China's cooperative AI counter-punch

Good morning, AI enthusiasts. Just days after the U.S. declared its intent to dominate the AI race, China dropped its own vision for the technology’s future with an action plan that strikes a very different tone.

With proposals for international cooperation and warnings against an "exclusive game," Beijing is positioning itself as the inclusive, open alternative to America's aggressive push — and turning decades of geopolitical playbooks upside down in the process.

In today’s AI rundown:

• China’s AI action plan pushes global cooperation

• Ex-OpenAI scientist to lead Meta Superintelligence Labs

• Create personalized AI video avatars

• Runway’s Aleph for AI-powered video editing

• 4 new AI tools & 4 job opportunities

LATEST DEVELOPMENTS

AI & CHINA

🇨🇳 China’s AI action plan pushes global cooperation

The Rundown: China just released an AI action plan at the World Artificial Intelligence Conference, proposing an international cooperation organization and emphasizing open-source development, coming just days after the U.S. published its own strategy.

The details:

• The action plan calls for joint R&D, open data sharing, cross-border infrastructure, and AI literacy training, especially for developing nations.

• Chinese Premier Li Qiang also proposed a global AI cooperation body, warning against AI becoming an "exclusive game" for certain countries and companies.

• China’s plan stresses balancing innovation with security, advocating for global risk frameworks and governance in cooperation with the United Nations.

• The U.S. released its AI Action Plan last week, focused on deregulation and growth, saying it is in a “race to achieve global dominance” in the sector.

Why it matters: China is striking a very different tone than the U.S., with a much deeper focus on collaboration over dominance. By courting developing nations with an open approach, Beijing could provide an alternative “leader” in AI — offering those excluded from the more siloed Western strategy an alternative path to AI growth.

TOGETHER WITH SLACK FROM SALESFORCE

📊 The data behind AI's workplace revolution

The Rundown: New research from Slack's Workforce Lab reveals daily AI usage has surged over 233% in six months, with users reporting 64% higher productivity and 81% greater job satisfaction. This isn't just about automation — it's about enabling workers to tackle tasks they couldn't otherwise and shifting how work gets done.

Join Slack’s Workforce Labs webinar to discover:

• Fresh insights on who’s using AI at work and where it’s delivering the biggest impact

• Real examples of AI agents helping employees with onboarding and decision-making

• Strategies to automate busywork while enhancing creativity and collaboration

• Practical implementation strategies that work for teams of all sizes

Watch the on-demand webinar here.

META

🤝 Ex-OpenAI scientist to lead Meta Superintelligence Labs

The Rundown: Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg just announced that former OpenAI researcher Shengjia Zhao will serve as chief scientist of the newly formed Meta Superintelligence Labs, bringing his expertise on ChatGPT, GPT-4, o1, and more.

The details:

• Zhao reportedly helped pioneer OpenAI's reasoning model o1 and brings expertise in synthetic data generation and scaling paradigms.

• He is also a co-author on the original ChatGPT research paper, and helped create models including GPT-4, o1, o3, 4.1, and OpenAI’s mini models.

• Zhao will report directly to Zuckerberg and will set MSL’s research direction alongside chief AI officer Alexandr Wang.

• Yann LeCun said he still remains Meta's chief AI scientist for FAIR, focusing on “long-term research and building the next AI paradigms.”

Why it matters: Zhao’s appointment feels like the final bow on a superintelligence unit that Mark Zuckerberg has spent all summer shelling out for. Now boasting researchers from all the top labs and with access to Meta’s billions in infrastructure, the experiment of building a frontier AI lab from scratch looks officially ready for takeoff.

AI TRAINING

🎭 Create personalized AI video avatars

The Rundown: In this tutorial, you will learn how to create AI-generated videos featuring yourself or any character by training an AI model with personal images and then animating them with natural speech using Google Veo 3.

