes like a chef

• 4 new AI tools, community workflows, and more

LATEST DEVELOPMENTS

BIOHUB

🧬 Zuckerberg’s Biohub funnels $500M into AI biology

Image source: Images 2.0 / The Rundown

The Rundown: Biohub, the nonprofit backed by Mark Zuckerberg and Priscilla Chan’s CZI, announced a $500M Virtual Biology Initiative to build open datasets and models that can predict how human cells behave — pushing AI toward biology simulation.

The details:

• $400M of the $500M will fund data generation and imaging tech, with $100M for external research labs and research efforts.

• Nvidia, Allen Institute, Arc, and others are joining the initiative, with Biohub committing to open datasets as a shared base for AI biology research.

• Current AI biology datasets max out near 1B cells, with Biohub’s Alex Rives saying an “order of magnitude” more data is needed to accelerate the efforts.

• The goal is to train models on the data to use AI toward “understanding disease and reprogramming it at the level of cells, molecules, and tissues.”

Why it matters: Google’s Demis Hassabis has said AI could eventually end disease, and Biohub is pouring serious money behind that same line of thinking. The question is whether the scaling that cracked language and protein structure also holds for cells, and whether $500M gets anywhere close to the data scale needed to find out.

TOGETHER WITH GLEAN

📈 From agent sprawl to real ROI

The Rundown: Organizations are deploying agents across functions, but few are seeing the ROI they expected. Join Glean:LIVE on May 12 to discover the Enterprise Agent Development Lifecycle — a new operating model that moves enterprises from scattered experiments to agents that deliver real, measurable impact.

Register for Glean:LIVE to:

• Get a repeatable framework for building, launching, and governing agents at scale

• Hear from enterprise leaders on the decisions shaping their agent strategy

• Watch product demos spanning the full agent lifecycle — with a live Q&A at the end

Register now.

AI & HEALTHCARE

🔬 Mayo Clinic AI spots pancreatic cancer 3 years early

Image source: Mayo Clinic

The Rundown: Mayo Clinic published new data on REDMOD, an AI that reads invisible tissue patterns on standard CT scans, catching pancreatic cancer up to three years ahead of when doctors typically find it and nearly doubling specialist accuracy.

The details:

• REDMOD reviewed nearly 2,000 routine CT scans that specialists had originally read as normal before later diagnoses, picking up 73% of the cases early.

• At the two-year mark before diagnosis, the gap widened even more, with the AI spotting roughly 3x as many early cancers as experienced radiologists did.

• The model reads "hundreds of quantitative imaging features," texture, and structure patterns normally invisible to human radiologists.

Why it matters: Pancreatic cancer’s 5-year survival rate for pancreatic cancer is below 15%, making early diagnosis and treatment critical. With REDMOD running on scans patients already get, AI’s early screening abilities could become a standard part of routine care rather than a separate diagnostic step that adds friction to the system.

AI TRAINING

✍️ Build a custom blog writing agent with no code

The Rundown: In this guide, you will learn how to build a subagent in Langflow that writes blog posts in your website's style. The big win is that the agent runs locally for free (besides LLM calls) and can be triggered by Claude, Codex, etc.

Step-by-step:

1. Download Langflow, open it on your computer (it runs locally), click New Flow, go to the content generation section, and choose the Blog Writer template

2. Add a text input called "topic", giving the agent a topic to write about, and link your best blog in the reference input so the agent can copy your writing style

3. Add your OpenAI or Anthropic API key under the language model settings. Then select the model you want the flow to use

4. Click on Playground and test it with a topic. That runs the flow, pulls in your reference style, and gives you a first draft

Pro tip: If you want Claude to use this as a subagent, click Share > MCP Server > Claude MCP. Then Claude can call that blog-writing tool for you whenever you need it.

PRESENTED BY BOX

🧠 Turn enterprise knowledge into AI action

The Rundown: Enterprise AI only works when it has the right business content. Box is the secure, essential context layer for agents to access the institutional knowledge that makes a company run.

