OpenAI’s ex-CTO launches rival lab

Good morning, AI enthusiasts. OpenAI’s former CTO just unveiled her secretive recent AI enterprise — and she or he’s bringing some serious talent along.

With experts from top AI labs and a daring open-science vision for user-focused applications, will Mira Murati be the most recent ex-OpenAI leader to rewrite the AI industry playbook?

P.S. We just launched two more newsletters! Join The Rundown Robotics for bi-weekly email updates on the Robotics industry and The Rundown Tech for bi-weekly email updates on every part happening in Tech — all in our signature rundown style.

In today’s AI rundown:

• Mira Murati’s OpenAI rival ‘Pondering Machines Lab’

• OpenAI’s recent software engineering benchmark

• Creating consistent visuals for presentations

• Fiverr’s AI platform for gig employees

• 4 recent AI tools & 4 job opportunities

LATEST DEVELOPMENTS

MIRA MURATI

🧠 Mira Murati’s OpenAI rival ‘Pondering Machines Lab’

The Rundown: OpenAI’s former CTO Mira Murati officially brought Pondering Machines Lab, a brand new AI research company, out of stealth with the mission to make AI systems more “widely understood, customizable, and usually capable” through open science.

The main points:

• Pondering Machines plans to develop frontier models focused on science and programming with an emphasis on human-AI collaboration and multimodality.

• Murati has hired a dream team for the corporate with OpenAI’s John Schulman and Barret Zoph in addition to experts from DeepMind, Character AI, and Mistral.

• The AI lab has also expressed commitment to open science and confirmed plans to often publish technical papers, code, datasets, and model specs.

• Its introduction comes just six months after Murati abruptly left OpenAI “to create time and space for her own exploration”.

Why it matters: The move makes Murati the most recent to go from OpenAI leadership to founding a rival lab, with Ilya Sutskever’s SSI also in talks to boost $1B+. While the stacked team may emerge as a serious recent player, its commitment to open science may very well be the massive catalyst pushing the industry towards a more open-source mindset.

TOGETHER WITH FIREFLIES AI

📝 AI that takes notes in real-time

The Rundown: Fireflies’s Notetaker is trusted by hundreds of thousands of users across platforms like Microsoft Teams and Google Meet — and now it offers real-time features that may extract quick, actionable insights out of your day by day meetings.

During live calls, Fireflies can:

• Capture bullet-point notes summarizing the conversation in real-time

• Curate motion items, create comments, and bookmark key moments

• Understand 100+ languages from different parts of the world

• Answer questions you will have in regards to the meeting

Add Fireflies to your team today!

OPENAI

📊 OpenAI’s recent software engineering benchmark

The Rundown: OpenAI just introduced SWE-Lancer, a brand new benchmark designed to measure AI’s coding performance against real-world freelance software engineering jobs — putting LLMs to the test with a complete of $1M in actual task payouts.

The main points:

• SWE-Lancer features over 1,400 freelance software engineering tasks from Upwork, spanning from minor bug fixes to high-value feature implementations.

• The benchmark evaluates each coding and technical management decisions of LLMs, difficult them to put in writing code and choose engineering proposals.

• It introduces monetary metrics, with success measured by how much a model could theoretically “earn” by completing tasks accurately.

• All top models struggled on the benchmark, with Claude 3.5 Sonnet performing best — solving nearly half of the tasks and earning $400k out of the $1M.

Why it matters: The benchmarks are increasing their difficulty to try and properly evaluate increasingly capable AI, but it surely’s hard to see any of those tests standing the test of time. Plus, while models “struggled” on the benchmark, $400k of value is not any joke — and is example of the dimensions of displacement about to reach in dev work.

AI TRAINING

🎨 Create consistent visuals for presentations

The Rundown: Freepik permits you to maintain a unified presentation style by creating custom AI styles that generate consistent visuals across all of your slides.

Step-by-step guide to make use of it:

1. Visit Freepik AI Suite and choose the “Create” option within the predominant dashboard.

2. Click the plus icon within the Style section.

3. Upload 10-50 reference images and choose Ultra/Prime quality for optimal results.

4. Use targeted prompts for every slide type and generate visuals along with your custom style at 100% strength for consistency.

Pro tip: Try our exclusive workshop on creating custom styles with Freepik here. Moreover, The Rundown University members enjoy a free monthly premium Freepik plan.

PRESENTED BY HEROKU

🏗️ Make AI be just right for you

The Rundown: Heroku’s recent Managed Inference and Agents platform lets developers easily deploy, scale, and manage AI-augmented applications and agents.

Heroku’s platform offers:

• Streamlined AI integration

• Advanced AI tools

• Scalable AI logic

Join Heroku’s pilot program for early access to powerful tools that may put AI to be just right for you.

FIVERR

🤖 Fiverr’s AI platform for gig employees

The Rundown: Freelance service platform Fiverr just launched Fiverr Go, a brand new suite of AI tools that lets gig employees train models on their work and automate future jobs, while also announcing an equity program giving top performers shares in the corporate.

The main points:

• Freelancers can train personal AI Creation Models for $25/mo, allowing them to sell AI-generated versions of their work while retaining ownership rights.

• A $29 monthly Personal AI Assistant helps manage client communications and handle routine tasks, using past interactions to supply customized responses.

• Access is initially limited to “hundreds” of vetted Level 2 and above freelancers in specific categories like voiceover, design, and copywriting.

• The corporate can also be launching an equity program that can give top-performing freelancers shares in Fiverr, though specific details have not been disclosed.

Why it matters: AI is within the strategy of upending traditional gig work, and Fiverr is attempting to provide freelancers a stake in automation as a substitute of competing against it. While the platform could help some creators scale, it also will likely face some backlash from creatives who may feel that opting out of AI is becoming unavoidable.

QUICK HITS

🛠️ Trending AI Tools

• 🤖 Grok-3 – xAI’s recent SOTA next-gen reasoning model (slowly rolling out)

• 🌎 Mistral Saba – Language model designed for Middle Eastern and South Asian cultures and linguistics

• 🧠 DeepHermes 3 Preview – Nous Research’s recent 8B model with the power to balance reasoning and speed

• 🤝 AndSend – AI Customer Relationship Agent that spots opportunities, suggests timely messages, and helps you reach your goals

💼 AI Job Opportunities

• 🛡️ Palantir Technologies – Principal Infrastructure Security Engineer

• 🌎 Soundhound AI – Sales Director, LATAM

• 📝 Anyscale – Technical Content Author

• 🎓 Metropolis – Director, Learning & Development

📰 Every part else in AI today

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman posted a poll on X asking what project users would love to see open-sourced, with an “o3-mini” level model leading over a “phone-sized model.”

Elon Musk announced the launch of xAI’s Gaming Studio during its Grok-3 demo, with plans to construct games with AI.

xAI also revealed that a Voice Mode for Grok will go live in ‘about every week’, with the corporate providing a transient teaser at the tip of the recent demo.

HP acquired Humane’s AI software platform and team for $116M and can discontinue its AI Pin hardware, with plans to integrate AI capabilities across HP’s device portfolio.

Meta announced Llamacon, the corporate’s first dedicated generative AI developer conference, for April 29.

Google rolled out recent AI features to Google Meet, including a scrollable caption history allowing users to review as much as half-hour of live and translated captions.

COMMUNITY

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See you soon,

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