AI avatars outsell humans in 6-hour livestream

Good morning, AI enthusiasts. The longer term of e-commerce just arrived in China, with an entrepreneur’s six-hour AI avatar livestream raking in thousands and thousands and outperforming real human creators.

With hyper-realistic AI twins now in a position to effectively sell products 24/7, is that this streaming success a peek at a brand new blueprint for retail’s automated future?

In today’s AI rundown:

• China’s AI avatars outsell humans in livestream

• OpenAI lands $200M Pentagon contract

• Easy methods to design perfect interfaces with v0

• Gemini 2.5 family goes GA with recent flash-lite

• 4 recent AI tools & 4 job opportunities

LATEST DEVELOPMENTS

AI AVATARS

🤖 China’s AI avatars outsell humans in livestream

The Rundown: Chinese entrepreneur Luo Yonghao just utilized an AI digital twin on a six-hour livestream on Baidu’s e-commerce platform, outperforming his human-led streams with over $7M in sales generated in the course of the broadcast.

The small print:

• Two AI-generated hosts promoted 133 products within the session, showcasing items while utilizing human gestures and handling real-time viewer interactions.

• The stream reached 13M viewers and beat Luo’s “real” stream in May in only 26 minutes, with Baidu’s ERNIE crafting 97K+ characters of product descriptions.

• Baidu said the stream was the primary to feature “dual digital avatars”, with Luo and his digital co-host interacting in natural conversation and movements.

• Over 100k digital humans reportedly work in China’s $946B live commerce sector, slashing costs by 80% and increasing transactions by 62% on average.

Why it matters: It’s hard to compete with an AI salesperson in a position to perfectly (and endlessly) sell products, especially when the difference in realism is imperceptible for the common viewer. The query turns as to if authentic human interactions retain any business advantage in markets where efficiency often trumps the whole lot else.

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Drive enterprise-wide innovation today with Sana Agents.

OPENAI

📌 OpenAI lands $200M Pentagon contract

The Rundown: OpenAI announced “OpenAI for Government,” an initiative that brings the corporate’s federal efforts under a single umbrella — while also securing a $200M DoD contract to deal with national security issues in “warfighting and enterprise” areas.

The small print:

• The one-year deal marks OpenAI’s debut as an official Pentagon contractor, with work centered within the Washington, D.C. region.

• ChatGPT Enterprise will aid service members in admin tasks like navigating advantages, with custom models tackling areas like proactive cyber defense.

• “OpenAI for Government” moves existing partnerships with NASA, NIH, Air Force Research Lab, and Treasury under a single initiative.

• The DoD’s contract listed the role as developing “prototype frontier AI” for “warfighting and enterprise,” though OAI said it could follow usage policies.

Why it matters: Between AI giants revising policies, partnering with governments and defense firms, and the modernization of warfare with AI and drone tech, it’s clear where things are trending. Government usage and control of top models could (unfortunately) be the important thing to the worldwide military powers that outline future conflicts.

AI TRAINING

🎨 Easy methods to design perfect interfaces with v0

The Rundown: On this tutorial, you’ll learn learn how to use v0’s recent Design Mode to create stunning user interfaces with AI after which manually fine-tune every element without additional prompts or credits.

Step-by-step:

1. Visit v0 and prompt your required user interface, e.g., “Create a landing page for a content creation AI tool”

2. Click the “Design” tab to enter manual editing mode

3. Select any element (text, buttons, sections) to customize copy, typography, layout, colours, and styling

4. Preview changes in real-time and click on “Save” when ready

Pro tip: Use detailed AI prompts for the inspiration (80%), then Design Mode for perfection (20%).

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• Automate the ingestion, enrichment and governance of information at scale

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• Help improve the accuracy of gen AI apps

What else can watsonx.data do for you? See for yourself.

GOOGLE

⚡ Gemini 2.5 family goes GA with recent flash-lite

The Rundown: Google just graduated its Gemini 2.5 Pro and Flash models to stable production status after months of preview version updates, while also rolling out a brand new, hyper-efficient Flash-Lite variant.

The small print:

• The Gemini 2.5 Pro and Flash models exit preview and at the moment are generally available, with Pro topping the leaderboards alongside OpenAI’s o3-pro.

• 2.5 Flash-Lite launches in preview, beating previous Lite models across benchmarks while maintaining the large 1M token context window.

• All three models feature adjustable “pondering” capabilities that permit users control reasoning and value, with Lite defaulting to pondering off for optimum speed.

Why it matters: After making a series of impressive “preview” updates to Gemini’s 2.5 family, Google is finally cementing the models in with a GA launch. The move now turns focus away from incremental updates and towards the teased 2.5 DeepThink and eventual larger breakthrough with the Gemini 3 family.

QUICK HITS

🛠️ Trending AI Tools

• 🧠 M1 – MiniMax’s recent reasoning model with a 1M token context window

• ⚙️ Kimi-Dev – Moonshot AI’s powerful open-source coding model

• 🤖 Proactor – Context-aware, memory augmented, proactive AI agent

• 🤳 Symphony – TikTok’s AI Studio, with recent features for advertisers

💼 AI Job Opportunities

• 🔁 The Rundown – Strategic Partnerships (AI University)

• 📦 Figure AI – Global Supply Manager, Electronics

• 🔬 Meta – Research Scientist

• 🖥️ xAI – Datacenter Technician Lead

📰 The whole lot else in AI today

MiniMax debuted Hailuo 02, a brand new AI video model (tested under the “Kangaroo” codename) that moves to No. 2 on the Artificial Evaluation leaderboard, passing Veo 3.

Amazon CEO Andy Jassy said in a letter to employees that the corporate’s AI push will trim its corporate headcount in the approaching years with agents and automation advances.

Krea AI launched its debut Krea 1 image model as a free public beta, showcasing advanced style control and image quality.

Intelligent Web introduced an updated version of its open II-Medical model, surpassing Google’s MedGemma across benchmarks despite its smaller size.

Adobe released recent mobile apps for its Firefly platform, allowing users to access its AI image, video, and other creative tools via iOS and Android.

xAI is reportedly aiming to boost $4.3B in recent funding for its AI operations, with the corporate valued at $80B as of the top of Q1.

COMMUNITY

🎥 Join our next live workshop

Join our next workshop this Friday, June twentieth, at 4 PM EST with Dr. Alvaro Cintas, The Rundown’s AI professor. By the top of the workshop, you’ll have the option to confidently construct and run your automation agents using n8n.

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

See you soon,

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