DeepSeek strikes again

Good morning, AI enthusiasts. Chinese startup DeepSeek shook the AI world with its R1 release earlier this 12 months, rattling markets and triggering talks of tighter U.S. chip controls.

Now the Whale is back with an enormous encore, dropping two recent models that rival GPT-5 and Gemini 3 Pro, open-sourcing them, and pricing them at a fraction of the fee. Suddenly, near-frontier AI has never looked cheaper.

In today’s AI rundown:

• DeepSeek’s recent models rivaling GPT-5, Gemini-3 Pro

• Runway tops video leaderboard with 4.5 release

• Create on-brand marketing campaigns with Pomelli

• Kling’s all-in-one video model for generation, editing

• 4 recent AI tools, community workflows, and more

LATEST DEVELOPMENTS

DEEPSEEK

🐳 DeepSeek’s recent models rivaling GPT-5, Gemini-3 Pro

The Rundown: Chinese AI startup DeepSeek just released V3.2 and V3.2-Speciale, two reasoning models that perform on par with SOTA models like GPT-5 and Gemini 3 Pro — while cutting costs and staying accessible under an open-source license.

The main points:

• V3.2 matches or nears GPT-5, 4.5 Sonnet, and Gemini 3 Pro on math, tool use, and coding tests, with the heavier Speciale surpassing them in several areas.

• The Speciale variant hit gold-medal scores on the 2025 International Math Olympiad and Informatics Olympiad, also placing No. 10 overall at IOI.

• V3.2 pricing is available in at $0.28 input / $0.42 output per 1M tokens, a fraction of Gemini 3 Pro ($2 / $12), GPT-5.1 ($1.25 / $10), and Sonnet 4.5 ($3 / $15).

• Each 685B parameter models ship under an MIT license, with weights available on Hugging Face for anyone to download.

Why it matters: DeepSeek’s R1 release rattled markets and sparked U.S. chip export control talk, and the V3.2 follow-up shows the Chinese lab isn’t a one-hit wonder — open-sourcing a model with frontier performance at a large price cut. For U.S. labs charging premium API fees, the pressure to justify that gap just got loads more intense.

TOGETHER WITH SONAR

💻 Coding personalities that redefine reliability & risk

The Rundown Sonar just published The Coding Personalities of Leading LLMs, analyzing 4,400 Java tasks accomplished by GPT-5, Claude Sonnet 4, Llama 3.2, and other leading LLMs. The important thing finding? Models that excel at benchmarks often fail at writing secure, maintainable code in real-world applications.

Here’s what stood out:

• LLMs excel at syntax but struggle with security

• Generated code often lacks maintainability and clarity

• Newer models include harder-to-detect, more nuanced flaws

Download the complete report — no form-fill required.

RUNWAY

🎥 Runway tops video leaderboard with recent 4.5 release

The Rundown: Runway just released Gen-4.5, a brand new AI video model that claims to usher in a “recent frontier for video generation”, topping benchmarks and showing strong performance across realism, motion, and artistic control.

The main points:

• 4.5 moves to the highest spot of Artificial Evaluation’ Text-to-Video leaderboard, after gaining hype under the codename “Whisper Thunder” in testing.

• Runway says Gen-4.5 handles physics, fluid dynamics, and human movement more naturally, with details like hair and fabric staying consistent across frames.

• 4.5 can handle a variety of styles, but excels in cinematic/realism visuals — with Runway saying outputs are “indistinguishable from real-world footage”.

• The model was also codenamed ‘David’, with co-founder Cristobal Valenzuela comparing the small company’s rating to a ‘David vs. Goliath’ victory.

Why it matters: Runway has already pushed AI into skilled creative workflows, and 4.5 feels the closest yet to the cinematic capabilities needed to be widely adopted across Hollywood. While the subsequent frontier is longer generations and even higher audio/speaking sync, the year-over-year improvement in AI video is mind-blowing.

AI TRAINING

🔥 Create on-brand marketing campaigns with Pomelli

The Rundown: On this tutorial, you’ll learn the right way to use Pomelli (by Google Labs and DeepMind) to routinely create what you are promoting identity and generate on-brand marketing campaigns with ready-to-use creatives.

