$450 reasoning model matches o1

Good morning, AI enthusiasts.The newest AI breakthrough is not coming from a tech giant — it’s emerging from a university lab with a shoestring budget.

UC Berkeley just matched o1-preview’s capabilities with a $450 training budget in 19 hours, and an open-source reasoning revolution could also be right across the corner.

In today’s AI rundown:

• $450 open-source reasoning model matches o1

• OpenAI constructing out latest robotics division

• Design your personal habit transformation roadmap

• World Economic Forum forecasts AI workplace surge

• 4 latest AI tools & 4 job opportunities

LATEST DEVELOPMENTS

UC BERKELEY

🧠 $450 open-source reasoning model matches o1

The Rundown: UC Berkeley’s NovaSky team just released Sky-T1-32B-Preview, a completely open-source reasoning model that competes with earlier versions of OpenAI’s o1 despite minuscule training time and costs.

The main points:

• Sky-T1 is a fine-tuned version of Alibaba’s Qwen2.5-32-Instruct, with training data generated using the open-source reasoning model QwQ-32B-Preview.

• Training took just 19 hours on 8 H100 GPUs, and the overall cost was around $450 — a fraction of typical AI training budgets.

• The model matches or exceeds an earlier version of OpenAI’s o1 on several benchmarks, particularly excelling in mathematics and coding challenges.

• Unlike other reasoning models, Sky-T1’s entire pipeline, including training data, code, and model weights, is totally open source.

Why it matters: Open-source AI has hit one more milestone — with UC Berkeley showing that high-level reasoning might be replicated at a fraction of the associated fee and training time of the huge AI giants. A brand new wave of innovation could come from previously priced-out labs that may now train and develop reasoning models.

TOGETHER WITH PROJECT IDX

☁️ Cloud dev environment + AI

The Rundown Project IDX gives you a whole cloud development environment with Google’s Gemini AI, right in your browser.

With Project IDX, you get:

• Your laptop within the cloud: A Linux-based virtual machine

• Native apps in browser: Construct Flutter/React Native apps with a built-in Android Emulator

• Pre-loaded environments: One click to begin with popular frameworks

Start with as much as 5 workspaces.

OPENAI

🤖 OpenAI constructing out latest robotics division

The Rundown: OpenAI just posted the corporate’s first robotics hardware job listings, revealing plans to develop its own custom robots with advanced AI capabilities.

The main points:

• Former Meta AR glasses lead Caitlin Kalinowski is spearheading the hassle, joining as OpenAI’s hardware director in November.

• The corporate is hiring for technical roles, including sensor suite development and mechanical design, and a lab operations manager to oversee prototype testing.

• Job listings hint at goals for ‘general-purpose robots that operate in dynamic real-world settings,’ with plans for a ‘wide selection of robotic form aspects.’

• OpenAI shuttered the robotics team in 2020, with research including training a robotic hand to unravel a Rubik’s Cube and other dexterity challenges.

• OpenAI has also collaborated with Figure previously yr, integrating its models into the robotics firm’s humanoid robots.

Why it matters: While OpenAI is not any stranger to robotics hardware with its partnerships and reported consumer device efforts with Jony Ive, rebuilding an in-house robotics division may signal a belief that achieving its AGI goal may require control of each the physical and digital features of AI systems.

AI TRAINING

🎯 Design your personal habit transformation roadmap

The Rundown: Transform your habits by creating a personalised development plan that uses AI to mix expert knowledge together with your specific situation.

Step-by-step:

1. Access any conversational AI assistant (e.g., ChatGPT, Claude, or Gemini).

2. Share your context using the profile prompt to get personalized questions on your goals and obstacles.

3. Request expert insights with the knowledge base prompt to get evidence-based strategies.

4. Generate your custom motion plan with the ultimate prompt that mixes your situation with expert guidance.

Pro tip: Keep your conversation saved as a template for developing future habits! Now we have also written detailed prompts that you may copy and paste here.

