Google’s Flash-y latest Gemini 3 release

Good morning, AI enthusiasts. OpenAI could have been riding high into the vacations after back-to-back releases, but Google just crashed the party again with one other flashy gift of its own.

The corporate’s latest Gemini 3 variant combines top-level intelligence with extreme speed at a fraction of the worth — a combo that stands out as the hardest yet for its AI rivals to reply.

In today’s AI rundown:

• Google’s Flash-y latest Gemini 3 release

• Amazon discussing $10B+ investment in OpenAI

• Comparing ChatGPT Image and Nano Banana Pro

• Stanford AI experts predict 2026 shall be a yr of reckoning

• 4 latest AI tools, community workflows, and more

LATEST DEVELOPMENTS

GOOGLE

⚡️ Google’s Flash-y latest Gemini 3 release

The Rundown: Google just rolled out Gemini 3 Flash, a speed-optimized version of its recently released flagship model that also maintains frontier-level intelligence, becoming the brand new default model across Gemini and in Google Search’s AI Mode.

The main points:

• Gemini 3 Flash matches and even exceeds 3 Pro across a variety of benchmarks, while coming in at ¼ the worth and 3x the speed.

• On Humanity’s Last Exam, Flash scored 33.7% — tripling the 11% from its predecessor and nearly matching GPT-5.2’s 34.5%.

• Each the Gemini App and Google Search’s AI Mode now default to three Flash, combining real-time web results with fast, improved reasoning.

Why it matters: It could sound counterintuitive, but Gemini 3 Flash seems like an even bigger deal than 3 Pro — offering a unmatched intelligence and speed combo at prices that significantly undercut the competition. Google continues to eat away at OpenAI’s market share, and Flash is looking like yet one more reason for that trend to proceed.

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AMAZON & OPENAI

💰 Amazon discussing $10B+ investment in OpenAI

The Rundown: Amazon is reportedly negotiating a possible $10B investment in OpenAI that may value the AI leader above $500B, in accordance with The Information — with the deal also possibly including a commitment to make use of Amazon’s Trainium AI chips.

The main points:

• The 2 corporations signed a 7-year, $38B AWS cloud contract last month, with OpenAI now partnered with “not less than” 5 cloud providers.

• OpenAI would adopt Amazon’s Trainium processors, giving AWS a high-profile customer for chips competing against Nvidia.

• The businesses have also discussed commerce and enterprise partnerships, with OAI continuing to position ChatGPT as a shopping destination for users.

Why it matters: The restructuring that freed OAI from Microsoft exclusivity is paying off, with the flexibility to court competing cloud providers for large infra needs. For Amazon, the move would hedge its Anthropic bet — while also securing a giant customer for Trainium chips which have struggled to achieve traction against Nvidia’s dominance.

AI TRAINING

⚖️ Comparing ChatGPT Image and Nano Banana Pro

The Rundown: Learn the important thing similarities and differences between Google’s Nano Banana Pro and ChatGPT’s latest image generation model, while also learning the best way to construct your personal comparison matrix that you may reuse for other model comparisons.

Step-by-step:

1. Pick 5 use cases (ours were logo, website graphic, IG post, marketing brochure, photorealistic image) and description testing rules: same prompt per model, 4 images each, graded 1-5 on consistency, creativity, utility, and quality

2. Feed use cases into Claude/ChatGPT/Gemini and prompt: “Here’s my use cases: [X]. Write me a json prompt for every with 4 variations in a 4×4 grid”

3. Create a scoring matrix (duplicate our Notion guide here) where Overall Rating = (Consistency + Creativity + Utility + Quality)/4

4. Generate images by putting each prompt into each tools using latest chats per use case, then rate outputs based in your criteria

Pro tip: To avoid wasting on time/tokens, tell the LLM to jot down a prompt that can generate 4 variations in a 4×4 grid.

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• How you can be an AI manager

• How you can measure what matters by tracking AI agent impact

Read the primary article in Box’s series and follow along for actionable insights and downloadable templates.

STANFORD UNIVERSITY

🔮 Stanford AI experts predict 2026 shall be a yr of reckoning

The Rundown: Stanford University’s Institute for Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence (HAI) just shared its AI predictions for 2026: a “ChatGPT Moment” for healthcare and a shift from hype to hard evaluation of what AI can actually deliver.

The main points:

• HAI Co-Director James Landay predicts “no AGI this yr,” expecting more corporations to confess AI hasn’t delivered gains outside coding and call centers.

• Economist Erik Brynjolfsson forecasts an increase in “AI dashboards” tracking displacement and productivity at the duty level updated monthly, not years later.

• Researcher Curtis Langlotz anticipates a “ChatGPT moment” for healthcare because the training cost of medical models decreases and dataset accessibility rises.

• Law professor Julian Nyarko said firms will move from “Can it write?” to “How well, on what, and at what risk?” with a shift toward more complex legal work.

Why it matters: With 2025 being the yr of AI hype and large investments, the experts see 2026 as a transition to asking whether it was price it. Stanford’s faculty isn’t expecting an AI bubble crash like many others, but their predictions do point to an industry which will have exhausted its patience for overpromising demos and pilots.

QUICK HITS

🛠️ Trending AI Tools

• 🔐 Incogni – Erase sensitive data like addresses and phone numbers from the online. Get 55% off with code RUNDOWN*

• ⚡️ Gemini 3 Flash – Google’s powerful, cost-effective frontier reasoning model

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

• 🗣️ Chatterbox Turbo – Resemble AI’s fast, expressive, open-source TTS model

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📰 All the things else in AI today

Alibaba unveiled Wan2.6, a brand new multimodal model that may generate as much as 15 seconds of HD video with dialogue, storyboarding, and character reference capabilities.

U.S. Sen. Bernie Sanders announced plans to pursue a pause on AI data center construction, citing concerns about job displacement and societal impacts.

Amazon’s Peter DeSantis will now lead a brand new division overseeing AI models, chips, and quantum computing, while Alexa and Nova architect Rohit Prasad departs.

xAI introduced the Grok Voice Agent API, allowing developers to construct voice tech using the corporate’s top-ranking speech-to-speech model.

Meta released SAM Audio, a model that may isolate specific sounds from audio or video files using text descriptions, visual clicks, or timeline selections.

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 Ritesh K. in India:

“I built an autonomous ‘Financial Firewall’ that reads and audits invoices higher than a human team. As a substitute of using brittle OCR templates, I exploit Vision Models to extract data from messy PDFs, however the magic is the semantic reasoning.

The AI compares every invoice against the unique Purchase Order, and understands context. Crucially, it also catches subtle exceptions that human reviewers often miss resulting from fatigue — like a vendor slipping in a shipping fee on a ‘free shipping’ order or small unit-price variances. It auto-flags these discrepancies with a summary of the error, ensuring zero financial leakage while fully automating the boring approval logic.”

How do you employ AI? Tell us here.

🎓 Highlights: News, Guides & Events

• Read our last AI newsletter: OpenAI’s answer to Nano Banana Pro

• 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: Comparing ChatGPT Image and Nano Banana Pro

• 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