Step-by-step:

1. Go to Pomelli, click “Let’s Get Began”, enter your website URL – Pomelli scans and extracts colours, fonts, taglines, tone, and product cues

2. Edit your “Business DNA” summary by adjusting colours, values, and duplicate to match your brand vision – all fields are customizable

3. Prompt the campaign generator: “Create a scary but kind Halloween campaign”, review three variations like “Give them something good” or “Treat yourself, no tricks”

4. Within the creative editor, change headlines, text, fonts, colours, resize for various placements, use “Fix layout” to auto-reflow elements, and add a call-to-action

Pro tip: You’ll want to test the conversion rate of Pomelli-generated creatives vs. your previous creatives.

PRESENTED BY IBM

🏆 Start small, then scale for AI success

The Rundown: Smarter AI starts with AI-ready data. When your models run on trusted, high-quality data, they perform more reliably, scale more easily, and deliver measurable value across the organization. Start small, validate impact quickly, and expand on a foundation built for long-term success.

Begin with AI that leverages:

• Trusted, high-quality data

• Each structured and unstructured data

• Seamless integration across sources

Watch the webinar: ‘AI Agents Run on Data—Is Yours Ready?’ and learn more.

KLING

📽️ Klings all-in-one video model for generation, editing

The Rundown: Chinese startup Kuaishou launched Kling O1, a brand new AI video system that handles each video creation and editing in a single model — letting users generate clips, swap characters, make granular edits, and restyle footage in a single interface.

The main points:

• O1 accepts as much as seven inputs without delay, able to interpreting images, videos, subjects, and text — with outputs of 3-10 seconds.

• Users can edit existing footage with text commands like “remove bystanders” or “shift to nighttime” while preserving characters and scenes.

• Other features include image, element, motion, camera movement, and video references, start and end frames, multi-subject capabilities, and more.

• Kling’s internal tests show the model winning against Google Veo 3.1 and Runway’s Aleph on video reference and editing tasks.

Why it matters: Between Runway and Kling, December is kicking off with some massive AI video upgrades. O1’s all-in-one and edit-anything capabilities (just like Runway’s previous Aleph drop) are making granular edits to video possible like never before — a leap very similar to what Nano Banana brought to pictures earlier this 12 months.

QUICK HITS

🛠️ Trending AI Tools

• 🎥 Runway Gen-4.5 – Runway’s recent top-rated video model

• 🐳 DeepSeek V3.2 – DeepSeek’s latest powerful open-source release

• 🎬 Kling O1 – Video model with multimodal understanding and editing

• 🧠 DeepSeek V3.2 Speciale – Open-source deep reasoning model

📰 Every little thing else in AI today

Black Forest Labs announced a brand new $300M funding round at a $3.25B valuation, coming on the heels of the corporate’s Flux.2 image model release.

Accenture and OpenAI are partnering to offer ChatGPT Enterprise to tens of 1000’s of consultants, also launching a program to assist clients deploy AI agents.

OpenAI is taking an ownership stake in Thrive Holdings, a firm owned by one in all its investors, Thrive Capital, saying the deal will scale impact across enterprise operations.

Nvidia invested $2B in chip design software maker Synopsys, with the multi-year partnership aimed toward using AI and computing to hurry up product engineering.

Epic CEO Tim Sweeney is lobbying for game marketplaces like Steam to stop using ‘Made with AI’ tags, saying the tech will likely be “involved in nearly all future production.”

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 Taya P. in Vancouver, BC:

“I made a College Compass this weekend on Base44 for my son. It’s an AI-powered guide to navigating the school application process, managing university research, applications, tasks, and deadlines multi functional place. It auto-populates scholarship fit based on his specific filters, maps his entire 5-year journey by grade, and gets richer over time. It adjusts based on his performance, making suggestions on the world of study specialization and best best-matched universities.

It even has an admission probability calculator and makes suggestions on the right way to improve his success. Better of all, it empowers my son with a strategic framework that supports HIS needs and allows me as his mother to get out of the way in which, knowing he’s got every support he needs!”

How do you employ AI? Tell us here.

🎓 Highlights: News, Guides & Events

• Read our last AI newsletter: AI cracks 30-year math problem

• Read our last Tech newsletter: Apple takes the crown from Samsung

• Read our last Robotics newsletter: The creepiest robot just got hands

• Today’s AI tool guide: Create on-brand marketing campaigns with Pomelli

• RSVP to next workshop @ 4PM EST Friday: Nano Banana Pro for Slide Decks

See you soon,

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