Box's AI suite includes:

• Box Extract to pull actionable data from enterprise content at scale

• Box Agent to transform unstructured data into the context AI needs

• Box Automate (now GA) to orchestrate agentic workflow automation

Learn more about Box’s AI solutions at Box’s Content + AI Virtual Summit on May 20.

AI RESEARCH

🧑‍🍳 Food AI’s ‘ChatGPT moment’ — tastes like a chef

Image source: Midjourney

The Rundown: Food robotics startup KAIKAKU AI just published Epicure, a new paper claiming a "ChatGPT moment" for food AI that shows its AI model can pick up on flavor, cuisine, and texture just from how chefs combine ingredients in recipes.

The details:

• Researchers cleaned 6,653 messy ingredient entries into 1,032 usable foods, then mapped with AI how they relate across recipes.

• Despite never seeing chemistry data or taste labels, the model identified all 5 basic tastes, ordered peppers by spiciness, and tagged cuisines by region.

• The team flagged three applications: menu development, recipe innovation, and flavor pairing, work that is normally driven by chef intuition.

• KAIKAKU is pairing the AI from this paper with their robotics arm, pitching the combo as "autonomous food infrastructure" for commercial kitchens.

Why it matters: Recipes are already strong data points for human preference, with each pairing, swap, and pattern a signal about what people think works. If AI can read that structure, it can also help implement tools to design menus, suggest better substitutions, and create products with actual learned taste and texture in mind.

QUICK HITS

🛠️ Trending AI Tools

• 🎶 ElevenMusic - Platform for AI song generation, remixing, creator payouts

• 🚀 MiMo-V2.5-Pro - Xiaomi's powerful new open-source model

• 🧠 GPT 5.5 - OpenAI's frontier model for agentic coding and computer use

• ⚙️ Cursor SDK - Run Cursor’s coding agents in other workflows and products

📰 Everything else in AI today

ElevenLabs launched ElevenMusic, a streaming platform with built-in AI remixing and AI-assisted track creation, already hosting 4k+ artists and offering creator payouts.

Two U.S. House committees opened probes into Cursor-maker Anysphere and Airbnb over Chinese AI use, with Composer 2 built on Kimi and Airbnb's agent on Qwen.

Mistral AI launched Vibe remote agents, cloud sessions that run coding tasks in parallel, powered by the company’s new open-weights Medium 3.5 model.

Google added file creation into Gemini, allowing the model to output formats like Google Docs, Sheets, and Slides, Microsoft Word and Excel files, Markdown, and more.

OpenAI released a Cybersecurity Action Plan to "democratize" AI cyber defense and work with the U.S. government and industry on threat coordination and defender tools.

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 Patrick B. in Boonsboro, MD:

"A couple of months ago, I received a cancer diagnosis... The amount of appointments, trying to understand the medical concepts, my diagnosis, appointments, scans, and how cancer really operates, is really overwhelming.

I built out several assets and artifacts in Claude, including a dashboard to help me manage my diagnosis with appointments, insurance claims, scans, treatment, regimens, etc. This allowed me to also share with my family the progress and what was happening with my diagnosis. As far as being a patient advocate, this really made it a lot easier for me to ask better, more targeted questions to my oncology team and helped me manage this whole process a lot better than I could have otherwise.

This has been a huge advantage for me in keeping on top of my diagnosis and making sure that I follow the doctor's instructions in a more detailed way. It also gives me a central place to ask questions about my diagnosis since it knows me like my doctors."

How do you use AI? Tell us here.

🎓 Highlights: News, Guides & Events

• Read our last AI newsletter: The biggest AI trial ever kicks off

• Read our last Tech newsletter: Samsung’s Meta Ray-Ban rival just leaked

• Read our last Robotics newsletter: The Chinese robot ban is coming

• Today’s AI tool guide: Build a custom blog writing agent with no code

• RSVP to workshop today @ 2PM EST: Codex for non-technical operators

See you soon,

Rowan, Joey, Zach, Shubham, and Jennifer — the humans behind The Rundown

Good morning, AI enthusiasts. The two faces behind AI’s biggest rivalry are finally in the same room — but this time it's a federal courtroom, with Elon Musk on the witness stand and Sam Altman watching from the gallery.

