OpenAI answers Google with major image upgrade

Good morning, AI enthusiasts. Google’s recent AI moves can have had Sam Altman slamming the ‘Code Red’ button, however the AI giant’s latest releases are rising to the challenge.

OpenAI’s counter to Nano Banana Pro is officially here, with a long-overdue GPT-image upgrade that vaults the corporate back to the frontier of image leaderboards (for now).

In today’s AI rundown:

• OpenAI counters Nano Banana Pro with recent Images upgrade

• HubSpot CEO Dharmesh Shah on search engine optimization for the AI era

• Quickly iterate on Sora videos with an easy automation

• Google, MIT study finds pitfalls in multi-agent systems

• 4 recent AI tools, community workflows, and more

LATEST DEVELOPMENTS

OPENAI

🚀 OpenAI counters Nano Banana Pro with recent Images upgrade

The Rundown: OpenAI just released GPT Image 1.5, a significant update to ChatGPT’s image generator that creates visuals as much as 4x faster, improves text rendering, and maintains consistency across edits — arriving as a solution to Google’s recent creative momentum with Nano Banana Pro.

The small print:

• Image 1.5 brings significantly upgraded generation speeds, with the model also now in a position to preserve faces, lighting, and composition across edits.

• Text rendering also gets a giant improvement, with 1.5 handling long content, infographics, and varied text sizes in comparison with GPT-image-1’s rampant issues.

• The brand new model moves to first place on each Artificial Evaluation and LM Arena’s text-to-image and editing leaderboards.

• OpenAI also released a brand new dedicated creative panel, joining the everyday chat-based workflow to supply users quick-start templates and curated style options.

Why it matters: Despite GPT-image-1 being a viral success on the time, it doesn’t take long to fall far behind the frontier curve — making this recent upgrade very overdue. 1.5 delivers on the benchmarks and, just like the recent GPT-5.2 release, brings OpenAI at the least on par with Google’s buzzy releases heading into the brand new yr.

TOGETHER WITH UIPATH

👋 Goodbye Chaos. Hello Orchestration.

The Rundown AI: UiPath 2025.10 upgrades how work moves across the enterprise with stronger coordination and clearer oversight. It sharpens the way in which teams manage processes that span systems, people, and intelligent agents — pushing automation right into a faster, more intelligent era.

What’s in the most recent UiPath release:

• Expanded Maestro upgrades for agentic orchestration

• Smarter AI across documents, testing, and workflows

• Faster construct cycles with streamlined Studio and Autopilot tools

Explore UiPath 2025.10 and the features persons are talking about.

ROWAN X DHARMESH

🎙️ HubSpot CEO Dharmesh Shah on search engine optimization for the AI era

The Rundown: We sat down with HubSpot CEO Dharmesh Shah for an exclusive interview on how the normal search engine optimization playbook is changing with LLMs and easy methods to prepare for a world run by agents.

On search engine optimization’s shift to AEO (Answer Engine Optimization):

Dharmesh: We’re moving from an search engine optimization mindset (solving for Google) to an LLM mindset (solving for AI). Ask, “How can I take the ideas and content that I even have and ‘translate’ it to make it more easily consumable by LLM vs. search engines like google and humans directly?”

On the hidden risk of low-quality AI content:

Dharmesh: The worst that may occur is definitely not zero return. The worst that may occur is negative return. Because in the event you construct a popularity online, within the algorithm’s mind that you just are crappy content, not trustworthy… it’s hard to dig yourself back out of that hole.

On the bottlenecks for AI agents:

Dharmesh: If you happen to consider agents as teammates… You wouldn’t just hand them a pc and access to all of the internals of the organization and say, “Here’s what we would like done, go do it.” Agents have to be trained, tested, and wish to have the equivalent of performance reviews.

Catch Rowan’s full interview with Dharmesh on YouTube, Spotify, or Apple Podcasts.

AI TRAINING

📹 Quickly iterate on Sora videos with an easy automation

The Rundown: Learn easy methods to generate bulk Sora videos mechanically using an easy Make.com automation that watches your Google Sheet prompts and uploads accomplished videos to Google Drive.

