OpenAI, Microsoft’s ‘high-stakes’ negotiations

Good morning, AI enthusiasts. A one-time AI power couple is heading back to the negotiation table, with OpenAI and Microsoft hoping to hash out recent terms for a partnership that appears to be getting frostier by the week.

With billions in revenue at stake and IPO dreams hanging within the balance, is the connection that fueled the AI boom about to alter fundamentally?

In today’s AI rundown:

• OpenAI, Microsoft rework ‘high-stakes’ partnership

• Pope Leo XIV targets AI as ‘critical challenge’

• Create personalized AI avatars for dynamic content

• AI teaches itself with ‘Absolute Zero’

• 4 recent AI tools & 4 job opportunities

LATEST DEVELOPMENTS

OPENAI & MICROSOFT

🤝 OpenAI, Microsoft rework ‘high-stakes’ partnership

The Rundown: OpenAI and Microsoft are reportedly engaged in negotiations to rewrite their partnership’s terms, with OpenAI in search of to chop Microsoft’s revenue as a part of its restructuring and Microsoft eyeing access to OpenAI’s tech beyond 2030.

The main points:

• Microsoft has invested over $13B in OpenAI and stays a key holdout in plans to convert OpenAI’s business arm right into a public profit corporation (PBC).

• OpenAI is aiming to cut back Microsoft’s revenue share from 20% to a share of 10% by 2030, a 12 months when the corporate forecasts $174B in revenue.

• The connection has reportedly cooled as OAI pursues agreements with competitors for Stargate, while also targeting overlapping enterprise customers.

• There may be also tension over IP, with Microsoft in search of guaranteed access to OpenAI’s tech beyond the present contract expiration in 2030.

Why it matters: There was smoke around this partnership for a very long time, however the stakes are much more with Microsoft being a primary holdout for OpenAI’s IPO desires and PBC restructuring. With each side seemingly motivated to get a deal done, it’s possible that contract restructuring helps warm the multi-billion-dollar relationship.

TOGETHER WITH SANA

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The Rundown: Sana Agents provides a no-code platform for deploying AI across your entire organization, enabling teams to automate complex workflows and integrate AI directly into existing tools in minutes, not months.

With Sana Agents, you’ll be able to:

• Seamlessly connect AI to 100+ platforms, including Slack, Teams, and your CRM

• Construct specialized agents for various departments in a single intuitive interface

• Ensure enterprise-grade security with zero data leakage

• Slash operational overhead by 10-20X

Drive enterprise-wide innovation today with Sana Agents.

AI & THE VATICAN

⛪ Pope Leo XIV targets AI as ‘critical challenge’

The Rundown: Newly appointed Pope Leo XIV identified artificial intelligence as one among humanity’s most pressing challenges in his first major address, continuing his predecessor’s give attention to the moral implications of the technology.

The main points:

• The primary American Pope highlighted AI as posing “recent challenges for the defence of human dignity, justice and labour.”

• He also drew parallels between the AI and Industrial Revolutions, saying the Church must lead in confronting AI’s threats to staff and human dignity.

• His stance follows Pope Francis’ calls for a world AI treaty and warnings about autonomous weapons systems.

Why it matters: The Vatican’s continued concerns over AI show that the tech’s advancement is moving from area of interest tech discussions to the forefront of worldwide (and political, as we’ve seen over the past week) concern. With over 1B Catholics worldwide, the Pope’s voice could play a task in helping shape each discourse and policy on AI.

AI TRAINING

🤖 Create personalized AI avatars for dynamic content

The Rundown: On this tutorial, you may learn how one can automate content creation by combining ElevenLabs’ voice cloning with HeyGen’s avatar creation tools to create AI videos featuring your individual personalized digital twin.

Step-by-step:

1. Visit ElevenLabs, select “Skilled Voice Clone,” and record half-hour of clear audio to create your AI voice.

2. Head to HeyGen, click “Create Latest Avatar,” select “Hyper-Realistic,” and upload a 2-minute high-quality video of yourself.

