🌏 China’s cooperative AI counter-punch

META

🤝 Ex-OpenAI scientist to steer Meta Superintelligence Labs

The Rundown: Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg just announced that former OpenAI researcher Shengjia Zhao will function chief scientist of the newly formed Meta Superintelligence Labs, bringing his expertise on ChatGPT, GPT-4, o1, and more.

The small print:

• Zhao reportedly helped pioneer OpenAI’s reasoning model o1 and brings expertise in synthetic data generation and scaling paradigms.

• He can be a co-author on the unique ChatGPT research paper, and helped create models including GPT-4, o1, o3, 4.1, and OpenAI’s mini models.

• Zhao will report on to Zuckerberg and can set MSL’s research direction alongside chief AI officer Alexandr Wang.

• Yann LeCun said he still stays Meta’s chief AI scientist for FAIR, specializing in “long-term research and constructing the subsequent AI paradigms.”

Why it matters: Zhao’s appointment appears like the ultimate bow on a superintelligence unit that Mark Zuckerberg has spent all summer shelling out for. Now boasting researchers from all the highest labs and with access to Meta’s billions in infrastructure, the experiment of constructing a frontier AI lab from scratch looks officially ready for takeoff.

AI TRAINING

🎭 Create personalized AI video avatars

The Rundown: On this tutorial, you’ll learn the right way to create AI-generated videos featuring yourself or any character by training an AI model with personal images after which animating them with natural speech using Google Veo 3.

Step-by-step:

1. Go to Freepik and create a brand new Character by uploading 12-24 varied images of yourself

2. Use ChatGPT to generate detailed scene prompts: “Provide a prompt where the character is in a studio holding a product. Don’t describe the character’s appearance”

3. Back in Freepik, select your character, paste the prompt along with your character’s name, and generate in 16:9 format

4. Upload your image to Google Gemini’s Video tool and prompt: “Guy talks to the camera saying: [dialogue]”

Pro tip: Use varied images when training your character and be specific with dialogue prompts for probably the most natural-looking results.

PRESENTED BY LOVABLE

💡 Construct apps at prompt speed

The Rundown: Lovable lets anyone go from idea to production-ready app or website in a couple of hours, collapsing six-month roadmaps right into a Friday night side project. Whether you would like a personalised holiday planner or a completely fledged SaaS back end, Lovable’s AI handles the heavy lifting so you may deal with your users.

With Lovable, you may:

• Turn an idea into reality without deep technical knowledge — just describe your vision

• Use chat mode to tweak products in real time and create responsive UIs

• Integrate with Stripe, Supabase, Figma, and mechanically wire databases, APIs, and UI

• Publish a live link, gather feedback, and quickly iterate, pivot, or monetize from Day 1

Try Lovable and ship your startup today.

RUNWAY

📽️ Runway’s Aleph for AI-powered video editing

The Rundown: Runway just unveiled Aleph, a brand new “in-context” video model that edits and transforms existing footage through text prompts — handling tasks from generating recent camera angles to removing objects and adjusting lighting.

The small print:

• Aleph can generate recent camera angles from a single shot, apply style transfers while maintaining scene consistency, and add or remove elements from scenes.

• Other editing features include relighting scenes, creating green screen mattes, changing settings and characters, and generating the subsequent shot in a sequence.

• Early access is rolling out to Enterprise and Creative Partners, with broader availability eventually for all Runway users.

Why it matters: Aleph looks like a serious leap in AI post-production capabilities, with Runway continuing to boost the bar for giving complete control over video generations as an alternative of the random outputs of older models. With its already existing partnerships with Hollywood, this looks like a release made to assist bring AI to the massive screen.

QUICK HITS

🛠️ Trending AI Tools

• 👁️ Memories AI – ChatGPT to your video library, with unlimited video context

• 🗣️ Qwen3-MT – AI translation model with support for 92+ languages

• 💬 Seed LiveInterpret 2.0 – ByteDance’s AI translation speech system

• 📸 Higgsfield Steal – Recreate any picture from anywhere on the net

💼 AI Job Opportunities

• 🎓 The Rundown – AI Educator (Workshop Host)

• 📦 Scale AI – Head of Delivery

• 🔍 xAI – AI Engineer & Researcher

• 🔋 Figure AI – Battery Design Validation Test Engineer

📰 All the pieces else in AI today

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said that despite users sharing personal info with ChatGPT, there isn’t a legal confidentiality, and chats can theoretically be called on in legal cases.

Alibaba launched an update to Qwen3-Pondering, now competitive with Gemini 2.5 Pro, o4-mini, and DeepSeek R1 across knowledge, reasoning, and coding benchmarks.

Tencent released Hunyuan3D World Model 1.0, a brand new open-source world generation model for creating interactive, editable 3D worlds from image or text prompts.

Music company Hallwood Media signed top Suno “music designer” Imoliver in a record deal, becoming the primary creator from the platform to affix a label.

Vogue is facing backlash after lifestyle brand Guess used an AI-generated model in a full-page commercial within the magazine’s August issue.

COMMUNITY

🎥 Watch our last workshop

Try our last live workshop with Dr. Alvaro Cintas, The Rundown’s AI professor. By the tip 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.

Watch it 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