Google’s recent AI video upgrade

Good morning, AI enthusiasts. Google just released Veo 3, the corporate’s upgraded AI video model — but after OpenAI’s viral Sora 2 explosion just weeks ago, the hype doesn’t feel the identical.

With recent editing features and general upgrades, Google is targeting filmmakers and creatives over viral feeds. The issue? In today’s attention economy, being useful might matter lower than being memorable.

In today’s AI rundown:

• Google’s upgraded Veo 3.1 video model

• Anthropic’s fast, low-cost Claude 4.5 Haiku

• Turn photos into personal branding videos with Veo 3.1

• Google’s Gemma-based AI finds recent cancer treatment

• 4 recent AI tools, community workflows, and more

LATEST DEVELOPMENTS

GOOGLE

🎬 Google’s upgraded Veo 3.1 video model

The Rundown: Google just rolled out Veo 3.1, a brand new video generation model that claims quality improvements, higher realism, upgraded image-to-video capabilities, and a series of recent editing features directed at filmmakers and artistic control.

The small print:

• Veo 3.1 now accepts up to 3 reference images to take care of character consistency across scenes.

• Users may provide start and end frames, with 3.1 generating smooth transitions between them and matching audio.

• Latest scene extension capabilities allow users to create as much as 1-minute-long videos by repeatedly adding segments to match the previous clip.

• Each standard and fast versions of three.1 are rolling out across Google’s ecosystem, including its Flow filmmaking tool, Vertex AI, and Gemini.

Why it matters: After Sora 2 raised the AI video bar in a massively viral way just weeks ago, Veo 3.1 doesn’t hit with the identical hype — despite what the benchmarks may say. The larger upgrade could also be inside the editing realm, with abilities like scene extending and begin/end frames giving the additional control needed to take outputs to the following level.

TOGETHER WITH VANTA

📅 The GRC event of the yr: Join VantaCon virtually

The Rundown: Tune in on Nov. 19 to VantaCon, where leaders from Vanta, Anthropic, 1Password, Sublime Security, and more tackle the most important challenges security professionals are facing today, and the opportunities recent technologies and trends are uncovering for the long run.

By joining VantaCon, you’ll:

• Construct connections with 400+ peers within the GRC security space

• Learn best practices and insights from GRC professionals across the industry

• Get hands-on with labs and learning opportunities to sharpen your skillset

Register today to look at the VantaCon livestream and take part in the virtual Q&A.

ANTHROPIC

🚀 Anthropic’s fast, low-cost Claude Haiku 4.5

The Rundown: Anthropic released Claude Haiku 4.5, the smallest variant of its latest model family that delivers performance comparable to the corporate’s flagship model from just months ago for significantly reduced prices and upgraded speeds.

The small print:

• The brand new model matches Claude Sonnet 4’s coding abilities from May while charging just $1 per million input tokens versus Sonnet’s $3 pricing.

• Despite its size, Haiku beats out Sonnet 4 on benchmarks like computer use, math, and agentic tool use — also nearing GPT-5 on certain tests.

• Enterprises can orchestrate multiple Haiku agents working in parallel, with the recently released Sonnet 4.5 acting as a coordinator for complex tasks.

• Haiku 4.5 is obtainable to all Claude tiers (including free users), inside the company’s Claude Code agentic development tool and via API.

Why it matters: With Haiku, the utopia of ‘intelligence too low cost to meter’ still appears to be following the trendline. Anthropic’s latest release shows how quickly the AI industry’s economics are shifting, with a small, low-cost model now able to performances that commanded premium pricing just a number of months ago.

AI TRAINING

🤩 Turn photos into personal branding videos with Veo 3.1

The Rundown: On this tutorial, you’ll learn how one can create skilled personal branding videos using Google’s recent Veo 3.1 model in Flow, transforming AI-generated photos into polished video content without ever being on camera.

