- The Rundown AI
- Posts
- AI tensions rise on global stage
AI tensions rise on global stage
PLUS: Perplexity's new ultra-fast Sonar upgrade
Rowan Cheung
February 12, 2025
Good morning, AI enthusiasts. While tech giants race to build more powerful AI, world leaders clash over who gets to write the rules.
The AI Action Summit just wrapped up in Paris, exposing some deep new fractures between allies — with billions in funding and global dominance at stake.
In today’s AI rundown:
Global tensions rise at Paris AI summit
Perplexity drops blazing new Sonar model
Master pre-market analysis with AI insights
YouTube supercharges creators with AI expansion
4 new AI tools & 4 job opportunities
LATEST DEVELOPMENTS
AI ACTION SUMMIT
Image source: BBC
The Rundown: The AI Action Summit in Paris concluded on Tuesday, raising global tensions as the U.S. and UK refused to sign a multinational declaration and European leaders announced ambitious investment plans to compete with American dominance.
The details:
U.S. Vice President J.D. Vance warned against AI overregulation, saying that the U.S. would dominate AI development by controlling chips, software, and rules.
The UK and the U.S. declined to sign a declaration for open, ethical AI, citing national security concerns and disagreements over governance.
Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei called the summit a ‘missed opportunity,’ highlighting concerns over accelerating AI progress and security risks.
EC President von der Leyen announced a €200B AI investment initiative, positioning Europe as an open-source alternative to U.S. AI development.
Why it matters: The AI summit revealed a widening rift in approaches to AI governance. With the U.S. and the previously safety-focused UK not committing to the summit’s pledge and China now part of the group of signees, AI is becoming a massive global policy issue — with the ability to reshape power balances and alliances quickly.
TOGETHER WITH H COMPANY
The Rundown: H Company’s Runner H, backed by a historic $220M pre-seed investment, is your new go-to AI agent for automating tasks that usually take hours in just a few clicks.
With Runner H, you can:
Automate complex workflows without writing any code
Create web automations seamlessly
Leverage AI agents for competitor research, pricing, website building and more
Transform text instructions into real business operations
Watch this video and follow H Studio on X to be among the first to test an AI agent that transforms the way you work.
PERPLEXITY
Image source: Perplexity
The Rundown: Perplexity just launched a new version of its in-house AI model Sonar, built on Llama 3.3 70B and delivering responses at 1,200 tokens per second while still matching or exceeding top models in accuracy at a fraction of the price.
The details:
Sonar achieves 10x faster responses than competitors like Gemini 2.0 Flash, with Cerebras inference infrastructure enabling near-instant answer generation.
In tests, Sonar outperformed GPT-4o and Claude 3.5 Sonnet in user satisfaction, factuality, world knowledge, and other benchmarks.
All Perplexity Pro subscribers now have access to Sonar as their default model, with API access coming soon using the same architecture.
Perplexity CEO Aravind Srinivas also teased Voice Mode, saying it will be ‘the only product’ that reliably gives real-time voice answers and information for free.
Why it matters: Perplexity continues to pump out major updates — rolling out this speedy new model just 3 weeks after Sonar’s reveal. With ultra-fast response speeds combined with reliable and factual performance topping some of the best models in the industry, Perplexity is making a serious push for a broader chunk of the AI market.
AI TRAINING
The Rundown: ChatGPT's Tasks feature can automate your morning market research by delivering a comprehensive analysis of market sentiment and technical indicators before the market opens.
Step-by-step:
Head to ChatGPT and select “GPT-4o with Scheduled Tasks” in the model dropdown menu.
Prompt it to set up a core market performance analysis for 6:30 AM EST.
Request news and event impact analysis to understand market drivers.
Ask for a risk assessment and specific trade opportunities.
Pro tip: Always validate AI-generated trade ideas with your own technical analysis since it might hallucinate. The Rundown University members can access the top prompts here.
PRESENTED BY GALILEO
The Rundown: Galileo’s latest eBook is a 100-page deep dive into the world of AI agents — offering practical strategies for selecting, optimizing, and scaling them with confidence.
This comprehensive guide covers:
How to select the right framework based on your goals
Best practices for tuning and evaluating agent performance
How to spot and fix failure points before they become major issues
YOUTUBE
Image source: YouTube
The Rundown: YouTube CEO Neal Mohan just unveiled major AI upgrades across the platform, including automated dubbing, expanded creator tools, and a new age detection technology — marking its biggest push yet into AI-powered content creation and moderation.
The details:
YouTube is expanding its AI detection pilot, giving high-profile creators and artists new tools to ID and control AI content that uses their likeness or voice.
Auto-dubbing expands to all monetized creators, with YouTube reporting that translated videos generated over 40% of watch time from dubbed versions.
An AI age estimation system that uses machine learning to detect viewer age ranges and customize content preferences and safety features is rolling out.
Dream Screen and Dream Track, YouTube's AI generation tools for Shorts, will integrate Google’s Veo 2 for enhanced background and music generation.
Why it matters: YouTube is leveraging AI across all platform areas — which is a win for creators and consumers alike. Plus, with features like auto-dubbing and AI generation tools becoming more widely available, users can streamline the content creation process and get their videos in front of a wider global audience.
QUICK HITS
🗣️ Zonos-v0.1 - Open-source, real-time TTS models with voice cloning
🎥 Luma Ray2 - New image-to-video with enhanced realism and motion
⚙️ Cursor - Coding agent with new custom tool integration and upgraded semantic search
⚒️ Readdy - Generate professional designs in seconds with ready-to-use code
🎯 The Rundown - Marketing/Media Buyer
📦 Coreweave - Warehouse Associate
🛠️ Shield AI - Staff Engineer, DevOps
💼 Databricks - Startup Account Executive
UC Berkeley researchers unveiled DeepScaleR, a new open-source model that surpasses OpenAI's o1-Preview in mathematical reasoning despite its tiny 1.5B parameter size.
Sam Altman commented on Elon Musk’s offer at the AI Action Summit, calling Musk ‘insecure’ and ‘unhappy’ and saying the antics are to ‘slow us down.’
Apple is reportedly partnering with Alibaba to bring Apple Intelligence to China after previously exploring deals with DeepSeek, Baidu, and ByteDance.
A new study from the Center for AI Safety revealed that LLMs develop internal value systems as they scale, with implications like valuing certain human lives differently and showing resistance to value changes.
Alphabet, OpenAI, Roblox, and Discord launched ROOST, a $27M initiative to develop free, open-source AI tools to combat online child exploitation and promote digital safety.
New BBC research found that major AI chatbots like ChatGPT and Gemini produced significant inaccuracies in over half of the news summaries tested.
COMMUNITY
Join our next workshop this Thursday at 4 PM EST to learn how to build your own AI-powered personal assistant to streamline your daily tasks with Dr. Alvaro Cintas, The Rundown’s AI professor.
RSVP here. Not a member yet? Join The Rundown University on a 14-day free trial.
We’ll always keep this newsletter 100% free. To support our work, consider sharing The Rundown with your friends, and we’ll send you more free goodies.
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. |
See you soon,
Rowan, Joey, Zach, Alvaro, and Jason—The Rundown’s editorial team
Reply