🍏 OpenAI’s Apple hardware heist

Good morning, AI enthusiasts. OpenAI’s secretive hardware projects are getting a bit clearer, and the event could possibly be coming straight out of the Apple playbook.

Armed with Apple’s former talent, manufacturers, and even Jony Ive’s design vision, the AI giant is betting that the very best technique to shape the device future is to rent the individuals who built the past.

In today’s AI rundown:

• OpenAI raids Apple for hardware push

• xAI’s cost-efficient Grok 4 Fast

• Use Notion AI to construct a CRM pipeline

• AI artist Xania Monet lands $3M record deal

• 4 recent AI tools, community workflows, and more

LATEST DEVELOPMENTS

OPENAI & APPLE

🍏 OpenAI raids Apple for hardware push

The Rundown: OpenAI has launched a serious hiring offensive focused on Apple’s hardware teams, in keeping with The Information, while also forging production partnerships with iPhone manufacturers for its upcoming AI device portfolio.

The small print:

• OAI has recruited dozens of Apple hardware vets, offering $1M+ packages to interface designers, audio engineers, and manufacturing specialists.

• Former Apple exec Tang Tan is leading the hardware effort, selling candidates guarantees of reduced red tape and an ambitious product vision.

• Production agreements now link OAI with iPhone manufacturers Luxshare and Goertek, discussing the creation of a display-less, smart speaker-type device.

• Other products in consideration include glasses, a pin wearable, and a voice recorder, aiming for an inaugural release in “late 2026 or early 2027”.

Why it matters: OAI’s hardware ambitions are being shaped by former Apple designer Jony Ive, and it seems like each talent acquisition and manufacturing are coming from the old Apple playbook. With the secrecy and hype across the upcoming devices, the eventual release might be one of the vital anticipated product launches in recent memory.

TOGETHER WITH TURING

🧪 The research accelerator for frontier AI labs

The Rundown: While data factories churn out quantity, leading AI labs need partners who co-own research goals and engineer the complex human-AI loops that push models from promising to state-of-the-art. Turing focuses on closing capability gaps through custom research acceleration.

Turing’s research-focused approach includes:

• Co-owned experimental outcomes, not only data delivery, and vendor neutrality

• Quality-by-design workflows with transparent data lineage and auditable results

• Custom RL environments and SFT/RLHF/DPO pipelines designed to your benchmarks

Partner with the research accelerator that understands what frontier AI labs really want.

XAI

💨 xAI’s cost-efficient Grok 4 Fast

The Rundown: xAI unveiled Grok 4 Fast, a brand new hyper-efficient reasoning model that delivers near-frontier performance and top speed at a fraction of the compute cost of its predecessor, Grok 4.

The small print:

• Grok 4 Fast achieves comparable results to Grok 4, despite using 40% fewer pondering tokens on average, leading to a 98% price reduction.

• Benchmarks place it above Claude 4.1 Opus and Gemini 2.5 Pro, hitting 85.7% on GPQA Diamond (science) and 92% on AIME 2025 (math).

• The model also rose to No. 1 in LMArena’s Search Arena, and showed strong performance on coding benchmarks — even surpassing the larger Grok 4.

• Grok 4 Fast also supports a 2M token context, together with native tool integration for web browsing and code execution.

Why it matters: xAI’s cost-efficiency gains with this recent release are wild, with Grok 4 Fast competing with the highest models on the planet despite massive decreases in cost. When leaders like Sam Altman speak of ‘intelligence too low-cost to meter,’ this model is a component of the trend that exemplifies that coming reality.

AI TRAINING

🔥 Use Notion AI to construct a CRM pipeline

The Rundown: On this tutorial, you’ll learn learn how to create a CRM dashboard to your sales pipeline with Notion AI. As a substitute of manually creating pages, subpages, and toggles, all of this might be done for you using AI prompts.