Musk's $130B trial against OpenAI kicked off on Tuesday, with four weeks of testimony, hundreds of pages of private emails set to spill into the public record, major AI names on the stand, and a lot more drama still to come.

In today’s AI rundown:

• Elon Musk’s $130B trial against OpenAI kicks off

• Google finalizes Pentagon deal despite protests

• Automate any manual task with Codex

• Talkie is an AI that thinks it's 1930

• 4 new AI tools, community workflows, and more

LATEST DEVELOPMENTS

OPENAI

🏛️ Elon Musk’s $130B trial against OpenAI kicks off

Image source: Images 2.0 / The Rundown

The Rundown: Elon Musk just took the stand in federal court as opening statements began in his $130B lawsuit against OpenAI, accusing CEO Sam Altman of "stealing a charity" — while OAI's lawyer told the jury Musk sued because he "didn't get his way."

The details:

• Musk's suit seeks $130B in damages, the ouster of Altman and Brockman from the board, and a forced unwind of OpenAI's recent for-profit conversion.

• Musk said in his testimony that "if a verdict comes out that it's OK to loot a charity, the entire foundation of charitable giving in America will be damaged”.

• OAI’s legal team called Musk’s suit “sour grapes,” saying Musk didn’t like the success the company saw after his departure.

• Microsoft’s legal team said Musk didn’t object to OAI’s structure until after its success as xAI’s competitor, and said it “knew nothing” of Altman’s 2023 firing.

Why it matters: This is just Day 1 of one of the most contentious court cases the tech world has seen, and the details are going to be juicy. With high-profile AI characters set to testify and with hundreds of pages of private messages about to spill into the public record, the next four weeks are going to be hard to look away from.

TOGETHER WITH TELEPORT

🛡️ Trusted ephemeral runtime for infra agents

The Rundown Running agents in production shouldn’t mean trading security for speed. Teleport Beams provisions an isolated VM and assigns identity via a short-lived certificate before an agent runs a single line — zero secrets, no IAM wrestling, no standing privileges.

Built for teams shipping real agents:

• Each Beam runs in an isolated Firecracker VM

• Supports coding agents, sandboxed apps, and agentic jobs

• Fully auditable, with identity and access tied to every session

Explore Beams.

GOOGLE

🪖 Google finalizes Pentagon deal despite protests

Image source: Images 2.0 / The Rundown

The Rundown: Google signed a classified AI deal with the Pentagon, opening its models to "any lawful government purpose," the same week that 600+ staffers wrote an open letter to CEO Sundar Pichai, calling to reject the use of AI for military purposes.

The details:

• More than 600 Google employees sent Pichai a letter on Monday asking him to “refuse to make our AI systems available for classified workloads.”

• The Information reported that the contract opens Google's AI to “any lawful government purpose”, with no legal right to veto how the Pentagon uses it.

• OAI and xAI inked deals with the Pentagon last month, with Anthropic currently fighting in court after being blacklisted for not dropping its guardrails.

• Google's no-weapons pledge was scrubbed from its AI principles in 2025, after it was implemented in 2018 following successful staff protests.

Why it matters: The Pentagon drama might still feel fresh in the OAI-vs-Anthropic rivalry, but it’s not discouraging another top AI lab from making a similar deal. Google’s now wading into a messy territory from a PR and internal perspective, and time will tell if the same backlash we saw with ChatGPT now comes to Gemini’s doorstep.

AI TRAINING

✅ Automate any manual task with Codex

The Rundown: In this guide, you will learn how to let OpenAI’s Codex click through any annoying, repetitive work using Computer Use on Mac or Windows.

