Mira Murati’s $12B startup sets launch clock

Good morning, AI enthusiasts. Former OpenAI CTO Mira Murati has kept her recent startup quiet since launching in February — but that didn’t stop investors from betting a fresh $2B on whatever she’s constructing.

With Considering Machine Labs now valued at $12B and promising multimodal AI with a “major open-source component” in the approaching months, the countdown to their first product has develop into considered one of the AI world’s most anticipated reveals.

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In today’s AI rundown:

• Considering Machine Labs raises $2B, nears product launch

• Runway’s Act-Two for AI motion capture

• Automate personalized sales outreach at scale

• AI researchers unite on reasoning transparency

• 4 recent AI tools & 4 job opportunities

LATEST DEVELOPMENTS

THINKING MACHINES LAB

💰 Considering Machine Labs raises $2B, nears product launch

The Rundown: Former OpenAI CTO Mira Murati just announced a brand new $2B seed raise for her startup, Considering Machines Lab AI, also revealing that the secretive company will share its first product in “the subsequent couple of months.”

The main points:

• The $2B seed round brings the corporate’s value to $12B, lower than a yr after its creation, with no product and little public information on direction.

• Murati said the startup’s first product will feature “a serious open-source component” for researchers and startups constructing custom models.

• She also revealed the lab is constructing multimodal AI that collaborates with users in natural interactions via conversation and sight.

• The Information recently reported that TML is planning to develop custom AI models to assist businesses increase profits.

Why it matters: With fierce competition among the many current AI leaders, it’s easy to forget the 2 former OpenAI heavyweights in TML and SSI are still in stealth mode. Despite little info or product, Murati has had no shortage of investor (and acquisition) interest — making the startup’s first release an enormous one to observe in the approaching months.

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RUNWAY

🎬 Runway’s Act-Two for AI motion capture

The Rundown: Runway just launched Act-Two, the corporate’s next-gen motion capture model that translates single performance videos into fully animated characters with head, face, body, and hand tracking across artistic styles and outputs.

The main points:

• The system captures subtle facial expressions, upper body movements, hands, and backgrounds from a single driving performance video.

• Requiring only a single character reference photo, Act-Two animates and maps the driving video while maintaining backgrounds and art styles.

• Runway claims the model delivers major performance gains over October 2024’s Act-One release, particularly in consistency, fidelity, and movement.

• The corporate has inked partnerships with Hollywood players like Lionsgate and AMC Networks, pushing to further infuse AI into filmmaking workflows.

Why it matters: While AI adoption in Hollywood is publicly frowned upon, it’s privately being adopted en masse — and few corporations are pushing that shift harder than Runway. With creative models continuing to evolve at a wild pace, AI’s use within the industry is coming, whether fans and actors want it or not.

AI TRAINING

📧 Automate personalized sales outreach at scale

The Rundown: On this tutorial, you’ll learn the best way to create a Zapier AI agent that routinely researches corporations out of your spreadsheet and drafts personalized sales emails, saving hours of manual outreach.

Step-by-step:

1. Create a brand new Zapier agent and set the trigger to “On demand”

2. Write detailed instructions: research company → populate contact info → draft personalized email → generate subject and body

3. Connect the Google Sheets tool and choose your leads spreadsheet with company, name, and email columns

4. Add Gmail integration with “Create Draft” option (not send) for review control

5. Test with a small batch, review generated drafts, then scale to the total lead list.

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• Harness agentic AI to show your API ideas into secured, production-ready reality

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AI RESEARCH

🧠 AI researchers unite on reasoning transparency

The Rundown: Leading researchers from OpenAI, DeepMind, Anthropic, and other major institutions published a paper calling for deeper investigation into monitoring the “chains of thought” in AI reasoning models, arguing it may very well be an important safety tool.

The main points:

• The paper highlights “chain-of-thought” (CoT) traces, the model’s step-by-step problem-solving paths, as a rare window into model decision-making.

• The researchers call for a deeper study of tracking these reasoning processes, warning that transparency could erode as models evolve or training shifts.

• Notable signatories include OpenAI’s Mark Chen, SSI’s Ilya Sutskever, Nobel laureate Geoffrey Hinton, and DeepMind co-founder Shane Legg.

• Researchers propose developing standardized evaluations for “monitorability” and incorporating these scores into deployment decisions for frontier models.

Why it matters: This rare moment of industry consensus highlights a critical inflection point where we are able to still see AI’s decision-making process — and the priority that competitive pressures may eventually result in that window being closed if AI labs don’t act to preserve it.

QUICK HITS

🛠️ Trending AI Tools

• 🤗 AI Companions – xAI’s recent Grok-powered interactive avatars

• 🗣️ Voxtral – Mistral’s first open-source voice model for speech understanding

• 📓 NotebookLM – Recent featured notebooks for expert advice on specific topics

• 📚 Claude Directory – A brand new directory of tools that connect with Claude

💼 AI Job Opportunities

• 🗂️ Deepmind – Administrative Business Partner

• 💡 Cresta – Demo Engineer

• 🤝 Databricks – Associate Account Executive

• 🏗️ Glean – Solutions Architect

📰 Every thing else in AI today

Mistral unveiled Voxtral, a low-cost, open-source speech understanding model family that mixes transcription with native Q&A capabilities.

Google revealed that its AI security agent, Big Sleep, discovered a critical security flaw that allowed Google to stop the vulnerability before it was exploited.

U.S. President Donald Trump announced over $92B in AI and energy investments at a Pennsylvania summit, saying America’s destiny is to be the “AI superpower.”

Google is investing $25B in data centers and AI infrastructure across the PJM electric grid region, including $3B to modernize Pennsylvania hydropower plants.

Anthropic launched Claude for Financial Services, an answer that integrates Claude with market data and enterprise platforms for financial institutions.

Nvidia plans to resume sales of its H20 AI chip to China after CEO Jensen Huang received assurances from U.S. leadership, with AMD also resuming sales within the region.

COMMUNITY

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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