Step-by-step:

1. Duplicate this Google Sheet Template, then sign into Make.com and create a brand new scenario with the Google Sheets ‘Watch Rows’ trigger

2. Add a Sora module along with your API key (create one if needed + confirm org), then create a Google Drive folder and add ‘Upload a File’ module

3. Add a Google Sheets ‘Update a Row’ module that updates the drive link column with the ‘Web View link,’ then write prompts in your sheet with ID numbers and click on ‘run once’ in Make

4. Inside just a few minutes, your Google Sheet will update with links to accomplished videos in your Google Drive

Pro tip: As a substitute of waiting every quarter-hour for the automation to fireplace, you may arrange Google Sheets to fireplace a webhook straight to Make each time a row is updated.

PRESENTED BY AMAZON

⚙️ Automate UI workflows with Amazon Nova Act

The Rundown: Nova Act just launched — designed for developers to construct, deploy, and manage #NormcoreAgents to automate tasks so that you don’t must.

How does it work?

• Prototype agents within the playground

• Write, test, and debug agents directly in your IDE

• Deploy agents to production

Try it free of charge within the Nova Act Playground.

AI RESEARCH

😵 Google, MIT study finds pitfalls in multi-agent systems

The Rundown: Researchers from Google and MIT published a brand new study testing whether throwing more AI agents at problems improves results, finding that performance swung wildly depending on the structure of the duty.

The small print:

• The team ran 180 experiments across models from OpenAI, Google, and Anthropic, using the identical prompts and token budgets.

• Financial evaluation tasks split across agents saw an 81% improvement, while Minecraft tasks requiring step-by-step work degraded by as much as 70%.

• When a single agent already hit 45% accuracy on a task, adding more typically led to worse performance — with multiple agents eating through tokens quickly.

Why it matters: The agentic hype is pushing firms and users towards complex multi-agent workflows, but this research may show that more isn’t at all times higher. For a lot of enterprise tasks that require step-by-step reasoning, a well-designed single agent may outperform an elaborate system at a fraction of the price.

QUICK HITS

🛠️ Trending AI Tools

• 🌌 ChatGPT Images – OpenAI’s upgraded image generation system

• 🎥 Wan 2.6 – Alibaba’s recent native multimodal model for image and video

• 📪 CC – Google Labs’ experimental AI productivity agent in Gmail

• 🔊 SAM Audio – Meta’s recent model for segmenting sounds using text prompts

📰 Every little thing else in AI today

Sonatype just launched Guide — ensuring your AI assistants select the appropriate open-source components so you may spend less time debugging. Watch the unboxing webinar to learn more.*

OpenAI released FrontierScience, a brand new benchmark to guage research-level reasoning in scientific research tasks, with GPT 5.2 taking the highest spot in testing.

Google Labs rolled out CC, an experimental AI assistant powered by Gemini that connects to user’s Gmail, calendar, and files to send personalized morning summaries.

Black Forest Labs released FLUX.2 [max], the startup’s recent top image model featuring upgraded editing and the flexibility to create visuals from real-time web data.

AI2 introduced Molmo 2, an SOTA open model family for analyzing video by following objects across frames, counting events, and locating precise moments inside footage.

*Sponsored Listing

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 Bo in Cincinnati, OH:

“I used Claude to assist my law firm pivot to an AI-native firm, using it for annual planning, project management, workload integration, and more. Recently I created AI agents to function my CFO, CTO, and content creator. With my digital CTO, we began constructing our own small language model trained on our proprietary data to scale our law practice.”

How do you utilize AI? Tell us here.

🎓 Highlights: News, Guides & Events

• Read our last AI newsletter: Nvidia’s powerful open AI model play

• Read our last Tech newsletter: The AI boom’s phone problem

• Read our last Robotics newsletter: 1X’s home humanoid gets a factory job

• Today’s AI tool guide: Iterate on Sora videos with an easy automation

• RSVP to next workshop @ 4PM EST Friday: Google NotebookLM For Work

See you soon,

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