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Good morning, AI enthusiasts, and welcome to the 11,000 new readers who joined this weekend. A new, seemingly capable AI has landed on the block, and no one knows who built it. |
The weekend has been all about "Ox Alpha," which showed up on OpenRouter with no lab name attached, frontier-level coding scores, and free access — leaving developers to play detective over its origins. |
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In today’s AI rundown: |
Ox Alpha has the internet playing detective The Rundown Roundtable: Our AI use cases Use Gemini Canvas to visualize Google Sheets Lady Gaga's startup trains AI on human skin
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OX ALPHA |
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Image source: Images 2.0 / The Rundown |
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The Rundown: An anonymous model, Ox Alpha, just launched for free on OpenRouter — with 1M-token context and multimodal input, built for coding, sustained agentic work, and production workloads — and sent the internet scrambling to ID its maker. |
The details: |
Ox Alpha made headlines Friday after hitting 80% on a DeepSWE subset, but full testing put it at 63%, near Fable 5 at far fewer tokens per task. Early forensics, including the AI’s answers and Chinese zodiac-based naming, suggest it’s from China’s Zhipu AI, potentially GLM-5.3 Flash or GLM-6. Another potential candidate is Microsoft’s MAI family, though all four anonymous drops on OpenRouter in six months have been from Chinese labs. The model continues to draw heavy usage thanks to the provider’s "near-unlimited" free offer for the week, with capacity for 100T tokens a day.
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Why it matters: We've never had a Flash-level model trade blows with the frontier, and if the numbers are anything to go by, Ox Alpha makes a strong case for that. We still have to wait for the full reveal, but if it's small enough to run locally — near-frontier coding on your own machine, off the cloud — it'll definitely break the internet. |
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TOGETHER WITH AWS |
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The Rundown: AWS Marketplace just released a free book featuring 15 chapters from senior data and AI leaders at JPMorgan Chase, Siemens, Mercedes-Benz, Roche, and more — each sharing practical advice on building the data infrastructure needed for agentic analytics and intelligent agents. |
Chapters cover topics including: |
Evolving data strategy for agentic AI and scaling data products Building on existing infrastructure with a pragmatic, business-first approach Unlocking value with classical ML, semantic layers, and cross-team alignment Real-world perspectives from leaders across different industries
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Get your free digital copy today. |
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THE RUNDOWN ROUNDTABLE |
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Image source: Ideogram / The Rundown |
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The Rundown: The Rundown Roundtable is a weekly feature where we poll members of The Rundown staff about how we use AI in our work and daily lives. |
Billy, University Educator: I was tired of opening Spotlight every time I wanted to switch apps. The search results would move around, I would occasionally open the wrong app, and those few wasted seconds kept adding up throughout the day. |
Instead of memorizing a collection of unrelated hotkeys, I used ChatGPT Work to design and build a personalized shortcut system in Apple Shortcuts. |
The shortcuts can open individual apps, jump directly into specific Safari or Chrome profiles, or launch an entire work mode with one keystroke. For example, a recording shortcut could open your microphone, camera, recording software, and notes. An analytics shortcut could open all the dashboards you check each week. |
Shubham, Editor: I applied for Schengen visas for my wife and me, using Claude. It researched the official requirements and Reddit rejection threads, identified which rules applied, and kept both applications consistent. It caught that I was using a generic India-wide checklist and replaced it with the specific requirements for my case, cutting unnecessary work. |
Claude also drafted and refined our cover letters and itinerary. It cross-checked the final forms and documents, catching typos and other minor errors, while helping with appointment sequencing. Both visas were approved on time. |
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AI TRAINING |
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The Rundown: In this guide, you will learn how to visualize a Google Sheet as a shareable dashboard. Google’s new tool, Gemini Canvas, might be the easiest and fastest way we’ve found to prototype in Google Workspace. |
Step-by-step: |
Open a spreadsheet (like a project tracker or content calendar) in Google Sheets. Launch Gemini in a new tab, click the + button, and select Canvas Prompt Gemini: “Make me an interactive dashboard using the data from tabs one and two” When it finishes, copy the Canvas link and paste it into your browser to view the dashboard outside the chat To edit the dashboard, talk to Gemini in the chat like you normally would. If you’ve shared the link with a coworker, they will see the updated version as well
