U.S. Govt gets ChatGPT for a buck

Good morning, AI enthusiasts. OpenAI desires to be the AI backbone of the U.S. government, and it’s going all in to undercut rivals to get there.

With a brand new initiative offering ChatGPT Enterprise to federal agencies for just $1 per agency, the AI giant is making a daring push for long-term government adoption, however it’s also one that would change expectations around enterprise pricing.

Reminder: Our next live workshop is tomorrow at 4 PM EST. Join and learn easy methods to run OpenAI’s recent open weight models locally in your computer. RSVP here.

In today’s AI rundown:

• OpenAI offers ChatGPT at $1 for U.S. agencies

• Google launches AI tutoring mode for college kids

• Create Claude Code subagents to your projects

• Microsoft’s self-adapting AI tackles scientific problems

• 4 recent AI tools & 4 job opportunities

LATEST DEVELOPMENTS

OPENAI

🇺🇸 OpenAI offers ChatGPT at $1 for U.S. agencies

The Rundown: OpenAI just announced that the enterprise version of ChatGPT, including access to advanced models with additional safety features, will likely be available to all federal agencies for just $1 per agency for the following 12 months.

The main points:

• The discounted pricing stems from OpenAI’s partnership with the U.S. General Services Administration, the federal government’s central purchasing authority.

• It’s going to even be accompanied by unlimited use of OpenAI’s advanced models and features, like Deep Research, for an extra 60-day period.

• The corporate hopes these efforts will help government officials cut down red tape and paperwork, making services “faster, easier, and more reliable.”

• To assist federal employees start, OpenAI can also be organising a dedicated government user community with tailored training resources.

Why it matters: While offering ChatGPT Enterprise for virtually free shows OpenAI’s willingness to embed itself deep into government workflows, it could also spark a high-stakes race, with other GSA-approved rivals like Anthropic and Google likely following suit and unleashing a wave of aggressive AI offers aimed toward federal adoption.

TOGETHER WITH POSTMAN

🏆️ Construct something incredible to win

The Rundown: Turn your API expertise into $1,000 and prizes in Postman’s newest challenge. Create interactive Notebooks to showcase AI-powered solutions. In spite of everything, AI + APIs is a match made in heaven.

The prizes include:

• $1,000 for multiple categories

• $2,500 + for Creator Fellowship Grant

• $1,000 for Community Favorite and more

Join the challenge and submit your work by August 24 to be considered.

GOOGLE

🧑‍🎓 Google launches AI tutoring mode for college kids

The Rundown: As OpenAI courts federal agencies with $1 licenses, Google is pushing into the education sector with a brand new Guided Learning mode for Gemini and free access to its $20/month AI Pro Plan for faculty students.

The main points:

• Following ChatGPT’s Study Mode, Gemini’s Guided Learning acts as a learning partner, offering step-by-step guidance as a substitute of giving direct answers.

• Google has worked with educators and learning experts to make sure the AI helps students work through problems, constructing their critical considering skills.

• The mode also includes tools that use images, videos, and interactive quizzes to assist students test their knowledge as they learn recent concepts.

• Google is making its AI Pro Plan free for college kids in select countries, including the U.S., and investing $1B over 3 years for AI training at U.S. colleges.

Why it matters: Amid concerns that AI may hurt the educational process with direct answers—including an MIT study highlighting its impact on students’ cognition—each Google and OpenAI at the moment are repositioning their AI tools with study tutor features designed to construct, not bypass, critical considering.

AI TRAINING

🤖 Create Claude Code subagents to your projects

The Rundown: On this tutorial, you’ll learn easy methods to use Claude Code’s sub-agents to create custom AI assistants with specific roles and directions, each with their very own context window and expertise.

Step-by-step:

1. Install Claude Code with npm install -g @anthropic-ai/claude-code and run claude in your project directory

2. Type /agents, select “Create a brand new agent” and select “Generate with Claude”

3. Describe your agent’s purpose and configure tools, model (Opus/Sonnet/Haiku), and color theme

4. Save your agent, and it’s going to robotically activate for relevant tasks.

Pro tip: Create multiple specialized sub-agents (testing, reviewing, bug-fixing) to keep up focused expertise and separate context windows for every task.

