Omi’s ‘mind-reading’ AI wearable

Good morning, AI enthusiasts. A brand new AI wearable just hit the scene, and it not only desires to be your latest ‘friend’ — but in addition eventually desires to read your thoughts.

Omi guarantees to spice up productivity with its always-on capabilities and brain-interface features, but can it overcome the challenges which have plagued past AI wearables?

In today’s AI rundown:

• Omi debuts brain-reading AI wearable

• Adobe showcases TransPixar for AI visual effects

• Turn any video into an quick tutorial

• Microsoft open-sources powerful Phi-4 model

• 4 latest AI tools & 4 job opportunities

LATEST DEVELOPMENTS

OMI

🧠 Omi debuts brain-reading AI wearable

The Rundown: Based Hardware just introduced Omi, an $89 AI wearable that mixes always-on listening capabilities with brain-interface tech to handle productivity tasks — with hopes to enable thought-reading type abilities in the longer term.

The main points:

• Omi will be worn as a necklace or attached to the temple to enable early brain-interface features that detect when the AI is addressed with no ‘wake’ word.

• The device listens constantly to supply real-time summaries, meeting notes, and contextual information, with a battery life of roughly 3 days.

• The corporate is taking an open-source approach, with over 250 apps already available in its store and integration of AI models from OpenAI and Meta.

• While brain-interface features are currently limited to intent detection, the founder envisions more advanced thought-reading capabilities inside 2 years.

• Omi was initially ‘Friend’ before a tool launched with the identical name, with founder Nik Shevchenko publishing a diss track calling his ‘the actual friend’.

Why it matters: Physical AI wearables have yet to seek out much success past the initial hype phase, though improving models could soon enable more value for users. But getting consumers to vary their habits is hard (along with privacy concerns around ‘all the time on’ tech) — especially when it involves taping a tool to your head.

TOGETHER WITH SANA

⚡Enterprise AI, simplified

The Rundown: Sana AI is an enterprise-grade AI platform grounded in all your organization’s data — making it easy to deploy secure, no-code AI agents for any team or role.

Sana AI permits you to:

• Deploy custom AI agents for any team or role without writing code

• Consolidate AI software applications and unify the UX for AI across your organization

• Integrate AI seamlessly into your existing tech stack

Click here to learn more about Sana AI.

ADOBE

🎬 Adobe showcases TransPixar for AI visual effects

The Rundown: Adobe Research and Hong Kong University of Science and Technology just developed TransPixar, an AI system that allows generation of transparent, realistic visual effects to AI-generated videos.

The main points:

• The tech enables the generation of see-through elements like smoke, reflections, and portals that may naturally mix into video scenes.

• The system teaches the AI to grasp each visible content and transparency concurrently, just like layering in photo editing software.

• TransPixar also needs only minimal additional training data, showing the flexibility to create diverse effects while not having thousands and thousands of example videos.

• The model excels across a variety of effects like swirling storms, magical portals, and shattering glass, with applications starting from movies to gaming.

Why it matters: While AI has already began to disrupt creative workflows, current AI video tools have previously only been in a position to generate solid objects. Adding transparent effects into the combo could change how VFX production is approached — and it’s clear AI will soon find a way to handle even essentially the most complex visual effects tasks.

AI TRAINING

📚 Turn any video into an quick tutorial

The Rundown: Gemini’s latest browser integration lets users turn YouTube videos into comprehensive tutorials that may offer you quick answers to your questions.

Step-by-step:

1. Find your YouTube video in Chrome’s browser and duplicate its URL from the share button.

2. Type “@ Gemini” in a brand new tab’s URL bar and choose Chat with Gemini.

3. Write your prompt (e.g., “create tutorial about”) and paste the URL.

4. Get quick tutorials and ask follow-up questions!

Pro tip: Use Google Chrome for the perfect experience, and do not forget you may ask for specific formats like summaries or practice exercises.

PRESENTED BY IMAGINE AI LIVE

🌟 Your AI future starts here

The Rundown: IMAGINE AI LIVE ’25 is a transformative three-day conference on the Fontainebleau Las Vegas where business leaders can connect with AI innovators and learn practical strategies for enterprise AI implementation.

Attend on May 28-30 and experience:

• Enterprise AI strategies from world-class practitioners and thought leaders

• Hands-on workshops covering practical applications of AI in business operations

• Networking opportunities with executives actively transforming their organizations with AI

Register by January tenth and save $500 on VIP and General Passes!

MICROSOFT

🚀 Microsoft open-sources powerful Phi-4 model

The Rundown: Microsoft just released its small, powerful Phi-4 language model as fully open-source on Hugging Face, with weights now freely available under an MIT license that permits for industrial use.

The main points:

• The 14B parameter model outperforms significantly larger models like GPT-4o and Gemini Pro 1 on math and reasoning tasks.

• Phi-4 was trained totally on synthetically generated high-quality data as an alternative of web scraped content, with a deal with enhancing reasoning capabilities.

• Released in December but limited to Microsoft’s Azure platform, Phi-4 is now fully accessible to developers through Hugging Face for industrial use.

Why it matters: The discharge of Phi-4 in December was an enormous win for smaller AI systems — and now Microsoft’s fully open-source move opens the door for developers to more widely construct on top of the powerful model. The momentum behind open-source AI development (and the capabilities of open models) continues to speed up.

QUICK HITS

🛠️ Trending AI Tools

• 🤖 TestSprite – AI agent that automates the software testing processes

• 📢 Agents Base – Grow brands autonomously with marketing agents

• 📚 2Read – AI kindle buddy for reading, reflecting, and enhancing knowledge

• 🗣️ Your Interviewer – Generate authentic content in seconds

💼 AI Job Opportunities

• 🏗️ Snorkel – Engineering Manager, Infrastructure

• 🛡️ Shield AI – Quality Engineering Technician

• 📝 Grammarly – Staff Product Manager, Core

• 📈 Runway – Revenue Ops Analyst

📰 The whole lot else in AI today

Free AI workshop: Get prompting proficient, find strong use cases, and get AI confident in only 1 hour with Section on Jan. 14. Enroll without spending a dime (Sponsored)

Microsoft announced a reversion of the corporate’s DALL-E PR16 (released in December) back to the older model, following reports of issues and degraded quality from users.

NVIDIA unveiled its next-gen ACE autonomous game characters at CES 2025, bringing human-like AI NPCs powered by small language models to major video game titles.

Chinese robotics firm EngineAI posted latest footage of its SE01 humanoid robot walking outside the corporate’s office, showcasing extremely human-like movement.

Delta introduced a brand new AI-powered Delta Concierge, featuring a multimodal assistant to provide travellers a more personalized and intuitive experience.

Insilico Medicine reported positive Phase I results for ISM5411, an AI-designed drug for inflammatory bowel disease setting the stage for Phase II trials in late 2025.

COMMUNITY

🎥 Join our next live workshop

Join our next workshop on tomorrow at 1 PM ET and learn methods to use AI coding tools to bring any idea to life with Dr. Alvaro Cintas, The Rundown’s AI professor.

RSVP here. Not a member yet? Join The Rundown University on a 14-day free trial.

🤝 Share The Rundown, get rewards

We’ll all the time keep this text 100% free. To support our work, consider sharing The Rundown with your folks, and we’ll send you more free goodies.

Your current referral count: 0
What you wish: 1 more referrals until receiving ChatGPT Prompting Kit Bundle

See you soon,

Rowan, Joey, Zach, Alvaro, and Jason—The Rundown’s editorial team