OpenAI braces for “rough vibes”

Good morning, AI enthusiasts. For the primary time in years, Sam Altman sounds… frightened.

In a leaked memo warning staff about “rough vibes” and “economic headwinds” from Google’s breakthroughs, the OpenAI CEO is preparing his team for something unfamiliar: playing catch-up.

P.S. Our next edition of The Rundown Roundtable is here, where our staff members share the unique ways we’re incorporating AI into each our work and private lives. See the most recent use cases below, and submit your individual workflow here.

In today’s AI rundown:

• Sam Altman senses ‘rough vibes’ as Google takes lead

• The Rundown Roundtable: Our AI use cases

• Use NotebookLM to show raw data into visual insights

• Research: Claude turns evil after learning to cheat

• 4 latest AI tools, community workflows, and more

LATEST DEVELOPMENTS

OPENAI

🙄 Altman senses ‘rough vibes’ as Google takes lead

The Rundown: OpenAI CEO Sam Altman sent a memo to staff last month warning of incoming “rough vibes” because of Google breakthroughs, in accordance with The Information — a preview of internal unease from its rivals’ release of Gemini 3 and Nano Banana Pro.

The main points:

• Altman said Google’s progress could “create temporary economic headwinds for our company,” saying he expects “the vibes on the market to be rough for a bit”.

• Google’s pretraining advances, particularly, concerned OpenAI, which was previously combating the problem when scaling GPT-5.

• He emphasized specializing in “very ambitious bets,” corresponding to automated AI research and artificial data, even when it means falling behind within the near term.

• The Information revealed that Altman also hinted at a coming LLM codenamed “Shallotpeat” that might help OpenAI catch back up on Google’s progress.

Why it matters: It’s rare to see Altman and OpenAI on their heels, and it appears Google’s big week of releases is finally one the AI leader doesn’t have a direct answer for. But, as we’ve seen again and again before within the AI race, the vibes can change fast — especially with a often busy holiday season of releases incoming.

TOGETHER WITH ATLASSIAN

📈 Different teams need different AI strategies

The Rundown: Not all departments leverage AI the identical way. Atlassian’s AI Collaboration Index: Executive Insights report breaks down how technology, marketing, and HR teams are using AI — offering critical insights about what works and what doesn’t across functions.

The research reveals:

• The largest untapped AI opportunities across functions

• Small, lively AI work groups drive more impact than formal training

• AI tools are optimized for individual tasks, not cross-team coordination

• Rapid experimentation beats perfect strategy for innovation gains

Read the report and learn find out how to turn isolated AI gains into real organizational impact.

THE RUNDOWN ROUNDTABLE

💡 The Rundown Roundtable: Our AI use cases

The Rundown: The Rundown Roundtable is a brand new weekly feature where we poll members of The Rundown staff on how they’re using AI, each in work and every day lives.

Darren, Director of Media: I’m continuously resizing images for our Instagram videos (vertical aspect ratio), and most of the pictures I download are horizontal. I mainly treat Midjourney’s editor as I’d Photoshop’s “Generative Fill” feature, nevertheless it’s way quicker and intuitive. Upload image, click “Move / Resize” select desired Aspect ratio, prompt “extend all sides, context-aware fill” – and also you get 4 options in seconds, and it’s quick to iterate.

Adrian, Developer: I exploit ChatGPT Voice Mode to practice my Japanese each day and prepare for the JLPT N4 exam. I keep a dedicated “Japanese practice” Project with easy tutor instructions (“Speak slowly,” “If I make a grammar/word/politeness mistake, pause, explain in English, show corrected Japanese, then proceed in Japanese”), then open up a voice chat and just talk. After ~20 turns, it wraps with just a few improvement notes.

Nate, Educator: I recently used ChatGPT as a washer repair assistant. My washer’s water pump failed, so I uploaded a photograph, described the noise it was making, and it helped me discover the precise part I needed to order.

When the alternative arrived, it looked like I actually needed two pumps, but after I shared one other picture, ChatGPT was smart enough to elucidate that the second (it looked an identical to me) was just the drain pump. It saved me from buying an unnecessary extra part and turned what would’ve been a dear service call right into a DIY win.

AI TRAINING

🎉 Use NotebookLM to show data into visual insights

The Rundown: On this tutorial, you’ll learn find out how to turn campaign data into ready-to-share infographics and slide decks with NotebookLM — which robotically analyzes sources and generates presentations so you may concentrate on considering, not formatting.

