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Good morning, AI enthusiasts, and welcome to our 3,832 new readers. Two years, nearly $5B in funding, and a $25B valuation — and until now, Reflection AI hadn’t released a single public model. |
That just changed with Beam, the startup’s first model and the West’s hopeful answer to China’s open-weight dominance. It isn’t catching the leaders yet, but Reflection is selling efficiency, and in a U.S. field this thin, that might be enough to make an impact. |
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In today’s AI rundown: |
Reflection AI enters the open-model race a16z’s top AI apps list follows the money Protect your files with this Claude Code mod OpenAI’s text watermark stops at the EU border
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REFLECTION AI |
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Image source: Reflection |
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The Rundown: U.S.-based Reflection AI, the $25B startup by former DeepMind researchers, just introduced Beam, an open-weight model for coding and agents that the company says competes with Chinese rivals at lower cost and greater efficiency. |
The details: |
Reflection claims Beam needs a fraction of the computing power of Chinese lab Z.ai’s GLM-5.2, but achieves similar scores across reasoning, coding, and more. Moonshot’s Kimi K3 still leads Beam on raw ability, but the model beats out Thinking Machines’ Inkling and other U.S. open systems in its own tests. Reflection is planning to release the weights for Beam this month with an Apache 2.0 license, letting companies customize Beam and run it themselves. The long game is “AI factories,” where a hedge fund or government runs Beam on its own chips and private data, with a test reportedly underway in South Korea.
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Why it matters: Reflection has been called the “DeepSeek of the West,” and while its first model isn’t rattling markets, it enters a U.S. ecosystem light on competition against open Chinese counterparts. Beam’s main comparison is to GLM-5.2, a model Z.ai has already replaced, which says a lot about how far ahead the Chinese labs still are. |
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TOGETHER WITH OPTIMIZELY |
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The Rundown: Skip the passive AI courses. Optimizely’s Opal U is a live 5-day cohort for 50 senior marketing leaders to get AI certified through hands-on, 1-hour training sessions with an expert coach. Past grads save 10+ hours per week, and 1 in 5 have landed a promotion or new role. |
In just 5 days, you’ll: |
Build 3+ AI agents tailored to your unique tasks, bottlenecks, and workflows Know how to prioritize the AI use cases worth building Learn the 5 techniques that turn prompts into high-quality outputs
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Skip the waitlist and apply directly today. |
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AI TRENDS |
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Image source: a16z |
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The Rundown: Andreessen Horowitz (a16z) just released the 7th edition of its Top 100 Gen AI Consumer Apps, adding a new 50-app ranking by U.S. card spending alongside fresh takes on the chatbot race, personal agents, and how AI apps are making money. |
The details: |
ChatGPT has 3x the U.S. paid subscribers of its rivals, while Claude caught up to Gemini this summer and shows strong high-tier monetization. Paying for AI is rare, with only 4.5% of Americans subscribing to a major chatbot, and the top 1% averaging $903/mo and outspending the bottom half. Big spenders tend to treat AI as a work tool, loading up on creative apps like HeyGen and Higgsfield and builder tools like Manus and n8n. Subscriptions still dominate as the primary monetization model, with 84% of the list’s AI-native web apps selling one and just 14% running ads. Personal agents are the new front, with Meta’s Muse reportedly crossing 5M downloads in under a month, though agent usage is mostly limited to power users.