Step-by-step:

1. Open Codex, go to Plugins, find and enable the Computer Use plugin, and then start a new task

2. Open the permissions menu and switch from Default permissions to Full access. Confirm any prompts

3. Give a real task, like: “Open Chrome and debug the UI of this web page http://localhost:3000/. Click through, reproduce the bug I describe, then tell me what you think is causing it. If not sure, ask before making changes”

Pro tip: Codex can automate repetitive workflows in local apps, too. Try it for Photoshop exports, Premiere cleanup, file renaming, or any other tool.

PRESENTED BY TELY AI

💬 Market leaders get leads from ChatGPT and Google

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

With Tely AI, you can:

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

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

• Costs less than hiring freelancers or maintaining a marketing team

• Ideal for niche industries where expertise matters

Get leads from Google and ChatGPT on autopilot.

AI RESEARCH

🕰️ Talkie is an AI that thinks it's 1930

Image source: Images 2.0 / The Rundown

The Rundown: Researchers Nick Levine, David Duvenaud (fmr. Anthropic), and Alec Radford (fmr. OpenAI) demoed Talkie, a 13B ‘vintage’ AI model trained only on text from before 1931, built to test how AI thinks when its worldview predates the internet.

The details:

• Talkie was trained on 260B tokens of pre-1931 books, newspapers, journals, patents, and case law, all now in the US public domain.

• To teach talkie to chat without modern data, the team pulled instructions from etiquette manuals and cookbooks, with Claude Sonnet 4.6 grading the answers.

• The coding language Python didn’t exist in 1930, but Talkie wrote working code by flipping a plus sign to a minus sign in an example, proving it can generalize.

• AI benchmarks get poisoned when models train on their own test data — talkie sidesteps that, with a GPT-3-level version coming next.

Why it matters: Today's frontier models all sound vaguely similar because they all read roughly the same modern web. Talkie is definitely cut from a different cloth — but the Python coding anecdote is a fascinating part of the experiment that shows what kind of learning and reasoning is potentially going on beneath the original training data.

QUICK HITS

🛠️ Trending AI Tools

• 📊 Replit Slides - Create polished, stunning slides in seconds with AI

• 🤖 Nemotron 3 Nano Omni - NVIDIA's open AI combining vision, audio, text

• 🌎 Echo-2 - SpAItial’s new SOTA text-to-3D world model

• ⚙️ Workflows - Mistral's enterprise tool for chaining AI agents

📰 Everything else in AI today

OpenAI announced that GPT-5.5, Codex, and Managed Agents are now available via Amazon Bedrock, coming a day after its new contract restructure with Microsoft.

NVIDIA released Nemotron 3 Nano Omni, a new open model that can handle vision, audio, and text at 9x the speed of rival open multimodal models.

The WSJ reported that OAI fell short of its targets for revenue and user growth, with CFO Sarah Friar questioning its massive spending — with OAI calling it “ludicrous.”

Anthropic added new connectors for a broader range of creative workflows, including apps like Blender, Adobe Creative Cloud, Autodesk Fusion, SketchUp, and more.

Xiaomi open-sourced MiMo-V2.5-Pro, which ties Kimi K2.6 on Artificial Analysis’ leaderboard, featuring a 1M context window and strong efficiency for agentic tasks.

SpAItial launched Echo-2, a new SOTA world model that turns text or photos into explorable 3D worlds, claiming to beat World Labs' Marble 1.1 across benchmarks.

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 Alan C. in Ontario, Canada:

"I used AI to resolve what looked like a furnace failure during a cold night without calling a technician. After installing a Google Nest Thermostat about a year ago, my system started making a loud ‘revving’ noise and flashing error codes (2 and 7) that pointed to pressure switch or hardware faults.

I photographed the control board and wiring and uploaded them to Google Gemini. It identified the furnace, traced the issue to thermostat power stealing, and flagged a wiring phasing error. It then guided a simple ‘G-to-C’ wire conversion to provide stable power, along with steps to clear lockouts and verify readings.

Within an hour, the noise stopped, error codes cleared, and the system stabilized to normal operation. It saved me about $300 HVAC tech service call, and I avoided a night in the cold."

How do you use AI? Tell us here.

