AI takes center stage at Davos

PLUS: Get better AI outputs using a multiple choice technique

Good morning, AI enthusiasts. The world's elite converged on Davos this week for the World Economic Forum, and there was one topic on everyone's minds — AI.

The takeaway from the industry's top leaders? Disruption is coming faster than expected, and the window for both individuals and companies to adapt is closing fast.

P.S.: We are sitting down for a Q&A with Jeetu Patel, President and Chief Product Officer at Cisco, and want our community to participate in the action! Submit any AI questions on the industry, security, future predictions, company workflows, etc., here.

In today’s AI rundown:

  • AI takes center stage at WEF in Davos

  • 'Human-centric' AI startup raises $480M

  • Get better AI outputs using multiple choice

  • LTX launches audio-to-video generation

  • 4 new AI tools, community workflows, and more

LATEST DEVELOPMENTS

AI & THE WORLD ECONOMIC FORUM

Image source: WEF / The Rundown

The Rundown: The World Economic Forum kicked off this week in Davos, featuring an intense focus on AI that included discussions with the industry’s top minds, including Anthropic’s Dario Amodei, Google’s Demis Hassabis, and Microsoft’s Satya Nadella.

The details:

  • Amodei took a shot at U.S. President Donald Trump’s recent policy allowing AI chip sales to China, likening it to “selling nuclear weapons to North Korea”.

  • Hassabis believes this year could see AI-driven slowdowns in junior hiring, but that AI tools could ultimately enable more skill creation than traditional paths.

  • Nadella said no company can “just coast” in the AI era, stating that big companies that don’t keep up will “get schooled by someone small.”

  • Amodei also said we may be just 6-12 months away from models that do “most, maybe all” of what software engineers do end-to-end.

Why it matters: Davos talks often stay abstract, but Amodei's timeline for full AI-powered coding puts a tight deadline on the disruption we're already seeing with tools like Claude Code. Between geopolitical warnings, labor shifts, and software upheaval, the message from AI's leaders is clear: the window to adapt is shrinking rapidly.

TOGETHER WITH MONGODB

The Rundown: Let MongoDB for Startups partner with you as you build the next big thing with the tools, support, and go-to-market opportunities you need to accelerate from idea to IPO.

MongoDB for Startups includes:

  • Built-in vector search using VoyageAI

  • Real-time data streaming

  • Baseline credits and technical expertise

HUMANS&

Image source: Humans&

The Rundown: A new AI startup founded by researchers from Anthropic, xAI, and Google, just raised $480M in seed funding at a $4.48B valuation, pushing to build AI that helps people collaborate better over automation and full replacement.

The details:

  • Humans& aims to build AI that functions like an intelligent group chat, requesting context, storing memory, and coordinating teams.

  • Co-founder Andi Peng left Anthropic over its autonomy focus, saying they “loved to highlight how its models churned for 8, 24, 50 hours by themselves."

  • The team includes Google's seventh employee, Georges Harik, two former xAI researchers who worked on Grok, and Stanford professor Noah Goodman.

  • The $480M seed round was led by SV Angel and its co-founder Harik, alongside Nvidia, Jeff Bezos, and Google Ventures.

Why it matters: A $4.48B value for a 3-month old startup is wild, but shows the investor appetite for any team with a frontier lab pedigree. The "human-centric" angle is a shot at the autonomy-driven gains most labs are chasing, though we’ve seen similar framing from the likes of Microsoft AI (and even Anthropic in its own ads).

AI TRAINING

The Rundown: In this tutorial, you will learn a universal strategy to get better outputs from any AI model at a fraction of the cost by minimizing the amount of unhelpful context you add to the AI’s “brain”.

Step-by-step:

  1. Open any chat-based AI and break your idea into Goal, Task, and Next Steps to "minimize unhelpful messages". The task will be to interview to build context

  2. Prompt using the Goal→Task→Next Steps pattern, e.g.: "Your job is to generate a logo... Interview me with 5-10 MCQs about my brand, vision to build context"

  3. Respond to Qs with simple choices (e.g., “A, B, A, C…”). This removes miscommunication and ensures that the AI has a better understanding

  4. Once it generates concepts, prompt to "Generate a 4x4 grid with each concept in a separate grid cell" to save on tokens, then ask for standalone images

Pro tip: If you get great results from this method, export and re-use the context by asking the AI to "extract the context as system instructions in markdown.”

PRESENTED BY MAULT

The Rundown: Mault is a VS Code extension that applies real-time architectural guardrails to prevent drift as code is generated.

Unlike linters or CI checks, Mault operates at the point of change:

  • Detects structural and config mismatches

  • Enforces file structure and naming

  • Flags deprecated or unsafe dependencies

  • Works alongside AI coding tools

LIGHTRICKS

Image source: LTX

The Rundown: AI creative platform Lightricks just released a new Audio-to-Video feature, allowing users to start with voice, music, or sound effects and then generate the video output to accompany it.

The details:

  • The tool syncs motion, lip movements, and camera work directly to the uploaded audio, keeping consistency across generations.

  • Users can upload files, record directly, or use a built-in text-to-speech tool powered by ElevenLabs’ Scribe V2 model.

  • LTX said the model can understand rhythm and beat, making it capable of music videos and timing/pacing outputs to align with audio.

  • LTX called being able to start from audio “the third paradigm in AI video generation,” allowing for more consistent and natural outputs.

Why it matters: Starting with sound opens up brand new creative pathways — with the ability to build around existing audio assets rather than roughly fitting dialogue onto AI-generated clips. While AI video has already hit such a high bar, tools enabling consistency and customization are the next lever to take models to new heights.

QUICK HITS

  • 💡 Skills - Vercel’s open ecosystem for finding and sharing agentic skills

  • 🎥 LTX Audio to Video - Generate videos directly from audio inputs

  • 👁️ Step3-VL-10B - StepFun’s open-source SOTA vision language model

  • 💦 LFM2.5-1.2B-Thinking - Liquid AI’s new on-device reasoning model

OpenAI’s Chris Lehane revealed during a talk at Davos that the company is “on track” to unveil its Jony Ive-led physical AI device in the second half of 2026.

Node.js creator Ryan Dahl declared the era of humans writing code over, arguing that software engineers still have work, but writing syntax directly is no longer the job.

Liquid AI released LFM2.5-1.2B-Thinking, a reasoning variant small enough to run on smartphones while matching larger rivals on math and problem-solving benchmarks.

OpenAI introduced a new age prediction feature on ChatGPT to help automatically apply underage-specific safeguards to younger users.

AI inference company Baseten is raising $300M in funding, with half coming from an investment by Nvidia, valuing the startup at $5B.

Anthropic announced a new partnership with Teach For All to train more than 100k educators across 63 countries on AI tools for the classroom.

COMMUNITY

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 Matt R. in London, UK:

"I was making my annual family calendar and found that a number of my wife's Apple photos were in HEIC format, which weren't accepted by Snapfish. I looked for a file converter to get them into JPGs, and was quickly browsing the spate of 'free' options that don't tell you that to convert more than one file, you have to hand over your credit card.

I asked Mocha to build me a HEIC to JPG converter, and 5 minutes later, it was ready and operational!"

How do you use AI? Tell us here.

That's it for today!

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See you soon,

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

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