AI giants pressure Capitol Hill

Good morning, AI enthusiasts. A number of the AI industry’s strongest players just delivered a unified message to Congress: Reduce regulations now or risk losing the worldwide AI race to China.

With top execs from OpenAI to CoreWeave pushing the federal government for infrastructure investments and lighter controls, tech giants are actually wielding national security concerns as their strongest political weapon yet.

Reminder: Our next workshop is today at 4 PM EST — join to learn advanced prompting techniques for higher AI responses. RSVP here.

In today’s AI rundown:

• AI leaders push for looser regulations

• OpenAI expands leadership with Instacart CEO

• Create engaging social carousels with Gamma

• Alibaba’s Zerosearch teaches AI to go looking solo

• 4 latest AI tools & 4 job opportunities

LATEST DEVELOPMENTS

AI REGULATIONS

🏛️ AI leaders push for looser regulations

The Rundown: Tech execs from OpenAI, Microsoft, AMD, and CoreWeave testified before the Senate Commerce Committee, calling for reduced regulations, improved infrastructure, and expanded market access to assist the U.S. keep its AI lead over China.

The main points:

• OpenAI CEO Sam Altman characterised AI as potentially “larger than the web,” urging lawmakers to support critical infrastructure investments.

• Microsoft’s Brad Smith warned that U.S. AI chip export restrictions could push customers toward Chinese alternatives, hurting global adoption of U.S. tech.

• AMD CEO Lisa Su also warned that strict export controls could backfire, saying other technologies will “come to play” if American options aren’t available.

• The executives united on calls to spice up federal AI R&D, improve AI workforce skills, modernize the electrical grid, and streamline permitting.

Why it matters: The AI race is being positioned as a broader battle for supremacy between the U.S. and China, and tech giants see overregulation as a barrier to moving fast enough to keep up the lead. The balance between pro-innovation policies, safety risks, and global power dynamics is a posh needle to string.

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OPENAI

🛒 OpenAI expands leadership with Instacart CEO

The Rundown: OpenAI just announced the hiring of Instacart CEO Fidji Simo as its CEO of Applications, making a latest leadership position that may oversee the corporate’s product offerings and business operations.

The main points:

• Simo will lead a brand new Applications division that mixes OpenAI’s existing business and operational teams liable for bringing research to market.

• She’s going to report on to CEO Sam Altman, who said the hire will free him up to extend his concentrate on research, compute infrastructure, and safety systems.

• Simo has served on OpenAI’s nonprofit board for the past yr and has also spent a decade at Facebook, focused on its app and promoting business.

• The move comes following the startup’s decision to stop its for-profit shift and amidst a significant global expansion of its Stargate project.

Why it matters: This high-profile hire is correct in step with OpenAI’s transition from a research lab to a multi-faceted global organization. While Altman stays on the helm, bringing in an experienced executive like Simo suggests the corporate is scaling leadership for its next major evolution to a worldwide powerhouse.

AI TRAINING

🎯 Create engaging social media carousels with Gamma

The Rundown: On this tutorial, you’ll learn how one can use Gamma’s latest AI-powered Social feature to rework easy ideas into skilled and interesting social media carousels — with just a couple of clicks.

Step-by-step:

1. Visit Gamma, select “Social” from the creation options, and adjust the variety of cards.

2. Enter a particular, detailed prompt about your carousel topic and click on “Generate outline.”

3. Adjust the variety of cards and customize your design by choosing from available themes and AI image generators.

4. Review each card, make any essential edits, and click on “Generate” to finalize.

Pro tip: Take a look at our exclusive workshop on creating stunning, on-brand content fast with Gamma here. Moreover, full Rundown University members enjoy a free monthly Gamma Pro plan.

PRESENTED BY FREEPIK

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• On-stage live AI music generation with immersive experience

• Opportunities to attach with fellow global innovators from design, art, and tech

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ALIBABA

🔎 Alibaba’s Zerosearch teaches AI to go looking solo

The Rundown: Alibaba researchers introduced ZeroSearch, a way that teaches AI systems to go looking for information without using real search engines like google and yahoo — cutting training costs by 88% while matching or outperforming the models trained with actual search APIs.

The main points:

• ZeroSearch removes the necessity for expensive search engine API calls during training by utilizing an LLM to simulate search results.

• A “curriculum-based rollout strategy” regularly lowers the standard of those simulated documents, progressively difficult the AI to refine its reasoning.

• The approach avoids the high API costs and unpredictable document quality related to training AI on live industrial search engines like google and yahoo.

• In testing, ZeroSearch was in a position to match or outperform models trained with real search engines like google and yahoo, while reducing costs by nearly 90%.

Why it matters: As we’ve seen in robotics, using simulations for training data is proving to be each an efficient and cheaper option. Techniques like ZeroSearch could eliminate a significant financial barrier for smaller labs competing with tech giants, while also giving higher control over how models learn to seek out and process information.

QUICK HITS

🛠️ Trending AI Tools

• 🔌 Anthropic Web Search API – Connect Claude applications to the net

• 🤖 Medium 3 – Mistral’s latest low-cost, high-performance model

• 📊 Le Chat Enterprise – Mistral’s AI assistant for business environments

• 🎨 Figma Make – Turn designs into interactive prototypes with prompts

💼 AI Job Opportunities

• 🤝 Abridge – Strategic Partnerships Director

• 🎬 OpenAI – Integrated Producer

• 🏗️ xAI – Construction Supervisor

• 🛠️ Figure AI – Staff NPI Engineer

📰 Every little thing else in AI today

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration is reportedly in talks with OpenAI to integrate AI into the drug development and review process.

Meta is appointing former staffer Robert Fergus as the brand new head of its Facebook AI Research Lab, as he returned to Meta this yr after a five-year stint at DeepMind.

Amazon is reportedly developing its own AI coding app, code-named ‘Kiro’, which is able to leverage agents for developer tasks and have multimodal capabilities.

Shopify released a brand new upgrade to its Sidekick AI assistant, integrating latest reasoning capabilities and free image generation tools for merchants on the platform.

Augment Code unveiled Distant Agent, allowing developers to delegate coding tasks to cloud-based AI assistants that proceed working even when laptops are closed.

Amazon launched Enhance My Listing, a brand new AI-powered tool that helps sellers maintain and optimize product listings on the platform.

Hugging Face released Open Computer Agent, a free (but slow) computer-using agent to tackle easy multi-step tasks.

COMMUNITY

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Join our next workshop this Friday, May ninth, at 4 PM EST with Dr. Alvaro Cintas, The Rundown’s AI professor. By the top of the workshop, you’ll you’ll be equipped to prompt with precision and creativity across any AI tool and improve AI responses.

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