🚧 Stargate’s $500B mixed signals

Good morning, AI enthusiasts. The Stargate Project is sending mixed signals — OpenAI is celebrating a serious Oracle deal, however the WSJ revealed only a day earlier that the broader initiative is already hitting major roadblocks.

With OpenAI and SoftBank reportedly deadlocked and 2025 plans scaled back, can the $500B AI infrastructure dream still deliver on its world-changing guarantees?

In today’s AI rundown:

• OpenAI, Oracle ink Stargate deal amid turbulence

• Amazon acquires AI wearable startup

• Improve AI coding workflows with Claude Code

• AI models transmit ‘subliminal’ learning traits

• 4 recent AI tools & 4 job opportunities

LATEST DEVELOPMENTS

OPENAI

🏗️ OpenAI, Oracle ink Stargate deal amid turbulence

The Rundown: OpenAI and Oracle just struck a large 4.5GW data center deal, coming on the heels of a WSJ report revealing that the broader Stargate enterprise is facing internal disputes and scaled-back ambitions just six months after its unveiling.

The small print:

• The deal brings current U.S. data center footprint to over 5GW, with Sam Altman saying Stargate will “significantly expand” past initial $500B claims.

• Oracle’s agreement will generate $30B annually, providing the equivalent of “two Hoover Dams“ of computing power.

• The WSJ reported that SoftBank and OAI are deadlocked over site selection and terms for Stargate, scaling back 2025 plans to simply one data center site.

• OpenAI said construction is advancing on the Abilene, TX site, with Oracle delivering Nvidia GB200 racks and already running early training workloads.

• Elon Musk doubled down on his claims that SoftBank “doesn’t have the cash” for Stargate, replying to the WSJ article that “they simply don’t.”

Why it matters: The Stargate trio of corporations threw out some eye-popping numbers on the unveiling in January — and despite the brand new Oracle deal, the WSJ report paints a far less positive outlook of how the broader project and SoftBank partnership is proceeding. But ultimately, only time will tell if Stargate can reach its lofty ambitions.

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• Create and edit by chatting with AI or uploading images

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AMAZON & AI WEARABLES

🐝 Amazon acquires AI wearable startup

The Rundown: Amazon is acquiring Bee, a startup that makes a $50 AI-powered wearable wristband that constantly records conversations for each day summaries, insights, and reminders.

The small print:

• The Fitbit-style device records and transcribes conversations throughout the day, generating each day digests, to-do lists, and suggestions via its app.

• Users can grant access to emails, contacts, calendar, and more for deeper personalization, with Bee saying recordings usually are not used for training or stored.

• All Bee employees reportedly received job offers, though the terms of the deal weren’t disclosed, with the acquisition expected to shut soon.

Why it matters: Amazon is making a notable move within the AI wearable sector, though reviews of Bee make it sound prefer it falls victim to the identical issues that plagued the likes of Humane, Rabbit, and other rivals. But despite OpenAI, Meta, and other AI giants pushing into the wearable realm, it still seems like an area wide open for the taking.

AI TRAINING

🤖 Improve AI coding workflows with Claude Code

The Rundown: On this tutorial, you’ll learn the right way to use Claude Code to enhance your development process by getting contextual code evaluation, debugging assistance, and project insights—right out of your terminal or inside AI-powered coding environments.

Step-by-step:

1. Install Claude Code by typing npm install -g @anthropic-ai/claude-code in your terminal

2. Open Cursor and run claude within the integrated terminal

3. Explore your project by asking “What’s the general structure?” and follow up with specific questions on components

4. Use it for real-time code generation by requesting it to code or fix a brand new feature in your code

Pro tip: Treat it like a pair programming partner; the longer your conversation, the higher it understands your project and coding style.

PRESENTED BY AMAZON

🚀 Construct the longer term of AI with Amazon

The Rundown: Amazon is transforming every aspect of AI technology, from custom chips to breakthrough applications that profit tens of millions of shoppers worldwide. Discover how Amazon’s unique mix of startup energy and global scale fuels innovation — and the way you may be a part of it.

Try Amazon’s AI experts discussing:

• Innovation across every layer of AI — Trainium2 chips, Nova models, and more

• The true-world impact of our 1,000+ generative AI services and applications

• How collaborative culture empowers scientists and engineers to think larger

• Why industry leaders select Amazon to show ideas into innovation

Watch and explore Amazon’s AI careers.

AI RESEARCH

🦉 AI models transmit ‘subliminal’ learning traits

The Rundown: Researchers from Anthropic and other organizations published a study on “subliminal learning,” finding that “teacher” models can transmit traits like preferences or misalignment via unrelated data to “student” models during training.

The small print:

• Models trained on sequences or code from an owl-loving teacher model developed strong owl preferences, despite no references to animals in the info.

• The effect worked with dangerous behaviors too, with models trained by a compromised AI becoming harmful themselves — even when filtering content.

• This “subliminal learning” only occurs when models share the identical base architecture, not when coming from different families like GPT-4 and Qwen.

• Researchers also proved transmission extends beyond LLMs, with neural networks recognizing handwritten numbers without seeing any during training.

Why it matters: As more AI models are trained on outputs from other “teachers,” these results show that even filtered data won’t be enough to stop unwanted or unsafe behaviors from being transmitted — with a wholly recent layer of risk potentially hiding in unrelated content that isn’t being picked up by typical security measures.

QUICK HITS

🛠️ Trending AI Tools

• 👑 Qwen3 – Alibaba’s newly updated SOTA open-source model

• 🧠 Hierarchical Reasoning Model – Brain-inspired open-source reasoner

• 🎥 Pika Social AI Video – AI-only social video app

• 🎥 Act-Two – Runway’s motion capture AI model, now available via API

💼 AI Job Opportunities

• 🧾 Glean – Tax Apprentice

• 🖌️ Scale AI – Staff Product Designer, GenAI Marketplace

• 📐 OpenAI – Quantitative UX Researcher, Product Policy

• 🛡️ Faculty – Associate (National Security)

📰 All the pieces else in AI today

Alibaba’s Qwen released Qwen3-Coder, an agentic coding model that tops charts across benchmarks, and Qwen Code, an open-source command-line coding tool.

Google released Gemini 2.5 Flash-Lite as a stable model, positioning it as the corporate’s fastest and most cost-effective option at just $0.10/million input tokens.

Meta reportedly hired Cosmo Du, Tianhe Yu, and Weiyue Wang, three researchers from Google DeepMind behind its recent IMO gold-medal math model.

Anthropic is reversing its stance on Middle East investments, with its CEO saying, “No bad person should ever profit from our success is a fairly difficult principle to run a business on.”

Elon Musk revealed that xAI is aiming to have the AI compute equivalent of 50M units of Nvidia’s H100 GPUs by 2025.

Microsoft reportedly poached over 20 AI engineers from Google DeepMind over the previous couple of months, including former Gemini engineering head Amar Subramanya.

Apple rolled out a beta update for iOS 26 to developers, reintroducing ‘AI summaries’ that were previously removed over hallucinations and incorrect headlines.

COMMUNITY

🎥 Join our next live workshop

Join our next workshop this Friday, July twenty fifth, at 4 PM EST with Dr. Alvaro Cintas, The Rundown’s AI professor. By the top of the workshop, you’ll know the right way to construct useful AI agents with ChatGPT and understand the broader ecosystem of agentic tools on the market.

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