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Why it matters: a16z’s recurring list has become a handy tracker of the metas that AI cycles through, from early chatbots to creative tools, coding, and now personal agents. With xAI's Grok Bot, OpenAI's Dots, and Meta’s Muse all piling in, the current trend also looks like AI's next real shot at a mainstream breakout. |
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AI TRAINING |
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The Rundown: In this guide, you’ll create a Claude Code mod, a small add-on that asks for approval before its editing tools change a chosen file. You’ll test it by refusing one edit and allowing the next. |
Step-by-step: |
Open a new practice folder in Claude Code and add the two sample files from the guide. Use these to test without touching your real work Paste the guide’s prompt and ask Claude to build the mod. It should show the proposed change and ask before editing your chosen settings file Review the code Claude creates and run the checks in the guide. Fix any errors, then load the mod in a new session Ask Claude to edit the ordinary file, then the settings file. The settings change should bring up your new approval question Decline the change and check that the file stays unchanged. Repeat the request, approve it, and open the file to check the result
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Pro tip: Keep Claude’s permission checks on. This mod checks two editing tools. Other tools can still change the file. Pro members get the starter mod, practice files, and tests. |
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PRESENTED BY GRANOLA |
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The Rundown: Granola is the AI notepad for people with back-to-back meetings, and it now supports 32 languages. Switch on multi-language mode once, and it follows along, whether your call is in English, Spanish, or Japanese. |
Granola now lets you: |
Talk in 32 different languages Skip switching settings between calls Get clear summaries and next steps
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Get one month free with code THERUNDOWN. |
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OPENAI |
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Image source: OpenAI |
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The Rundown: OpenAI introduced textGrain, a hidden watermark headed for ChatGPT and Codex output across the EU in the next few weeks to satisfy the AI Act’s labeling rules, with API customers worldwide also free to switch it on for select models. |
The details: |
textGrain subtly leaves a pattern in text content that's invisible to readers but readable by a detector, which OAI says does not impact output quality or speed. Anthropic announced its own Claude watermarks in August, which run on Google’s SynthID, with OAI claiming textGrain “matched or exceeded” in testing. Unlike OAI’s public image and audio checker, the text detector is open only to vetted researchers and expert groups at launch, citing error risks. OAI also listed what a detected watermark can’t prove, like who the words belong to, how much a human shaped them, or whether they’re even true.
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Why it matters: Anthropic took its watermark global and put it on every Claude product, and the result was backlash. OAI has taken notes, keeping the mark to the EU, off by default elsewhere, and spending a big chunk of its post on what the tech can’t do — positioning it more like a compliance effort than something it fully endorses. |
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COMMUNITY AI WORKFLOW OF THE DAY |
▸ Bud built a personal news editor that costs a dime a month |
Today’s workflow comes from reader Bud Westmont: |
“I built a custom news agent that skips the Google News and Apple News walled gardens. Eight prompts turn Claude into a personal news editor that reads my trusted RSS feeds, scores every story with a decision model, and delivers a clean daily page for about a dime a month. |
Each week, pulling two or three good stories for my newsletter digest meant searching multiple sites by hand — hours of clicking and scrolling for a handful of usable links. RSS feeds already deliver that content; the missing piece was a judgment layer that could separate worthwhile stories from noise without the cost or latency of running everything through a full LLM. |
I used Claude Cowork, Jev from TypeSafe AI, Vercel AI Gateway, RSS feeds, Python, and SQLite. Jev is a decision model rather than a chatbot: it returns a probability and confidence score instead of prose and scores a story in a fraction of a second. Scoring costs roughly $0.10 per month with Jev, compared with a few dollars for a full LLM doing the same job.” |
See Bud’s full workflow here. How do you use AI? Tell us for a chance to be featured. |
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🔀 Switch - One AI lab shouldn’t own your agent stack. Connect your agents across any harness, any LLM. Open source. Self-hosted* 🪞 Beam - Reflection’s new open AI model taking on Chinese rivals 🎥 HyperFrames Studio - Agent-run video editor with draw-to-edit frames 🤖 North 2 - Cohere’s workplace agent platform with memory and spend caps
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*Sponsored Listing |
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Live Webinar on Oct. 20 – AI Agents without a context layer take 15-35 round trips to answer one question about your company. Uvi’s founding engineer shares the fix. Register now.* |
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman told Politico, “We believe the world should accept some bad things happening for the benefit of this technology and people having the agency,” when asked where the company’s AI regulation worldview differs from Anthropic. |
Norway is moving to keep AI smart glasses out of gyms, schools, playgrounds, and beaches, with a temporary ban headed to parliament as officials weigh permanent rules. |
AI video company Runway generated the opening of Sunday’s 60 Minutes, cloning correspondent Jon Wertheim to introduce a segment asking whether AI will take our jobs. |
Elon Musk hinted at renaming SpaceXAI to ‘SpaceXSI’ following the U.S. push to rename the tech, saying “we will make that change.” |
*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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