🎓 Highlights: News, Guides & Events

• Read our last AI newsletter: OpenAI and Microsoft’s new open relationship

• Read our last Tech newsletter: Samsung’s Meta Ray-Ban rival just leaked

• Read our last Robotics newsletter: The Chinese robot ban is coming

• Today’s AI tool guide: Automate any manual task with Codex

• RSVP to workshop Thursday @ 2PM EST: Codex for non-technical operators

See you soon,

Rowan, Joey, Zach, Shubham, and Jennifer — the humans behind The Rundown

Good morning, tech enthusiasts. Samsung’s long-rumored Galaxy Glasses just leaked — and they look a lot like Meta’s Ray-Bans.

The first model skips AR entirely, betting on Google Gemini and cameras to do the heavy lifting. Meta already owns 73% of the smart glasses market — Samsung wants to be the Android answer to that dominance. But the real play is what comes next.

In today’s tech rundown:

• Samsung’s Meta-rival smart glasses leak

• Spotify is now a fitness app

• Australia slaps Big Tech with journalism tax

• SpaceX, Anduril win Golden Dome contracts

• Quick hits on other tech news

LATEST DEVELOPMENTS

SAMSUNG

🕶️ Samsung’s Meta-rival smart glasses leak

Image source: Ideogram / The Rundown

The Rundown: Leaked renders of Samsung’s Galaxy Glasses reveal a display-free, camera-forward frame that looks a lot like Meta’s Ray-Bans — only cheaper, and with a more powerful follow-up already in the pipeline, reports Android Headlines.

The details:

• Codenamed “Jinju,” the entry-level Galaxy Glasses pack a Snapdragon AR1 chip, a 12MP Sony IMX681 sensor, and a 155mAh battery.

• Priced between $379 and $499, the display-free Jinju runs Android XR with Gemini onboard for hands-free capture, real-time translation, and visual search.

• A second model, “Haean,” is expected in 2027 with a micro-LED display for true AR overlays, competing with Meta’s Ray-Ban Display glasses.

• Samsung could preview Jinju as early as Google I/O, with a fuller reveal likely at a Galaxy Unpacked event later this summer.

Why it matters: Samsung’s two-model rollout is a studied move: let Meta absorb the market risk, then enter with sharper specs and a lower price tag. Jinju keeps expectations low-key — with no display, just camera and AI — while Haean, arriving in 2027 with a micro-LED overlay, is where Samsung’s real AR ambitions live.

TOGETHER WITH DREXEL UNIVERSITY

🎓 Earn your AI degree from a top-ranked school

The Rundown: Drexel University’s MS in Artificial Intelligence & Machine Learning is an interdisciplinary program taught by visionary leaders and industry experts, giving practitioners a deep understanding of the latest methodologies, techniques, and ethics shaping the field today.

The program offers:

• Hands-on work with datasets and state-of-the-art tools you can apply immediately

• Coursework structured around data science, computation theory, and algorithms

• Flexible full-time, part-time, online, and on-campus learning options

Learn more about Drexel’s MS in AI & Machine Learning.

SPOTIFY

 💪 Spotify is now a fitness app

Image source: Spotify

The Rundown: Spotify is turning itself into a full‑blown fitness platform, folding a new workout hub, Peloton video classes, and creator‑led programs into the main app for its roughly 600M users.

The details:

• A new in-app Fitness hub surfaces workouts via an onboarding questionnaire, then generates a personalized starter pack.

• More than 1,400 on-demand Peloton classes — runs, strength, cardio, yoga, but not bike workouts — are available to Premium subscribers, ad-free.

• Both free and Premium subscribers can access curated playlists and content from wellness creators like Yoga With Kassandra and Chloe Ting.

• Workouts save, queue, and download like any track — video on TV, audio on your phone, recovery on your smart speaker, no app-switching.

Why it matters: Spotify says nearly 70% of its Premium subscribers already work out to Spotify music, and there are more than 150M fitness playlists active globally. So rather than letting those users bounce to Apple Fitness+ or YouTube, it’s now competing directly for their workout time.