PRESENTED BY TOGETHER AI

⚙️ Automate, debug, and solve with SOTA open source models

The Rundown: Together AI’s Inference & Nice-Tuning platform lets developers deploy open source models at scale, offering each serverless and dedicated endpoints for models like Kimi K2 — a brand new SOTA agentic intelligence model with 1T parameters, 128K context, and native tool use.

With Together AI, you’ll experience:

• High-performance infrastructure designed for the bottom possible latency

• Developer-friendly APIs that simplify integration

• An in depth model library featuring the highest open-source AI models like Kimi K2

Try Kimi K2 now and get all the advantages of open-source AI without the complexity.

AI RESEARCH

🧠 Microsoft’s self-adapting AI tackles scientific problems

The Rundown: Microsoft just announced CLIO (Cognitive Loop via In-situ Optimization), a breakthrough framework that allows non-reasoning LLMs to develop their very own thought patterns and adapt their reasoning in real-time.

The main points:

• While most reasoning models use strategies and actions which are pre-baked during post-training (before deployment), CLIO creates a “steerable” AI system.

• It builds and refines its reasoning through self-reflection at runtime, creating its own feedback loops to explore ideas, manage memory, and flag uncertainties.

• With the self-adapting behavior, users get full control to set thresholds for uncertainty, change reasoning paths, or re-execute them entirely.

• On Humanity’s Last Exam, CLIO boosted GPT-4.1’s accuracy on text-only biomedical questions from 8.55% to 22.37%, surpassing o3 (high).

Why it matters: With CLIO’s performance leap—plus built-in explainability, memory control, and tunable reasoning—Microsoft has shown that LLMs don’t should be “finished” in training. In high-stakes scientific domains where trust and rigor matter, a continually steerable AI could be just what teams must speed up discovery.

QUICK HITS

🛠️ Trending AI Tools

• ✨ Anything – Launch beautifully designed mobile apps and web apps from only a prompt, no coding or extra tools required*

• ⚙️ Bing Image Creator – Now with OpenAI’s latest GPT-4o image model

• 📽️ Endex – An AI agent that lives inside Excel

• 📝 Kitten TTS – A 15M parameter text-to-speech model that runs without GPU

^{*Sponsored listing}

💼 AI Job Opportunities

• 🧠 Meta – AI Research Scientist, Computer Vision

• 🎨 Descript – Product Designer

• 🤝 Deepmind – People Partner, GenAI

• 📈 UiPath – Territory Sales Manager

📰 Every little thing else in AI today

Midjourney added a brand new HD video mode for its Pro and Mega subscribers, saying it delivers 4x more pixels in outputs than the default SD mode and is 3.2x costlier.

Google’s asynchronous, agent-based coding tool, Jules, is finally out of beta, however the free plan usage limits have been reduced to fifteen individual every day tasks from 60.

Anthropic added automated security reviews in Claude Code with a brand new /security-review command that checks for vulnerabilities directly from the terminal.

xAI’s Grok Imagine, a video and image generation tool, is now rolling out in early access on Android devices, via the official Grok app.

OpenAI announced a “LIVE5TREAM” for Thursday, 10 am PT (today), teasing the launch of GPT-5, its long-awaited flagship model, with possibly a Nano and Mini version.

OpenAI can also be reportedly holding early talks a few secondary share sale for current and former employees at a valuation of $500B.

Chai Discovery, the AI lab constructing frontier models for molecular design, raised $70M series A from Menlo Ventures and the Anthology Fund.

COMMUNITY

🎥 Join our next live workshop

Join our next workshop this Friday, August eighth, at 4 PM EST with Dr. Alvaro Cintas, The Rundown’s AI professor. By the tip of the workshop, you’ll know easy methods to run your personal fully private, open-weight model locally in your computer.

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

See you soon,

Rowan, Joey, Zach, Shubham, and Jennifer—the humans behind The Rundown