Step-by-step:

1. Go to NotebookLM, click “Create latest,” and add your sources by connecting Google Drive, adding links, or pasting text directly (campaign data, notes, etc.)

2. Once uploaded, NotebookLM analyzes and summarizes your sources — select “infographic” on the suitable panel, select orientation and detail level, then optionally customize color theme

3. Create a slide deck by choosing length (e.g., long for a deep-dive), setting language, and adding custom instructions like “Highlight which variant is best for profitable growth”

4. Review the output with clear recommendations, charts, visualized customer journeys, and appendixes — then download, share with stakeholders, or enable presentation mode to present immediately

Hot Tip: Reuse this workflow for learning complex topics, like school material, tweet threads, book excerpts, academic papers, or YouTube transcripts.

PRESENTED BY LOVART

✅ Edit AI designs immediately

The Rundown: Lovart’s latest Edit Elements gives you full control over AI designs. As a substitute of regenerating from scratch, you may change copy, move layers, and remix compositions immediately. Trusted by 3M+ creators worldwide who want AI speed without sacrificing creative control.

With Edit Elements, you may:

• Update copy, fonts, or sizes in seconds with Live Editable Text (LET)

• Isolate subjects, text, or background for precision edits with Layer Separation

• Get pixel-perfect results combining AI automation with human-level control

Try Lovart today and experience AI design with full creative control

AI RESEARCH

😈 Research: Claude turns evil after learning to cheat

The Rundown: Anthropic published latest research on AI misalignment, finding that Claude spontaneously starts to lie and sabotage safety tests after learning find out how to cheat on coding assignments — without ever being trained to be deceptive.

The main points:

• Researchers trained models on real programming tasks and provided documents describing ‘reward hacks’ to cheat on the assignments.

• Models that learned the shortcuts pretended to follow safety rules while pursuing harmful goals, also actively weakening tools for catching misbehavior.

• Attempting to fix the problem with standard safety training only taught models to cover deception, appearing helpful while remaining problematic behind the scenes.

• Anthropic found that explicitly giving ‘permission’ to make use of reward hacks during training stopped them from connecting cheating with other harmful behaviors.

Why it matters: The whack-a-mole game of AI alignment continues to uncover odd insights. As systems gain autonomy in areas like safety research or accessing company systems, one problematic behavior resulting in many others becomes a serious concern — especially with future models recuperating at hiding these patterns entirely.

QUICK HITS

🛠️ Trending AI Tools

• 🍌 Nano Banana Pro – Google’s latest image AI with improved text rendering

• 🚀 Olmo 3 – AI2’s latest family of benchmark-topping open-source models

• 📖 NotebookLM – Latest Infographics & Slide Decks with Nano Banana Pro

• ☄ Comet – Perplexity’s AI-first browser, now available on Android

📰 All the pieces else in AI today

OpenAI detailed tests showing GPT-5’s scientific research across math, biology, physics, and computer science, including solving a decades-old math problem.

Amazon’s AI-upgraded Alexa+ assistant is expanding to Canada, marking its first rollout expansion outside of the U.S.

Meta’s Chief AI Scientist, Yann LeCun, confirmed his coming departure from Meta, with plans to create a brand new startup around AI that understands the physical world.

Intology unveiled Locus, an AI system that claims to outperform human experts on AI R&D while running “consistent performance improvement as much as several days.”

Edison released Edison Evaluation, a scientific data evaluation AI agent that works inside Jupyter notebooks to perform complex research tasks.

Dartmouth researcher Sean Westwood created an AI agent that bypassed survey bot detection 99.8% of the time, showing the threat coming to online research studies.

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 Joe I. in Latest York City, NY:

“The very best thing that I even have tried is uploading my bloodwork and MRI / Xray images. The readings were very accurate and gave me a greater understanding of what the doctor was talking about. I do that as soon as i get the outcomes and might ask any questions without feeling like I’m being a nuisance. The answers from ChatGPT help me higher discuss my situation with my provider and are so helpful.”

How do you employ AI? Tell us here.

🎓 Highlights: News, Guides & Events

• Read our last AI newsletter: Nano Banana Pro changes the AI image game

• Read our last Tech newsletter: Ozempic’s next trick — slow aging

• Read our last Robotics newsletter: Sunday’s humanoid can do your dishes

• Today’s AI tool guide: Use NotebookLM to show data into visual insights

• Watch our last workshop: The Human-First Agentic Content Workflow

See you soon,

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