Images lose ‘AI look’ with recent open model

Good morning, AI enthusiasts. In the event you thought distinguishing AI images from reality was already difficult, a brand new open model could have just made the lines even blurrier.

With Black Forest Labs and Krea’s recent FLUX.1 Krea, the era of waxy skin and blurry backgrounds could also be quickly coming to an end for photorealistic generations.

Reminder: Our next live workshop is today at 4 PM EST! Join and learn practical AI prompting strategies to get the proper responses. RSVP here.

In today’s AI rundown:

• BFL, Krea tackle ‘AI look’ with recent image model

• OpenAI expands Stargate to Europe

• Automate presentations with ChatGPT Agents

• Anthropic takes enterprise AI lead as spending surges

• 4 recent AI tools & 4 job opportunities

LATEST DEVELOPMENTS

BLACK FOREST LABS & KREA

🎆 BFL, Krea tackle ‘AI look’ with recent image model

The Rundown: AI image startup Black Forest Labs and inventive platform Krea just released FLUX.1 Krea, an open-weight image model focused on eliminating the everyday “AI look” with upgraded photorealism and quality.

The small print:

• The model was trained on a various, curated dataset to avoid common AI outputs like waxy skin, blurry backgrounds, and oversaturated colours.

• The businesses call FLUX.1 Krea SOTA amongst open models, while rivaling top closed systems (like BFL’s own FLUX 1.1 Pro) in human preference tests.

• The discharge is fully compatible with the FLUX.1 [dev] ecosystem, making it easy to integrate for developers and inside other applications.

Why it matters: An open model of this quality shows how far things have are available the image world, with the AI aesthetics problem now looking like one which will be solved via selective training. The web was already largely fooled by the older models, and this next wave will make telling real humans from AI images even harder.

TOGETHER WITH VANTA

🛡️ Continuous compliance without the headaches

The Rundown: Navigating recent compliance requirements could be a daunting task, but with the appropriate automation tools, it doesn’t need to be. Whether you’re a fast-growing startup or a longtime security team, Vanta can show you how to achieve continuous compliance (and more).

On this live demo on August 20, you will learn:

• Automated evidence collection and audit techniques across frameworks

• How continuous control monitoring builds and reinforces your security foundation

• AI solutions for vendor risk management and security questionnaire automation

Plus, get your questions answered directly by the Vanta team — secure your spot today.

OPENAI

🇳🇴 OpenAI expands Stargate to Europe

The Rundown: OpenAI just announced the launch of Stargate Norway, the corporate’s first European AI data center that may house 100,000 Nvidia GPUs and run entirely on renewable energy by late 2026.

The small print:

• The power near Narvik will start with 230MW of capability, expandable to 520MW, making it certainly one of Europe’s largest AI computing centers.

• The project leverages Norway’s cool climate and renewable energy grid, with waste heat from GPUs being redirected to power local businesses.

• Norwegian industrial giant Aker and infrastructure firm Nscale committed $1B for the initial phase, splitting ownership 50/50.

• Norway also becomes the primary European partner within the “OpenAI for Countries” program, introduced in May.

Why it matters: Probably the most recent rumblings surrounding Stargate hinted at partnership issues and potentially scaling back. But between a large cope with Oracle and recent expansion into Europe, OpenAI is painting a distinct picture, with the project beginning to spread AI’s cost and infrastructure demands across the globe.

AI TRAINING

🤖 Automate presentations with AI Agents

The Rundown: On this tutorial, you’ll learn learn how to use ChatGPT’s Agent Mode to mix deep research capabilities with autonomous actions and generate comprehensive reports and presentations autonomously.

Step-by-step:

1. Head over to ChatGPT and choose “Agent Mode” in Tools

2. Connect sources if needed, or let the agent work with any website autonomously

3. Create an in depth prompt: “Research [topic]. Deliver a 2-page report citing academic sources, plus a 5-slide deck.”

4. Watch the agent work for 15-25 minutes because it searches, analyzes, and creates content robotically, and extend your research with follow-ups

Pro tip: Agent Mode can handle multiple complex tasks in a single prompt, from research to presentation creation to contact finding, all while working completely autonomously.