Step-by-step:

1. Generate your headshot and workspace in Google Gemini using prompts like “photo of this person [upload reference], casual denim shirt, looking barely right” and “modern office, city view, minimalist desk”

2. Open Google Flow, create a brand new project, switch from “Text to Video” to “Ingredients to Video,” and upload each generated images

3. Prompt your first scene: “Using the uploaded photo as me, sitting at a desk, smiling on the camera while sipping coffee, then typing on a laptop. Warm morning light, add soft acoustic music”

4. Click “Add to Scene”, then “+” to Extend with: “I finish typing, have a look at the camera saying ‘Able to collaborate? DM me!’ Fade to text overlay with title”

5. Review timeline, ensure smooth transitions between clips, then click the download icon to export your complete branding video

Pro tip: Use the editing tool to pick areas and insert any objects inside your video —it’s perfect for creating product demo videos or training content without recording.

PRESENTED BY DELVE

🤑 Delve’s AI turns RAG into riches

The Rundown: Delve’s brand-new AI security questionnaire tool uses state-of-the-art GraphRAG to show you how to fly through security reviews with unparalleled accuracy — built by AI experts from Stanford and MIT.

Delve’s AI agents:

• Pull evidence, resolve conflicts, and reason across your entire policy graph

• Interrogate your infrastructure and draft bulletproof responses robotically

• Navigate reviews with F50 firms while saving dozens of hours

Book a demo with Delve for $1,000 off compliance certifications and unlimited free AI questionnaire access.

AI RESEARCH

🧪 Google’s Gemma-based AI finds recent cancer treatment

The Rundown: Google and Yale University researchers introduced C2S-Scale 27B, a foundation model — based on Google’s open-Gemma family — that discovered a previously unknown cancer treatment pathway, proven to work in living cells.

The small print:

• The C2S AI system reads cellular data like a language, capturing how individual cells will behave and reply to treatments.

• Researchers tasked the system with finding compounds that could make tumors more visible to the immune system, but only when certain signals were present.

• It identified silmitasertib, an existing drug never before linked to helping the immune system spot cancer cells.

• Laboratory tests confirmed the AI’s prediction, with the drug combination making tumor cells about 50% more visible to immune defenses.

Why it matters: The ‘novel’ discoveries from AI systems are beginning to trickle in — something many skeptics thought inconceivable. With Google also finding that “biological models follow clear scaling laws”, we might be in for a fully wild period of scientific progress as models proceed to get larger and more capable.

QUICK HITS

🛠️ Trending AI Tools

• 💨 Claude 4.5 Haiku – Anthropic’s recent small, cost-efficient model

• 🎥 Veo 3.1 – Google’s upgraded video generation model

• 📽️ Flow – Google’s filmmaking tool, with recent artistic control

• 🎨 MAI-Image-1 – Microsoft’s first in-house image generation model

📰 The whole lot else in AI today

MIT introduced Recursive Language Models, a way allowing models to process long contexts by recursively calling themselves, with an RLM-powered GPT-5 mini outperforming GPT-5 by 114% on long-context benchmarks.

Apple announced its M5 chip, featuring AI-focused upgrades including specialized processors to make AI tasks 4x faster across its product lines.

Runway introduced Apps, a brand new collection of streamlined video editing tools with features like element removal, product reshoots, dialogue adding, and more.

The International AI Safety Report provided a ‘First Key Update’ to its 2025 report, saying that performance, adoption, and oversight concerns are increasing safety risks.

Meta announced plans for a brand new $1.5B, 1GW AI-optimized data center in El Paso, the corporate’s twenty ninth data center and third in Texas.

OpenAI rolled out its low-cost ChatGPT Go tier to recent regions, now available in 89 countries.

COMMUNITY

🤝 Community AI workflows

Every newsletter, we showcase how a reader is using AI to work smarter, save time, or make life easier.

Today’s workflow comes from reader Jason B. in Morgantown, WV:

“As an educator and department director, essentially the most useful workflow now we have created is generating accessible and usable transcripts for videos. Our instructors often depend on YouTube for videos, however the auto-transcription there doesn’t meet accessibility standards by a rustic mile. We throw the YouTube “word salad” right into a couple of prompts we have developed and generate high-quality transcripts for lengthy videos.”

How do you utilize AI? Tell us here.

🎓 Highlights: News, Guides & Events

• Read our last AI newsletter: ChatGPT to go 18+

• Read our last Tech newsletter: Meta and Anduril’s AI war helmet

• Read our last Robotics newsletter: Figure drops recent humanoid

• Today’s AI tool guide: Turn photos into branding videos with Veo 3.1

• RSVP to next workshop @ 1PM Friday: Construct AI teams with Zapier Agents

See you soon,

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