The Rundown AI(@TheRundownAI)

Google just rolled out Gemini 3.7 Flash, coming just three weeks after 3.6. At $0.75 / $3.75 per M ...

The Rundown AI (@TheRundownAI) — Thu, 13 Aug 2026 17:23:31 GMT

Google just rolled out Gemini 3.7 Flash, coming just three weeks after 3.6.

At $0.75 / $3.75 per M tokens, it undercuts similar mid-sized rivals like Sonnet 5, GPT 5.6 Terra, and Muse Spark 1.2.

Strong coding, knowledge work, and intelligence bumps for a quick upgrade, with Google continuing to push price + speed over a Pro frontier competitor. 

Reuters reported yesterday that the company "delayed the new flagship version of Gemini by two months after internal testing showed its performance continued to lag behind rivals in areas such as coding".

💬5🔄3❤️24👀6831📊8

Google DeepMind just shipped a model that lets people sign into a Pixel 11 instead of typing. SL2T ...

The Rundown AI (@TheRundownAI) — Thu, 13 Aug 2026 15:43:36 GMT

Google DeepMind just shipped a model that lets people sign into a Pixel 11 instead of typing.

SL2T starts with ASL-to-English in Gboard and Live Transcribe.

Testers said signing was faster than typing in English.

To keep the camera feed private, the phone tracks points on the hands, face, and body on-device and discards the video.

Sam Sepah, a Deaf Googler, originated the project.

Demis Hassabis: “Built in close collaboration with the Deaf community, it’s a great example of the good that can be done with AI.”

Google DeepMind@GoogleDeepMind

SL2T is our breakthrough sign language-to-text model powering new features for Deaf and hard of hearing users on @Android.

Starting with American Sign Language-to-English on Pixel 11, people can sign directly into Gboard and Live Transcribe instead of typing.

Your browser does not support the video tag.

💬3🔄1❤️22👀6940📊4

Kellanova, the company that makes Pringles in Europe, spent four years and roughly $5M working with ...

The Rundown AI (@TheRundownAI) — Wed, 12 Aug 2026 19:18:21 GMT

Kellanova, the company that makes Pringles in Europe, spent four years and roughly $5M working with Siemens to build a real time digital twin of its potato chip dough at a factory in Poland. 

The problem it solves is variability. More than 200 parameters affect the final chip, from flour particle size to the humidity of the dough to where and when the potatoes were harvested, and workers previously corrected for all of it by hand and by feel. 

Now sensors capture 200 data points every millisecond and feed a machine learning model that recommends recipe adjustments before problems appear. 

A human operator still approves each change. The line has seen 13 percent less waste, 7 percent lower energy use and a 10 percent capacity gain. 

Digital twins have been a concept in manufacturing for years, but this is what it looks like when one finally starts paying for itself.

Your browser does not support the video tag.

💬7🔄4❤️23👀7488📊10

NEW: SpaceXAI released Grok 4.6, with some impressive jumps across benchmarks. Matching or nearing...

The Rundown AI (@TheRundownAI) — Wed, 12 Aug 2026 16:02:36 GMT

NEW: SpaceXAI released Grok 4.6, with some impressive jumps across benchmarks. 

Matching or nearing Fable and 5.6-Sol on areas like intelligence, coding, and agentic tasks, with pricing that significantly undercuts the frontier. 

Elon + Cursor are cooking

💬2🔄3❤️20👀6901📊5

More on the story behind Rosie's treatment: https://t.co/hQ6uriboIm

The Rundown AI (@TheRundownAI) — Wed, 12 Aug 2026 14:58:24 GMT

More on the story behind Rosie's treatment: x.com/TheRundownAI/s…

The Rundown AI@TheRundownAI

An AI consultant with no biology training used ChatGPT and AlphaFold to create a personalized mRNA cancer vaccine for his rescue dog.

Tumor shrunk by half.

UNSW structural biologist Dr. Kate Michie: “It’s exciting to me that someone who’s not a scientist has been able to do these things.”

UNSW genomics director Martin Smith: “If we can do this for a dog, why aren’t we rolling this out to all humans with cancer?”

Via The Australian

💬0🔄0❤️0👀2148

LAUNCHED: Paul Conyngham, who used ChatGPT + AlphaFold to design an mRNA cancer vaccine for his resc...

The Rundown AI (@TheRundownAI) — Wed, 12 Aug 2026 14:57:30 GMT

LAUNCHED: Paul Conyngham, who used ChatGPT + AlphaFold to design an mRNA cancer vaccine for his rescue dog Rosie, founded Gamgee (YC S26) to build personalized vaccines for other dogs.

Trials are live in Australia, and Gamgee is taking cases worldwide.

Paul S. Conyngham@paul_conyngham

My dog Rosie was given months to live. Chemo and immunotherapy failed

I used chatgpt + computational genomics to design a personalised mRNA cancer vaccine for her tumour. Several of her tumours shrank

Today we launch Gamgee (YC S26): personalised mRNA cancer vaccines for dogs

Your browser does not support the video tag.

💬7🔄1❤️16👀7483📊7

NEW: SpaceXAI released Grok Bot in beta, AI teammates that get their own cloud computer, can sign i...

The Rundown AI (@TheRundownAI) — Tue, 11 Aug 2026 17:47:24 GMT

NEW:  SpaceXAI released Grok Bot in beta, AI teammates that get their own cloud computer, can sign into apps, and work 24/7.

Bots are able to coordinate between each other independently or in group chats, and learn from workflows and improve over time.

Your browser does not support the video tag.