3. Start a brand new video project in HeyGen, select your avatar, and click on “Integrate third party voice” to attach your ElevenLabs voice using your API key.

4. Write your script, preview your avatar in motion, and generate your final AI video.

Pro tip: You may write scripts in a conversational style with natural pauses and expressions to make your AI avatar presentations more engaging and authentic.

PRESENTED BY VANTA

🔍 The AI security blind spots you’ll be able to’t afford to miss

The Rundown: Vanta’s free AI Security Assessment gives firms at any stage of AI adoption a structured framework to discover, evaluate, and mitigate potential security vulnerabilities before they turn out to be costly problems.

This comprehensive resource helps you:

• Establish governance protocols across your entire AI program

• Address critical considerations from data privacy to incident management

• Show your AI compliance to potential customers and partners

Get your free assessment and join over 10,000 organizations using Vanta to construct trust through transparent security practices.

AI RESEARCH

💡 AI teaches itself with ‘Absolute Zero’

The Rundown: Researchers from Tsinghua University and BIGAI introduced “Absolute Zero,” a brand new AI training method where models learn and master complex reasoning tasks on their very own through self-play — while not having any human-provided data.

The main points:

• The Absolute Zero Reasoner (AZR) autonomously generates its own tasks, solves them, and improves through self-play with no external datasets required.

• The system achieved SOTA results on coding and math benchmarks, surpassing models trained on tens of 1000’s of expert-labeled examples.

• AZR uses three reasoning modes (deduction, abduction, and induction) to create increasingly harder self-generated challenges to learn.

• Researchers noted an “uh-oh moment” when Llama-3.1 produced chains of thought of “outsmarting intelligent machines,” raising safety concerns.

Why it matters: A way that enables AI to self-train could eliminate the event barrier of massive, costly human datasets — and given how we’re already running out of quality data and systems are already moving beyond human intelligence, this may increasingly be a necessity to proceed scaling learning.

QUICK HITS

🛠️ Trending AI Tools

• ⚙️ Distant Agent – Delegate coding tasks to cloud-based AI assistants

• 🤖 Open Computer Agent – Hugging Face’s computer-using agent

• 🪄 Shopify Magic – Latest reasoning capabilities and image generation tools

• ✨ Enhance My Listing – Amazon’s recent tool for optimizing product listings

💼 AI Job Opportunities

• 🤝 The Rundown – Partnerships Manager

• 📣 Mistral AI – Lead, Communications US

• 💼 Synthesia – Head of Sales

• 📊 Databricks – Marketing Specialist

📰 Every part else in AI today

OpenAI released a brand new GitHub connector for its Deep Research feature, allowing the tool to leverage and answer questions on codebases.

Tencent launched HunyuanCustom, a brand new open-source AI system that generates customized video from text, images, audio, and video inputs with consistent subjects.

Google introduced “implicit caching,” allowing its Gemini 2.5 models to mechanically detect and reuse cached content from API requests for as much as 75% cost savings.

Microsoft president Brad Smith revealed that the corporate’s employees are banned from using DeepSeek models, citing propaganda and data security concerns.

Chinese tech giant Baidu filed a patent for a system that uses AI to translate data from animal sounds, behavior, and emotional states into human language.

400+ British artists signed a letter urging PM Keir Starmer to support laws requiring transparency around using copyrighted materials in AI training.

COMMUNITY

🎥 Join our next live workshop

Join our next workshop on Wednesday, May 14th, at 3 PM EST with Rahul Sonwalkar, founding father of Julius AI. On this hands-on live session, you’ll learn how one can analyze any dataset using just natural language, no code or spreadsheets required. Discover how Julius AI helps marketing, finance, and product teams turn raw data into clear, actionable insights at lightning speed.

RSVP here. Not a member? 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