OpenAI’s $500B Stargate Project

Good morning, AI enthusiasts. A half-trillion-dollar bombshell just dropped on the AI world — with OpenAI and tech giants uniting for one in every of America’s biggest technology initiatives ever.

With an enormous infusion of infrastructure spending and loosening regulations, the U.S. just made a defining move within the AI race — and the acceleration could also be just getting began.

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In today’s AI rundown:

• OpenAI unveils $500B U.S. AI infrastructure initiative

• Tencent unveils advanced 3D generation AI

• Supercharge your code editor with AI assistance

• Perplexity launches Sonar API for real-time search

• 4 recent AI tools & 4 job opportunities

LATEST DEVELOPMENTS

OPENAI

💰 OpenAI unveils $500B U.S. AI infrastructure initiative

The Rundown: OpenAI just announced “The Stargate Project,” a brand new company set to speculate $500B in U.S. AI infrastructure alongside SoftBank, Oracle, and other tech giants — coming alongside the repealing of Biden-era AI safety order during President Donald Trump’s first days back in office.

The main points:

• The enterprise will immediately deploy an initial $100B, starting with massive data centers in Texas before expanding nationwide.

• The project goals to create “lots of of hundreds” of American jobs while securing U.S. leadership in advanced AI development.

• Key technology partners include Nvidia, Microsoft, and Arm, constructing on existing collaborations in AI chip development and cloud infrastructure.

• The initiative was unveiled following Trump’s repeal of Biden’s AI EO, which required labs to share safety testing results and created the AI Safety Institute.

Why it matters: Stargate’s sheer $500B scale, together with unprecedented collaboration between tech giants, could completely reshape your complete AI landscape. The move marks a defining moment in the worldwide AI and AGI race for the U.S., and the timing also signals a transparent prioritization of speed over safety — for higher or worse.

TOGETHER WITH WETHOS

💪 Empower Yourself within the Age of AI

The Rundown: WethosAI empowers you to thrive professionally by merging behavioral science and advanced AI, equipping you with the tools to excel within the AI-driven era through actionable insights and impactful communication.

With WethosAI, you’ll be able to:

• Uncover your individual strengths, cognitive biases, and interpersonal dynamics in minutes

• Prep for meetings with Google Calendar integration and on-the-go coaching

• Communicate confidently in work or life with expert guidance from Wethos Copilot™

Register for Wethos’ “AI Exposed: The Hype Must Die!” webinar on Jan. 23 at 10 AM PST.

TENCENT

🧊 Tencent unveils advanced 3D generation AI

The Rundown: Tencent just released Hunyuan3D 2.0, a brand new open-source system for creating and animating high-quality 3D assets — combining advanced shape generation with sophisticated texture synthesis capabilities.

The main points:

• The system works in two stages – first, creating the 3D shape using Hunyuan3D-DiT, then adding realistic textures with Hunyuan3D-Paint.

• The form generator captures intricate details like fabric folds, facial expression, and surface patterns that previous models often miss or oversimplify.

• The platform also includes Hunyuan3D-Studio, an interface that supports features like sketch-to-3D, low-polygon stylization, and character animation.

• The system outperformed all alternative models across key metrics, including geometry detail, texture quality, and input image alignment in tests.

Why it matters: The times of making 3D objects being a labor-intensive, lengthy process are long gone. With Tencent open-sourcing this powerful recent system, the creation opportunities are about to be limitless for everybody. Workflows in areas like game development and film are about to get a serious speed upgrade.

AI TRAINING

💻 Supercharge your code editor with AI assistance

The Rundown: Mistral’s recent Codestral model could be integrated directly into your code editor at no cost, helping you write, debug, and understand code higher.

Step-by-step:

1. Install the “Proceed” extension in VS Code from the marketplace.

2. Click “Add Chat Model” and choose Mistral because the provider.

3. Copy your free API key from Mistral.ai into the VS code extension.

4. Start coding smarter with AI assistance using Command+L.

Pro tip: Use the ‘@’ symbol to reference specific files in your questions for more accurate assistance.

PRESENTED BY ASSEMBLY AI

🗣️ Speech-to-text that drives customer loyalty

The Rundown: AssemblyAI’s advanced speech-to-text API converts calls and voice notes into accurate, easy-to-read transcripts — helping you improve customer retention, reduce customer support tickets, and unlock actionable insights from every conversation.

With AssemblyAI, you’ll:

• Minimize customer complaints brought on by inaccurate transcripts

• Boost customer satisfaction with intelligent models like PII Redaction and Summarization

• Provide formatted, clear conversations with Speaker Labels and Automatic Language Detection

Test AssemblyAI’s Speech-to-Text models at no cost.

PERPLEXITY

🔍 Perplexity launches Sonar API for real-time search

The Rundown: Perplexity just launched Sonar and Sonar Pro, two API options that make the corporate’s powerful search tech available to developers to bring real-time, citation-backed search capabilities to third-party applications.

The main points:

• The usual Sonar API focuses on speed and affordability, offering citation-backed search results with flat pricing at $1/M input and output tokens.

• Pro handles more complex queries, with double the citations and bigger context windows — with pricing at $3/M input tokens and $15/M output tokens.

• The APIs outperform competitors in factuality benchmarks, with Sonar Pro outperforming rivals like Gemini, GPT-4o, and Claude on SimpleQA.

Why it matters: The difference between AI that hallucinates and AI that delivers reliable results could make or break user trust. With Sonar’s real-time search and impressive accuracy benchmarks, Sonar is addressing a critical gap out there and will position it because the go-to for corporations trying to add AI search to their products.

QUICK HITS

🛠️ Trending AI Tools

• 🤖 Kimi – Latest multimodal model with joint reasoning over text and vision

• 🌊 Windsurf Wave 2 – Codeium’s latest update to its AI development platform

• 🗣️ JoggAI 2.0 – Create lifelike, personalized AI avatars from text prompts

• 🪡 Needle – Enable AI search across all of your data in seconds

💼 AI Job Opportunities

• 🤖 The Rundown – Author (Robotics/Tech)

• 💼 UiPath – Director FinOps

• 🔬 Hippocratic AI – Applied Scientist Intern

• 🏛️ OpenAI – Forward Deployed Software Engineer (Public Sector)

📰 Every little thing else in AI today

Former OpenAI CTO Mira Murati secured the primary hires for her unnamed AI startup, adding OpenAI’s ex-head of special projects, Jonathan Lachman, alongside ten other key hires from leading AI firms.

CEO Dario Amodei said during an interview at Davos that Anthropic is working on a two-way voice mode for Claude and smarter models set for release in the approaching months — over 1M chips are expected to power its AI by 2026.

Mistral CEO Arthur Mensch revealed that the startup is currently exploring an IPO, denying acquisition rumors for the French AI leader, already valued at nearly $6B.

The X Games is adding a Google Cloud-powered AI judging system during its 2025 competition in Aspen, which is able to analyze and grade snowboarding superpipe performances alongside human judges.

The UK government unveiled Parlex, an AI system that analyzes parliamentary data to predict how members of parliament will react to potential policies, as a part of its broader Humphrey suite of administrative AI tools.

Goldman Sachs introduced GS AI Assistant, an in-house tool designed to help over 10,000 employees with tasks starting from email drafting to code translation.

COMMUNITY

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See you soon,

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