PRESENTED BY AMARO

💡 Where AI meets creative excellence

The Rundown: Amaro is your all-in-one platform for AI content creation, empowering enterprises and creatives to leverage the most recent AI models across image, video, audio, and text.

With Amaro, you possibly can:

• Create brand-consistent content using custom AI models trained in your assets

• Switch between leading AI tools like Runway, FLUX, and ElevenLabs in a single intuitive workspace

• Generate production-level product photos with customizable settings and backgrounds

Enroll without spending a dime to see how Amaro makes AI be just right for you. 

AI & THE WORKFORCE

📈 World Economic Forum forecasts AI workplace surge

The Rundown: The World Economic Forum just released its 2025 Way forward for Jobs Report, revealing AI’s dramatic impact on the workforce — with an amazing majority of employers expecting significant transformations from the tech by 2030.

The main points:

• Technology adoption is surging, with 86% of firms expecting AI to rework their operations by 2030.

• AI is predicted to create 11M jobs while displacing 9M others, with big data specialists and AI/ML experts topping the list of fastest-growing roles globally.

• Three-quarters of organizations plan to upskill existing employees for AI collaboration, while 70% aim to rent latest staff with AI experience.

• Half of firms expect to reorient their business around AI opportunities, while 40% anticipate reducing workforce size as AI capabilities grow.

Why it matters: AI’s disruption to the workforce is coming fast, and each industry must be planning its talent and tech strategies to organize for the huge changes ahead. Early adopters who successfully navigate the AI boom will see major competitive benefits during modern history’s biggest reshaping of labor.

QUICK HITS

🛠️ Trending AI Tools

• 🤖 Hugging Face SmolAgents – Create powerful AI agents with minimal effort

• 📓 Reset – Reduce anxiety with AI-powered guided journaling

• 👨‍💻 twenty first.dev – Github + Pinterest to make your AI web sites look beautiful

• 🪞 Topview 2.0 Product Avatar – Showcase products with AI avatars

💼 AI Job Opportunities

• 📦 LabelBox – General Application, Data Operations Engineer

• 💡 Figure AI – Patent Agent

• 📈 Databricks – Business Operations Analyst

• 🗓️ Palantir Technologies – Executive Assistant

📰 All the pieces else in AI today

Elon Musk said during an X interview at CES 2025 that AI has exhausted the sum of human training data, and firms are turning to AI-generated synthetic data to coach future models despite the drawbacks.

Nvidia unveiled an AI Blueprint for retail shopping assistants, enabling AI-powered digital retail agents to process text and image queries while visualizing products in virtual spaces.

AMD researchers published Agent Laboratory, a framework for using LLM agents as research assistants that may handle literature reviews, experiments, and report writing — achieving an 84% cost reduction in comparison with previous methods.

Mark Zuckerberg said in an interview with Joe Rogan that Meta and other firms will use AI to automate the roles of midlevel engineers this yr, with plans to dump all coding to artificial intelligence eventually.

Savannah Feder launched Astral, a viral automated AI marketing platform that may handle social media tasks like commenting and content creation on Reddit.

A brand new report from Bloomberg Intelligence predicts that over 200,000 Wall Street jobs could also be slashed in the subsequent 3-5 years as a consequence of AI, with automation and productivity increases resulting in as much as 17% higher banking profits.

COMMUNITY

🎥 Join our next live workshop

Join our next workshop on Wednesday at 2 PM EST and learn the best way to create custom styles for brand consistency via Freepik with Sofía López Martín.

RSVP here. Not a member yet? Join The Rundown University on a 14-day free trial.

🤝 Share The Rundown, get rewards

We’ll at all times keep this article 100% free. To support our work, consider sharing The Rundown with your folks, and we’ll send you more free goodies.

Your current referral count: 0
What you would like: 1 more referrals until receiving ChatGPT Prompting Kit Bundle

See you soon,

Rowan, Joey, Zach, Alvaro, and Jason—The Rundown’s editorial team