OpenAI’s $20,000 AI agents

Good morning, AI enthusiasts. OpenAI is reportedly set to place an enormous price on AI expertise—with plans to launch specialized agent subscriptions costing as much as senior executive salaries.

But, with investors already placing multibillion-dollar bets, Sam Altman’s prediction of seeing AI agents “joining the workforce” this yr could also be quickly coming to fruition.

In today’s AI rundown:

• OpenAI launching premium AI agents

• Google Search adding latest ‘AI Mode’

• Connecting Claude Projects with GitHub repos

• Alibaba’s low cost and efficient QwQ-32B AI

• 4 latest AI tools & 4 job opportunities

LATEST DEVELOPMENTS

OPENAI

🤖 OpenAI launching premium AI agents

The Rundown: OpenAI is reportedly preparing to launch a collection of specialised AI agents with price tags starting from $2,000 to $20,000 a month for skills like knowledge work and Ph.D.-level research.

The main points:

• OpenAI is planning three agent tiers: business professionals ($2k/mo), advanced software devs ($10k/mo), and PhD-level researchers ($20k/mo).

• Investor SoftBank has already reportedly committed $3B to those agent products for 2025 alone.

• The agentic offerings are expected to generate as much as 25% of OpenAI’s long-term revenue as the corporate expands beyond its current offerings.

• In January, CEO Sam Altman predicted that 2025 would see the primary AI agents “join the workforce and materially change the output of corporations.”

Why it matters: With price tags rivaling senior worker salaries, OpenAI is betting big that specialized AI agents can deliver enough value to justify the enterprise-level subscription. The move could set latest precedents for AI agent pricing while revealing just how much corporations are willing to pay for automated expertise.

TOGETHER WITH SANA

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Sana’s platform allows you to:

• Turn manual processes into automated workflows in minutes

• Create meeting assistants that capture insights and motion items

• Develop agents that work across multiple applications seamlessly

• Search across every app and deploy agents for deep research

Start creating expert AI agents to your company today.

GOOGLE

🔎 Google Search adding latest ‘AI Mode’

The Rundown: Google just launched AI Mode, a Search Labs experiment that turns traditional search right into a conversational experience powered by a custom Gemini 2.0, together with updates to AI Overviews.

The main points:

• AI Mode uses a “query fan-out” technique, launching simultaneous searches across diverse sources to assemble detailed answers with relevant sourcing.

• Users can proceed their search by asking follow-up questions directly in AI Mode, receiving well-reasoned responses with curated links to explore further.

• Google also upgraded AI Overviews with Gemini 2.0, improving responses to more difficult topics like coding, advanced math, and multimodal queries.

• The corporate also said it’s expanding access to AI Overviews to teens and removing sign-in requirements.

Why it matters: Search continues to evolve within the AI era, and Google faces serious pressure from rivals like Perplexity, Grok, and ChatGPT. The brand new AI Mode looks to create a bridge between familiar search interactions and advanced, conversational AI — leading to a potentially more comfortable (yet powerful) web experience.

AI TRAINING

💻 Connecting Claude Projects with GitHub repos

The Rundown: On this tutorial, you’ll learn the way you should utilize Claude’s GitHub integration to attach repositories on to your AI assistant for comprehensive code understanding and support.

Step-by-step:

1. Arrange a Claude project named “Code Assistant: [Repo Name]” with description: “Workspace to research and improve [Repository Name] codebase.”

2. Select “GitHub” from the “Add Content” menu and authorize the Claude GitHub app when prompted.

3. Select your repository and choose specific files you’ll need assistance with.

4. Start asking questions on your code – Claude can explain functions, suggest improvements, and even help with debugging.

Pro tip: You can too use the “Sync now” button to update your project at any time when your repository changes, ensuring Claude at all times works along with your latest codebase.

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• 40% more deals move past Stage 1 with higher discovery

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• 4x higher win rates with reps enabled to reply technical and competitive questions on day one

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ALIBABA

🧠 Alibaba’s low cost and efficient QwQ-32B AI

The Rundown: Alibaba’s Qwen team released QwQ-32B, a brand new AI reasoning model that leverages reinforcement learning to match or surpass the performance of larger competitors like DeepSeek-R1 at a fraction of the fee.

The main points:

• QwQ-32B uses reinforcement learning at scale, significantly boosting performance on advanced math, coding, and reasoning-based tasks.

• The model is roughly 20x smaller than DeepSeek-R1 yet delivers comparable or superior performance across key benchmarks.

• It’s priced at just $0.20 per million input and output tokens, a roughly 90% reduction in comparison with similar performing models like R1 and o1-mini.

• Qwen has open-sourced the model under the Apache 2.0 license, with availability on Hugging Face and Alibaba Cloud’s ModelScope platform.

Why it matters: China’s open-source models proceed to speed up — with this latest launch from Qwen showing off some major performance gains despite shrinking size (near-frontier intelligence on-device is here) and value. Clever training approaches are still proving their price over raw model size as labs proceed to push closer to AGI.

QUICK HITS

🛠️ Trending AI Tools

• 👁️ Aya Vision – Cohere’s latest SOTA multilingual visual model

• 🗣️ Sesame – Conversational speech model for natural, engaging conversations

• 🎵 DiffRhythm – Generate complete 4-min songs w/ vocals in only 10 seconds

• 🎬 ReframeAnything – Resize any video in a single click

💼 AI Job Opportunities

• 🔧 Abridge – Implementation Manager, Industrial Accounts

• 🤝 Pinecone – Industrial Account Executive

• 📣 Glean – Solutions Marketing Manager

• 🌍 Harvey – Customer Success Leader, EMEA

📰 The whole lot else in AI today

Social media platform Digg is being revived by former founder Kevin Rose and Reddit co-founder Alexis Ohanian, with AI-enhanced moderation and UX.

OpenAI rolled out its GPT-4.5-Preview model to all Plus users after launching last week exclusively to Pro and developers via API.

A federal judge officially denied Elon Musk’s request to dam OpenAI’s transition from nonprofit to for-profit status but allowed other points of his lawsuit to proceed.

Andrew Barto and Richard Sutton won the 2024 Turing Award for pioneering reinforcement learning within the Eighties and warned against rapid AI deployment.

Scale AI secured a multimillion-dollar contract from the U.S. DoD for “Thunderforge,” a program that may deploy AI agents for military planning and operations.

Codeium released Windsurf Wave 4, introducing latest features like AI-powered previews for rapid app iteration, tab-to-import functionality, and suggested actions.

Luma Labs introduced three latest features to its Ray2 video model, with Keyframes, Extend, and Loop offering more control over generations.

COMMUNITY

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

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See you soon,

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