Good morning, {{ first_name | AI enthusiasts }}. The Claude vs. ChatGPT battle just went mainstream, and Anthropic is coming out swinging on advertising's biggest stage.
The company's Super Bowl campaign takes direct aim at OpenAI's decision to bring ads to its platform, pledging to keep Claude ad-free with a primetime spot Sam Altman is already calling "clearly dishonest."
In today’s AI rundown:
Anthropic’s campaign takes aim at OpenAI
Kling 3.0 brings more length, consistency to AI video
Set up a coordinated coding team with Codex app
PaperBanana’s publication-ready research diagrams
4 new AI tools, community workflows, and more
LATEST DEVELOPMENTS
ANTHROPIC
Image source: Anthropic
The Rundown: Anthropic just dropped a new Super Bowl ad campaign that mocks the idea of ads inside AI chats, pairing the spots with a formal pledge to keep Claude ad-free — in a direct move against OpenAI’s recent decision to bring ads to ChatGPT.
The details:
Anthropic published a blog committing to keep its AI assistant ad-free, saying advertising would be “incompatible” with Claude acting in users’ interests.
The SB campaign features the tagline “Ads are coming to AI. But not to Claude”, showing parodies of ads interrupting helpful AI conversations.
OAI CMO Kate Rouch hit back on X, arguing free access to ChatGPT does more good than Anthropic’s paid-only subs that reach a fraction of the users.
Sam Altman called it "clearly dishonest," saying OAI would never run intrusive ads — and that Anthropic serves “an expensive product to rich people”.
Why it matters: Anthropic's spot draws a clear line between its vision for Claude and OAI's ad-supported direction, and doesn’t pull punches. But OAI's counterargument that free, ad-powered access is more democratic than a product that only paying users can unlock hits harder when the user gap sits in the hundreds of millions.
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The Rundown: AI is transforming every workplace – but executives are terrified of becoming one of the companies that gets “no ROI on AI”. That’s where you come in, and how you can build a 6-figure consultancy with Innovating with AI’s proven methods for delivering fast ROI on AI strategy and implementation.
The AI Consultancy Project helps you:
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KLING
Image source: Kling
The Rundown: Chinese AI video startup Kling just released Kling 3.0, consolidating text-to-video, image-to-video, and native audio generation into a single multimodal model with longer outputs and upgraded character and scene consistency.
The details:
3.0 merges previous model lines into a unified system, with native support for 15-sec clips and a new Multi-Shot mode that auto-generates camera angles.
Consistency gets a major upgrade, with the model now able to lock in visual traits across shots using image or video references as reusable "anchors."
Native audio generation now supports voice cloning for multiple characters, alongside expanded language options for natural multilingual dialogue.
The release is currently limited to Kling’s Ultra-tier subscribers, with a broader rollout expected in the next week.
Why it matters: Kling has consistently sat near the top of AI video leaderboards — and while benchmarks aren’t out for 3.0, it looks like it will take another step towards the frontier. Its storyboard tools and unified system also follow the industry trends towards actual production workflows with control, audio, and storyboarding built in.
AI TRAINING
The Rundown: In this guide, you will learn how to use OpenAI’s Codex app to set up a “coding factory” where multiple agents work in parallel and build a website brick by brick each day.
Step-by-step:
Scaffold a new React website with
npm create vite@latest, then open the folder in the Codex app and click “Create git repository”Tell Codex to create a modular PRD (plan document) where each webpage can be built out in parallel, without conflicts
Open a new thread for each page of your website (landing, blog, pricing, etc.) and direct each agent to work only on its assigned scope, following the PRD
Review each agent’s output, merge completed branches with the main agent, and preview the site directly from Codex to assemble it piece by piece
Pro tip: Use the “Automations” menu to set up automated agents for daily code review, feature building and bug hunting.
PRESENTED BY CONCENTRIX
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The business value of keeping humans in the loop across AI development
Research-based analysis on the impact of AI on human roles
A real-world AI success story
AI RESEARCH
Image source: Google Cloud AI & Peking University
The Rundown: Researchers from Peking University and Google Cloud AI just released PaperBanana, a system of five AI agents that work together to auto-generate publication-ready diagrams and charts for academic papers.
The details:
The system chains five AI agents together for retrieval, planning, styling, rendering, and critique, mimicking how a human designer crafts diagrams.
On a new benchmark of 292 NeurIPS methodology diagrams, the system beat baselines in conciseness by 37% and readability by nearly 13%.
PaperBanana can also polish existing human-drawn figures, winning head-to-head aesthetic comparisons against originals 56% of the time.
Why it matters: Between platforms like OpenAI’s Prism and tools like PaperBanana, we’re getting a good look at how much the actual drafting part of the scientific research process is getting sped up — letting researchers focus on the actual ideas instead of production bottlenecks like illustrations, formatting, etc. that slow output.
QUICK HITS
🗣️Unwrap Customer Intelligence - Turn unstructured customer feedback into data-backed insights that inform your product roadmap*
🎥 Kling 3.0 - Kling’s new video AI with better consistency and 15s outputs
💬 Voxtral Transcribe 2 - Mistral’s new transcription models, for 13 languages
⚙️ Codex App - OpenAI’s new Mac app for managing agents with Codex
*Sponsored Listing
Amazon rolled out Alexa+ across the U.S., making its AI-infused assistant free for Prime members and available at $19.99 / month for everyone else.
Mistral launched Voxtral Transcribe 2, a new speech-to-text family for transcription across 13 languages, including an open-weights Realtime model for live transcription.
Perplexity launched an advanced version of Deep Research, claiming SOTA performance on benchmarks, with immediate availability for Max plan subscribers.
ElevenLabs announced a new $500M funding round that pushes the AI voice platform’s valuation to $11B, tripling its worth in just a year.
AI chipmaker Cerebras secured a $1B Series H round at a $23B valuation, coming on the heels of the company’s January deal with OpenAI.
Google CEO Sundar Pichai revealed that the Gemini app now has 750M+ monthly active users, with the tech giant expecting to increase investments to $185B in 2026.
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 Allen E. in Prattville, AL:
"Due to leukemia, I have to have frequent blood work drawn. The lab reports are long and tabular. To get a better picture of the disease's progression or lack thereof, I plot each new value of Hemoglobin, RBC, WBC, and others on a graph...
After each new blood work, I just speak the new date and value and add it to the existing graph. The normal values for each test are also shown as a shaded area on the graph, so it is easy to see if the value is close to or far from the desired value."
How do you use AI? Tell us here.
Read our last AI newsletter: Sam Altman’s OpenAI succession plan
Read our last Tech newsletter: The race to make space babies
Read our last Robotics newsletter: Waymo hits record $110B valuation
Today’s AI tool guide: Set up a coordinated coding team with Codex App
RSVP to our next workshop on Feb. 11: Agentic Workflows Bootcamp pt. 1
That's it for today!
See you soon,
Rowan, Joey, Zach, Shubham, and Jennifer — the humans behind The Rundown