PRESENTED BY TOGETHER AI

⚙️Automate, debug, and solve with SOTA open source models

The Rundown: Together AI’s Inference & Advantageous-Tuning platform lets developers deploy open source models at scale, offering each serverless and dedicated endpoints for models like Kimi K2 — a brand new SOTA agentic intelligence model with 1T parameters, 128K context, and native tool use.

With Together AI, you’ll experience:

• High-performance infrastructure designed for the bottom possible latency

• Developer-friendly APIs that simplify integration

• An in depth model library featuring the highest open-source AI models like Kimi K2

Try Kimi K2 now and get all the advantages of open-source AI without the complexity.

AI RESEARCH

📊 Anthropic takes enterprise AI lead as spending surges

The Rundown: Menlo Ventures just released its mid-year LLM market report, revealing that enterprise AI spending is continuous to surge, with Anthropic emerging as the brand new market leader over OpenAI with a 32% model usage share.

The small print:

• The report surveyed 150 technical leaders, finding that enterprises doubled their LLM API spending to $8.4B within the last 6 months.

• Anthropic captured the highest spot with 32% market share, ahead of OpenAI (25%) and Google (20%) — a significant shift from OAI’s 50% dominance in 2023.

• Code generation emerged as AI’s “breakout use case”, with developers shifting from single-product tools to an ecosystem of AI coding agents and IDEs.

• Enterprises also rarely switch providers once they adopt a platform, with 66% upgrading models inside the same ecosystem as a substitute of adjusting vendors.

• The report also found that open-source LLM usage amongst enterprises has stagnated, with corporations prioritizing performance and reliability over cost.

Why it matters: Enterprise AI spending goes up, but the true story is how sticky platforms have develop into, with corporations rarely switching providers. Combined with the shortage of open-source adoption, a winner-take-most market is emerging where early tech benefits of the AI leaders have gotten the competitive moat.

QUICK HITS

🛠️ Trending AI Tools

• 📺 Showrunner – Platform for creating personalized, playable TV episodes

• ⚙️ NEO – Neo AI’s recent SOTA autonomous ML engineer

• 📸 FLUX.1 Krea [dev] – BFL and Krea’s open advanced image model

• 🌎 AlphaEarth Foundations – Google’s AI model for on-demand maps

💼 AI Job Opportunities

• 🛡️ The Rundown – Product Marketing

• 📊 Horizon3 – Senior Business Intelligence Analyst

• 💵 Perplexity AI – Payroll Manager

• 🧠 xAI – AI Engineer & Researcher, Reasoning Post-training

📰 Every thing else in AI today

AI in Motion, Aug 6: Discover how MongoDB Atlas + Azure turn vectors into real-world value on this webinar with MongoDB + Microsoft. Construct scalable, secure, flexible AI apps.*

Cohere introduced Command A Vision, a brand new model that achieves SOTA performance in multimodal vision tasks for enterprises.

OpenAI has reportedly reached $12B in annualized revenue for 2025, with around 700M weekly lively users for its ChatGPT platform.

StepFun released Step3, an open-source multimodal reasoning model that achieves high performance at low price, outperforming Kimi K2, Qwen3, and Llama 4 Maverick.

Each Runway and Luma AI are exploring robotics training and simulations with their video models as a income, in line with a brand new report from The Information.

AI infrastructure platform Fal raised a brand new $125M funding round, bringing the corporate’s valuation to $1.5B.

Agentic AI startup Manus launched Wide Research, a feature that leverages agent-to-agent collaboration to deploy a whole bunch of subagents to handle a single task.

*Sponsored Listing

COMMUNITY

🎥 Join our next live workshop

Join our next workshop today, August 1, at 4 PM EST with Dr. Alvaro Cintas, The Rundown’s AI professor. By the top of this workshop, you’ll have practical prompting strategies to get AI to do exactly what you wish.

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

See you soon,

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