BIG TECH

🗞️ Australia slaps Big Tech with a journalism tax

Image source: Ideogram / The Rundown

The Rundown: Australia is threatening to hit Meta, Google, and TikTok with a 2.25% levy on local revenues if they don’t cut deals to pay news publishers for the journalism powering their platforms.

The details:

• Australia has unveiled draft “News Bargaining Incentive” laws to force major platforms to pay publishers or face a compulsory levy on Australian revenues.

• The 2.25% charge would kick in if platforms skip content deals with local publishers.

• Any platform clearing A$250M (~$179M) a year in Australia is in scope, and the scheme could reportedly funnel up to A$250M annually into newsrooms.

• The proposal replaces Australia’s News Media Bargaining Code, which collapsed after Meta walked away and dropped news from its feeds.

Why it matters: Prime Minister Anthony Albanese says the plan is meant to stop tech giants from using Australian journalism for free, keep newsrooms alive, and block platforms from dumping news to avoid payments. Canada and the EU are also rolling out rules that get Big Tech to share ad money with the outlets supplying their headlines.

DEFENSE TECH

☄️ SpaceX, Anduril win Golden Dome contracts

Image source: Boeing

The Rundown: Twelve companies — including SpaceX, Anduril, and Lockheed Martin — landed fast-track contracts worth $3.2B to prototype space-based interceptors for President Trump’s Golden Dome defense system by 2028.

The details:

• The contracts target orbital tech designed to destroy enemy missiles before they re-enter the atmosphere, a capability that has never been fielded at scale.

• The award mixes legacy defense primes with newer space-warfare startups: True Anomaly, Turion Space, Quindar, and Sci-Tec all made the cut.

• Golden Dome’s price tag could hit hundreds of billions, with Space Force commanders flagging affordability as the program’s defining constraint.

• SpaceX isn’t just building satellites; it’s developing the operating system that will knit Golden Dome’s interceptors, sensors, and command networks together.

Why it matters: No country has ever put weapons in orbit to shoot down ballistic missiles, and no one has proven it can be done. If Golden Dome works, and if Congress pays for it, the U.S. could destroy enemy missiles just seconds after launch. For now, it’s more of a concept than hardware — and a pricey one at that.

QUICK HITS

📰 Everything else in tech today

Joby Aviation is running a week-long series of demo flights in NYC using its electric air taxis to travel between JFK Airport and Manhattan in under 10 minutes.

Elon Musk is preparing to launch X Money, an in-app banking and payments service, as a key step toward turning X into a WeChat-style “everything app.”

Apple is expanding its “Ultra” branding beyond Apple Watch to include the long-rumored foldable iPhone and a MacBook with OLED touchscreen, Macworld reports.

Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff said AI won’t kill entry-level jobs and is hiring 1K new graduates and interns to work on the company’s AI platforms as proof.

Maine Gov. Janet Mills vetoed a bill that would have paused construction of large data centers in the state until fall 2027, promising to study their impact instead.

Social media scams cost Americans more than $2.1B in 2025, according to a U.S. Federal Trade Commission report that highlights an eightfold increase since 2020.

Tokyo plans to build a 1-gigawatt floating offshore wind farm near the Izu Islands by 2035, aiming to create the world’s largest facility of its kind.

Meta signed a deal with startup Overview Energy to receive up to 1 gigawatt of solar power beamed from satellites as infrared light to ground-based solar farms at night.

Europe cleared Moderna’s first mRNA flu–COVID shot, while the U.S. remains without it after Moderna pulled its FDA application amid RFK Jr.’s anti-vaccine push.

COMMUNITY

🎓 Highlights: News, Guides & Events

• Read our last AI newsletter: OpenAI and Microsoft's new open relationship

• Read our last Tech newsletter: Big Tech’s $20B lobbying blitz

• Read our last Robotics newsletter: The Chinese robot ban is coming

• Today’s AI tool guide: Set up AI teammates with Workspace Agents

• RSVP to workshop Thursday @ 2PM EST: Codex for non-technical operators

See you soon,

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