Elon’s $97B OpenAI offer

Good morning, AI enthusiasts. The subsequent chapter of the Elon vs OpenAI feud just arrived, with Musk offering $97B to manage his former company.

With billions at stake and egos colliding, Silicon Valley’s ultimate power struggle continues to create reality-TV-level drama.

In today’s AI rundown:

• Musk launches $97B bid to retake OpenAI

• AI joins Super Bowl prime time with major commercials

• Transform your ideas into songs with AI

• ByteDance unveils Goku AI image and video creation

• 4 latest AI tools & 4 job opportunities

LATEST DEVELOPMENTS

ELON MUSK & OPENAI

💰 Musk launches $97B bid to retake OpenAI

The Rundown: Elon Musk and a gaggle of investors just made an unsolicited $97.4B offer to acquire control of OpenAI’s nonprofit arm, escalating tensions once more together with his former company and CEO Sam Altman.

The main points:

• The bid was submitted by Musk’s attorney to OpenAI’s board, with backers including xAI, Valor Equity Partners, Baron Capital, and other investment firms.

• The offer comes as OpenAI attempts to transition from nonprofit to for-profit status, with a pending $40B investment from SoftBank at a $260B valuation.

• Musk said he goals to return OpenAI to its open-source roots and promised to match or exceed any competing bids for control of the organization.

• Altman responded dismissively on X, offering to “buy Twitter for $9.74B” as a substitute, leading Musk to call the CEO a ‘swindler.’

Why it matters: The drama never ceases between two of the most important figures within the tech world, nevertheless it’s no surprise to see Altman rebuff the offer after Musk’s lawsuits and prodding. With each heavily involved within the U.S. government’s tech push, this likely isn’t the last we’ll see of Musk’s vendetta against the corporate he helped create.

TOGETHER WITH TURING

📘 The hidden costs of poor LLM strategy

The Rundown: Turing’s white paper breaks down why misaligned training, weak evaluation, and poor optimization create the most important ROI hurdles for LLMs—not only the model itself.

Inside, you’ll learn how one can:

• Avoid hidden costs from ineffective LLM training

• Improve model accuracy and long-term efficiency

• Construct a scalable LLM strategy that delivers real business impact

Download the white paper now and learn how one can get essentially the most out of your AI investments.

THE SUPER BOWL AND AI

🏈 AI joins Super Bowl prime time with major commercials

The Rundown: AI played a distinguished role in Super Bowl LIX’s industrial lineup, with OpenAI, Google, Meta, and others shelling out for promoting slots in the course of the big game with mixed audience results.

The main points:

• OpenAI made its SB debut with an inventive black-and-white spot that positioned ChatGPT alongside other historical innovations, corresponding to electricity and space travel.

• Google featured Gemini Live helping a father balance job hunting and parenting, with an earlier spot axed after backlash for incorrect cheese facts.

• Meta showcased its AI-powered Ray-Ban glasses, with Chris Hemsworth and Chris Pratt utilizing features like video recording and its multimodal assistant.

• Other AI products advertised included Salesforce’s Agentforce autonomous agent platform and GoDaddy’s latest Airo website creation tool.

Why it matters: AI was all over the place during this 12 months’s Super Bowl, with the standard big players all getting in on the motion (with mixed results) on USA Today’s ad rankings. OpenAI’s presence was the most important wildcard — with the corporate’s first major spot feeling like a key moment in its transition from a startup right into a universally known brand.

AI TRAINING

🎵 Transform your ideas into songs with AI

The Rundown: Suno allows you to create original music that matches your creative vision with AI (no musical experience needed).

Step-by-step:

1. Access Suno, select “Create” within the menu options, and enable custom mode.

2. Generate lyrics using either Classic (structured) or ReMi (creative) models.

3. For the style, start with genre tags and add specific instruments, effects, and moods.

4. Once your song is created, expand it using Cover, Persona, or Extend features.

Pro tip: We did an in depth workshop with Sara Adkins, machine learning engineer and artist in residence at Suno, which you’ll be able to access here (alongside an exclusive Rundown University member free code for a 1-month Premier Plan).

PRESENTED BY INNOVATING WITH AI

🤝 Turn AI passion right into a consulting profession

The Rundown: Innovating with AI’s latest program, AI Consultancy Project, transforms AI enthusiasts into skilled consultants — tapping right into a market projected to succeed in $54.7B by 2032.

The 6-month program delivers:

• Proven frameworks for client acquisition and repair delivery

• A step-by-step path to six-figure consulting income

• Students who land their first AI client in as little as 3 days

Click here to request early access to The AI Consultancy Project.

AI RESEARCH

🎥 ByteDance unveils Goku AI image and video creation

The Rundown: ByteDance and the University of Hong Kong just introduced Goku and Goku+, a family of AI models that bridge image and video generation, showing top performance across multiple visual benchmarks and enabling hyperrealistic industrial content for promoting and marketing.

The main points:

• Goku achieves top performance on major benchmarks, setting records for each image and video quality with a unified architecture to handle each tasks.

• A sophisticated “rectified flow” technique enables seamless transitions between images and videos, with the system trained on 160M images and 36M videos.

• An enhanced Goku+ specifically targets promoting and marketing needs, with the flexibility to create photorealistic human avatars and product demos.

• The + platform includes specialized tools for turning product photos into video clips and creating realistic human-product interactions for industrial content.

Why it matters: Goku’s ability to create prolonged, high-quality industrial content and product demos shows that AI video production is reaching a brand new level of sophistication. It’s transforming how marketing content is created and consumed, but it’s also making it harder than ever to tell apart AI generations from reality.

See Goku’s impressive demo generations here.

QUICK HITS

🛠️ Trending AI Tools

• 💬 Krea Chat – Use natural language commands to create and edit images

• 🤖 Mistral Small 3 – Open-source, 24B model with enhanced speed and accuracy

• 🗣️ Talo – Real-time voice translator for video calls

• 📝 Tana – Put your notes to work with voice and AI

💼 AI Job Opportunities

• 🤖 The Rundown – Author (Robotics/Tech)

• 📣 Databricks – Field Marketing Manager, Central Europe

• 💻 Coreweave – Data Center Technician

• 👔 Curai – Manager, Provider Operations

📰 Every thing else in AI today

OpenAI will reportedly finalize the design for its first generation of in-house AI chips this 12 months and plan to work with TSMC on the initial fabrication.

Zyphra launched Zonos-v0.1 beta, featuring two open-source text-to-speech models with real-time voice cloning capabilities and competitive pricing and quality to rivals.

Anthropic published its Economic Index, a brand new study tracking AI’s labor market impact — finding that AI usage primarily augments reasonably than automates work.

Luma AI launched latest image-to-video capabilities for its next-gen Ray2 model, showcasing impressive realism and natural motion.

French President Emmanuel Macron unveiled plans for €109B in AI investments ahead of the Paris AI Motion summit, including a large UAE-backed datacenter campus and a €20B commitment from Brookfield to develop infrastructure.

Saudi Arabia pledged a brand new $1.5B investment into AI inference startup Groq, marking considered one of the biggest single-country commitments to specialized AI chip development.

Sam Altman posted a blog detailing exponential cost reductions in AI computing, predicting widespread AI agent deployment that can reshape economic productivity over the following decade.

COMMUNITY

🎥 Join our next live workshop

Join our next workshop this Thursday at 4 PM EST to learn how one can construct your individual AI-powered personal assistant to streamline your every day tasks with Dr. Alvaro Cintas, The Rundown’s AI professor.

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

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See you soon,

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