Step-by-step:

1. Go to Notion.so, open Notion AI, and collapse the side panel for a cleaner workspace

2. Use this prompt: “A CRM pipeline database where I can track leads from first contact through conversion. Add filters for email, sort of subscriber, first contact, second contact, did they convert, and why didn’t they convert”

3. Click Submit and let Notion AI construct the database structure, then conform to suggested additions like follow-up stages and next steps

4. Review the generated “CRM – Sales Pipeline” page and refine fields by changing toggles to checkboxes or adding filters like deal size

Pro Tip: Experiment with prompt styles. For instance, as a substitute of claiming “create me a CRM,” try “create a sales pipeline with Kanban stages” or “construct a lead tracker with follow-up reminders.” The more specific you might be, the higher your results.

PRESENTED BY ENCORD

📊 Double your CV Model robustness

The Rundown: Encord is the universal data layer for multimodal AI, consolidating curation, annotation, and model evaluation pipelines. Teams can speed up model iteration cycles through the use of Encord’s agentic AI data workflow system to organize balanced, accurately labeled datasets 10x faster.

Join Encord on Sept. 24 for an edge case and model evaluation masterclass on:

• Uncovering edge cases your accuracy metrics are blind to

• Cutting labeling time by prioritising edge-case data

• Curating datasets for model performance in variable environments

Save your spot.

AI & MUSIC

🎵 AI artist Xania Monet lands $3M record deal

The Rundown: Mississippi poet Talisha Jones secured a multimillion-dollar contract for her AI-generated R&B persona Xania Monet, coming on the heels of the artist’s music debuting on Billboard’s charts and racking up 10M streams within the U.S. last week.

The small print:

• Jones created Monet’s identity using AI tools and uses Suno for music creation, but claims to make use of ‘live elements’ and writes all of the lyrics herself.

• Multiple labels bid for the artist before Hallwood Media secured the $3M deal, though some also had copyright concerns concerning the use of Suno.

• Hallwood Media also signed top Suno creator Imoliver in July after a single hit 3M streams on the platform, which was the primary known signing of a Suno artist.

Why it matters: We’re at an odd inflection point in AI and music, where the tech’s use is each controversial and still being identified. The newest music generation models have already reached quality levels imperceptible from skilled tracks – meaning there’s likely already a flow of AI music mixing into the streaming scene.

QUICK HITS

🛠️ Trending AI Tools

• ⚙️ Grok 4 Fast – xAI’s recent cost-efficient reasoning model

• ✍️ Metaprompt – An easy tool to make AI prompts more powerful

• 🔊 Studio 3.0 – ElevenLabs’ editing platform with recent video support

• 🎥 Ray3 – Luma AI’s recent reasoning video model with studio-grade outputs

📰 All the pieces else in AI today

Scale AI introduced SWE-Bench Pro, an updated, more difficult version of its agentic software development benchmark widely used across the industry.

Satya Nadella shared that he’s “haunted” by the prospect of Microsoft becoming irrelevant with AI, saying its “biggest businesses” won’t be as relevant in the longer term.

Mistral AI released Magistral Small and Medium 1.2, updates to its reasoning model family that bring multimodal capabilities, upgraded tool use, and performance boosts.

Sam Altman posted that OpenAI is releasing some recent “compute-intensive offerings” over the following few weeks, available to Pro subscribers.

Oracle is reportedly in talks with Meta for a $20B multi-year cloud computing deal to offer AI model training and deployment capability.

Anthropic’s Jan Leike criticized “Leading the Future, a pro-AI, $100M+ super-PAC from a16z, Greg Brockman, and others that Leike says is “bad news for AI safety”.

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 Ibrahim I. in Türkiye:

“I exploit AI as my “second brain”—it scans my calendar, mood logs, and to-do lists to predict once I’ll procrastinate… then mechanically schedules micro-tasks with funny motivational nudges. (“Your 3pm slump called—it wants you to knock out 1 email before coffee.”

How do you employ AI? Tell us here.

🎓 Highlights: News, Guides & Events

• Read our last AI newsletter: Google brings AI to Chrome

• Read our last Tech newsletter: Nvidia and Intel’s $5B plot twist

• Read our last Robotics newsletter: Figure soars to $39B valuation

• Today’s AI tool guide: Use Notion AI to construct a CRM pipeline

• RSVP to next live workshop @ 4PM EST Friday: Automated Deep Research

See you soon,

Rowan, Joey, Zach, Shubham, and Jennifer — the humans behind The Rundown