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Pro tip: Gemini can also make really fast slide decks in Canvas. Ask it to make slides from the same tabs, then export the result to Google Slides or download it as a PDF. |
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PRESENTED BY CDATA |
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The Rundown: CData's MCP Research Report is an enterprise-grade study of what happens when you ask Claude Code to build a production MCP server. We tested across eight critical dimensions to find exactly where AI-generated connectors break down, and what it takes to close the gap. |
In the report, you'll find: |
Only 1 of 8 dimensions passed with zero human intervention Where silent data loss and pagination failures slip through undetected Why expert guidance still left 3 dimensions unresolved
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Download the full report and find out if your AI-built connector holds up in production. |
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OUTER BIO |
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Image source: Images 2.0 / The Rundown |
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The Rundown: Outer Bio, co-founded by Lady Gaga and fiancé Michael Polansky, emerged from stealth with Yuna, a platform that keeps human skin alive for four weeks and feeds its testing data into an AI looking for viable skincare compounds. |
The details: |
Yuna keeps full-thickness ex vivo skin alive for four weeks — versus about a week normally — on a 3D-printed scaffold that feeds it and clears waste. Data from experiments on that skin feeds an AI that proposes compounds likely to affect a given skin process, and each result sharpens its next prediction. Polansky says the loop cut discovery from two leads in ~18 months to a new candidate every six weeks, with six active leads currently in the pipeline. A bioRxiv preprint shows Yuna reproducing known results, including a psoriasis-like state reversed by a JAK inhibitor and UVB damage eased by sunscreen.
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Why it matters: Skincare recycles the same ingredients because lab skin dies in a week, cutting off the slow tests that could show what else works. Yuna buys that time and lets AI learn from it to chase actives with real proof. It's progress, but still a partial version of skin — with no blood flow or the immune cells the skin recruits from the body. |
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COMMUNITY AI WORKFLOW OF THE DAY |
▸ Josh built a one-screen freight offer platform with Claude Code |
Today’s workflow comes from reader Josh Thephasdin: |
“I work in the freight brokerage industry. When speaking with trucking companies, we usually want to send offers to multiple contacts at once. This is called a load blast. Clients prefer different communication channels, mostly email and Telegram, so freight brokers often have multiple screens open to manage all of those conversations. |
Using Claude Code, I built a platform that lets me save each client’s preferred communication method once. The platform then blasts the load information to the appropriate contacts through their chosen channels. |
I also built a guide to help nontechnical salespeople set up the system. It guides them through adding contacts, connecting Telegram, and sending load information to multiple contacts at once. This lets them manage the process from one screen instead of switching between multiple screens. This happens hundreds of times per day.” |
See Josh’s workflow here. How do you use AI? Tell us for a chance to be featured. |
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🧑💻 Tines 3B - Empower every team to build with AI while giving IT and security complete visibility, control, and governance.* 💻 Slack Code - Slack's channels for building software with agents as a team 🤖 Grok Bot - xAI's always-on agent team with its own cloud computer 📄 Precision Mode - Databricks’ document extraction tool beating GPT-5.6 Sol
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*Sponsored Listing |
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Sonar Vortex makes your code conform from the first line, without agents wasting tokens guessing at your architecture. Learn more and drop your token costs by up to 36%.* |
Hugging Face, which hosts over 2M models and 1.5M datasets, is exploring a sale at $13B or more, up from its $4.5B valuation in 2023, Business Insider reported. |
Nvidia struck a $6B deal to license Poolside’s model-development technology and bring 100+ engineers onto the Nemotron team to build powerful open-weight models. |
Dr. Dre told the NYT he’s using AI in producing music, calling it a tool for creativity and noting that the only people who see it as a threat are those who have trouble creating. |
Anthropic expanded Mythos 5 access to cyber defenders beyond Project Glasswing, while its bankers told investors the startup could raise $100B+ at a $2T IPO valuation. |
*Sponsored Listing |
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That's it for today!Before you go we’d love to know what you thought of today's newsletter to help us improve The Rundown experience for you. |
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See you soon, |
Rowan, Zach, Shubham, Jennifer, and Nate — the humans behind The Rundown |
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