Step-by-step:

1. Go to Freepik and create a new Character by uploading 12-24 varied images of yourself

2. Use ChatGPT to generate detailed scene prompts: “Provide a prompt where the character is in a studio holding a product. Do not describe the character’s appearance”

3. Back in Freepik, select your character, paste the prompt with your character's name, and generate in 16:9 format

4. Upload your image to Google Gemini’s Video tool and prompt: “Guy talks to the camera saying: [dialogue]”

Pro tip: Use varied images when training your character and be specific with dialogue prompts for the most natural-looking results.

PRESENTED BY LOVABLE

💡 Build apps at prompt speed

The Rundown: Lovable lets anyone go from idea to production-ready app or website in a few hours, collapsing six-month roadmaps into a Friday night side project. Whether you need a personalized holiday planner or a fully fledged SaaS back end, Lovable’s AI handles the heavy lifting so you can focus on your users.

With Lovable, you can:

• Turn an idea into reality without deep technical knowledge — just describe your vision

• Use chat mode to tweak products in real time and create responsive UIs

• Integrate with Stripe, Supabase, Figma, and automatically wire databases, APIs, and UI

• Publish a live link, gather feedback, and quickly iterate, pivot, or monetize from Day 1

Try Lovable and ship your startup today.

RUNWAY

📽️ Runway’s Aleph for AI-powered video editing

The Rundown: Runway just unveiled Aleph, a new “in-context” video model that edits and transforms existing footage through text prompts — handling tasks from generating new camera angles to removing objects and adjusting lighting.

The details:

• Aleph can generate new camera angles from a single shot, apply style transfers while maintaining scene consistency, and add or remove elements from scenes.

• Other editing features include relighting scenes, creating green screen mattes, changing settings and characters, and generating the next shot in a sequence.

• Early access is rolling out to Enterprise and Creative Partners, with broader availability eventually for all Runway users.

Why it matters: Aleph looks like a serious leap in AI post-production capabilities, with Runway continuing to raise the bar for giving complete control over video generations instead of the random outputs of older models. With its already existing partnerships with Hollywood, this looks like a release made to help bring AI to the big screen.

QUICK HITS

🛠️ Trending AI Tools

• 👁️ Memories AI - ChatGPT for your video library, with unlimited video context

• 🗣️ Qwen3-MT - AI translation model with support for 92+ languages

• 💬 Seed LiveInterpret 2.0 - ByteDance’s AI translation speech system

• 📸 Higgsfield Steal - Recreate any picture from anywhere on the web

💼 AI Job Opportunities

• 🎓 The Rundown - AI Educator (Workshop Host)

• 📦 Scale AI - Head of Delivery

• 🔍 xAI - AI Engineer & Researcher

• 🔋 Figure AI - Battery Design Validation Test Engineer

📰 Everything else in AI today

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said that despite users sharing personal info with ChatGPT, there is no legal confidentiality, and chats can theoretically be called on in legal cases.

Alibaba launched an update to Qwen3-Thinking, now competitive with Gemini 2.5 Pro, o4-mini, and DeepSeek R1 across knowledge, reasoning, and coding benchmarks.

Tencent released Hunyuan3D World Model 1.0, a new open-source world generation model for creating interactive, editable 3D worlds from image or text prompts.

Music company Hallwood Media signed top Suno “music designer” Imoliver in a record deal, becoming the first creator from the platform to join a label.

Vogue is facing backlash after lifestyle brand Guess used an AI-generated model in a full-page advertisement in the magazine’s August issue.

COMMUNITY

🎥 Watch our last workshop

Check out our last live workshop with Dr. Alvaro Cintas, The Rundown’s AI professor. By the end of the workshop, you’ll know how to build useful AI agents with ChatGPT and understand the broader ecosystem of agentic tools out there.

Watch it here. Not a member? Join The Rundown University on a 14-day free trial.

See you soon,

Rowan, Joey, Zach, Alvaro, and Jason—The Rundown’s editorial team