💬6🔄3❤️21👀7484📊8

https://t.co/HBe1bCxCa9

The Rundown AI (@TheRundownAI) — Tue, 11 Aug 2026 17:06:08 GMT

x.com/bradlightcap/s…

Brad Lightcap@bradlightcap

i shared the message below with the openai team this morning. these decisions are never easy, but the talent and mission orientation of the openai team make me more optimistic than ever. 🤍

###

Team, it is bittersweet to share that I’ll be moving on from OpenAI to start something new. I feel incredibly fortunate to have spent most of the last decade pursuing our mission and building this company. Sitting here today, mission success feels within sight. It has been the honor of my life to help bring us to this point, and to do it alongside all of you.

I joined OpenAI in 2018, eight years ago this month, because I wanted to work on something hard. @sama introduced me to @gdb and @ilyasut, who showed me a pitch deck suggesting that because models improve predictably with scale, AGI was not only possible but likely. If you had told me then that we’d be where we are today, I wouldn't have believed you.

In the years that followed, I had the privilege of building the first versions of most of our operations and business teams – from Finance to Legal, People, CorpSec, GTM/Gov, Partnerships, and more. Among the most rewarding parts of this journey for me has been watching each of these teams mature under brilliant leaders. I am excited for the next decade in the hands of this incredibly capable team.

At the same time, we grew from a small research lab to one of the most consequential companies of our time. I was reminded of that fact constantly – from serving our first user to our billionth, to the growing scale and ambition of our partnerships and the occasional curveball (the Blip, etc.).

Through it all, I’m proud of how we’ve maintained our focus on people. It always amazes me how quickly the world has adopted our tools and rallied behind our mission. I hope we will continue to earn their trust.

Over the last few months, I’ve been focused on the next horizon and what would stand in the way of mission success. I believe there are a few important new things the world will need to get right as we enter this next period. I’ll have more to share soon, but I believe in OpenAI more than ever and am excited to help you all advance the mission from a different vantage point.

I am deeply grateful to have had the opportunity to work with all of you, and to so many of you for the support through the years. The old OpenAI meme that “the real AGI is the friends you made along the way” really rings true for me.

I will be around for the next few weeks. I am not going far and hope to continue to support you all however I can. I’ll always be a phone call away if you need me.

Brad

💬0🔄0❤️0👀2452

DEPARTING: OpenAI COO Brad Lightcap is leaving the company after eight years to "start something new...

The Rundown AI (@TheRundownAI) — Tue, 11 Aug 2026 17:03:28 GMT

DEPARTING: OpenAI COO Brad Lightcap is leaving the company after eight years to "start something new".

Lightcap said he'll "have more to share soon," and that there is "a few important new things the world will need to get right" as AI enters its next period.

💬7🔄2❤️25👀7491📊9

Chinese billionaire Zhang Lei thinks the AI industry is powering its data centers the wrong way. Hi...

The Rundown AI (@TheRundownAI) — Mon, 10 Aug 2026 18:50:40 GMT

Chinese billionaire Zhang Lei thinks the AI industry is powering its data centers the wrong way.

His company, Envision, just built what it calls the world’s first AI data center running entirely on off-grid wind and solar, tucked into China’s Inner Mongolia region as part of a plan he’s dubbed Mission Gobi.

The bet is that cheap desert renewables, paired with massive batteries, can run servers around the clock without touching a strained power grid.

Zhang has promised 5 GW of these facilities by 2030.

There are still questions around water-free cooling and the cost of battery storage, and Western governments are wary of Chinese infrastructure.

Zhang brushes off Western worries, seeing the same desert model working in dry parts of Spain. 

He also says the tech is “kind of a civilizational output for the rest of the world.”

Your browser does not support the video tag.

💬7🔄6❤️22👀7775📊10

LAUNCHED: Spotify is opening Xirp to the public in beta, an internal tool its engineers built to run...

The Rundown AI (@TheRundownAI) — Mon, 10 Aug 2026 16:58:12 GMT

LAUNCHED: Spotify is opening Xirp to the public in beta, an internal tool its engineers built to run Claude Code, Gemini CLI, and OpenAI Codex agents side-by-side. 

Xirp has already handled 36,000+ coding-agent sessions inside Spotify.

Your browser does not support the video tag.

💬11🔄2❤️32👀7572📊16

NEW: Meta will open the weights for Muse Spark 1.2 "soon", which would immediately be the strongest ...

The Rundown AI (@TheRundownAI) — Mon, 10 Aug 2026 15:21:31 GMT

NEW: Meta will open the weights for Muse Spark 1.2 "soon", which would immediately be the strongest current U.S. open-weight rival to China.

Meta also open-sourced Muse Glimmer, a 30B-parameter model built for running AI agents locally with benchmarks that smash similar-sized rivals like Gemma4 and Qwen3.6. 

Mark Zuckerberg published "The Future Is for Everyone" alongside the news, a 6,500-word essay arguing superintelligence should be distributed to individuals rather than concentrated in a few labs.

A few important quotes from the post: 

"Any policy that slows American model releases -- even by a month -- could add significant risk to American leadership while letting foreign models race ahead."

"The notion that AI is so dangerous that the only safe path is an extreme concentration of power seems inherently problematic."

"While there are risks to releasing capable models, the most dangerous scenario from this perspective would be leading AI labs training powerful models and keeping them for themselves."

Your browser does not support the video tag.

💬4🔄7❤️34👀7758📊10

A thread of some of our favorite submissions so far: https://t.co/fQBzHLRq58

The Rundown AI (@TheRundownAI) — Sun, 02 Aug 2026 17:49:18 GMT

A thread of some of our favorite submissions so far: x.com/rowancheung/st…

Rowan Cheung@rowancheung

We just launched the Reddit for AI use cases.

A place for builders to learn from other builders on how they're using AI to get ahead in life, work, and business.

The submissions have been INCREDIBLE so far.

A few of my favorites: