DeepSeek returns with an IMO-crushing AI

PLUS: Create Instagram product shots with Nano Banana Pro

Good morning, AI enthusiasts. The big whale is back — this time with an open-source reasoner that hits gold-medal performance on one of the world’s toughest math competitions.

But the real story is what it unlocks: frontier reasoning, once gated by proprietary labs, is now free for all. For the first time, anyone can own the brain of a world-class mathematician.

In today’s AI rundown:

  • DeepSeek’s new reasoner crushes IMO 2025

  • OpenAI’s API user data leaked in third-party breach

  • Create Instagram product shots with Nano Banana Pro

  • NVIDIA’s case for scale isn’t everything in AI

  • 4 new AI tools, community workflows, and more

LATEST DEVELOPMENTS

DEEPSEEK

Image source: Gemini / The Rundown

The Rundown: DeepSeek just released DeepSeek-Math-V2, an open-source MoE model that achieves gold-medal performance at IMO 2025, democratizing “research-level” mathematical reasoning that was previously locked behind proprietary walls.

The details:

  • The model scored 118/120 on the 2024 Putnam competition (beating the top human score) and solved 5 of 6 IMO 2025 problems, hitting the gold standard.

  • On IMO ProofBench, it hit 61.9%, nearly matching Google’s specialized Gemini Deep Think that won IMO gold and crushing GPT-5, which scored only 20%.

  • Math-V2 uses a generator-verifier system where one model proposes a proof and another critiques it — instead of rewarding final answers only.

  • The verifier assigns confidence scores to steps, forcing the generator to refine weak logic and ensuring step-by-step self-debugging of reasoning.

Why it matters: By open-sourcing a model that rivals Google’s internal heavyweight, DeepSeek has broken the monopoly on frontier mathematical reasoning, providing the community with a blueprint to build agents that debug their own thought processes. This can be a game-changer in domains like engineering, where mistakes are costly.

TOGETHER WITH BLAND

The Rundown: In San Francisco, there’s an AI company who’s making inbound voice agents that sound human, run 24/7, and are so good that they deliver 127% net revenue retention.

If you call it yourself, you’ll be able to:

  • Have Bland role-play any use case

  • Experience the lowest latency on the planet (<500ms)

  • Have a phone call that you actually enjoy

For Black Friday, Bland is offering to create your enterprise a custom agent for free so you can validate the quality before you commit.

OPENAI

Image source: Gemini / The Rundown

The Rundown: OpenAI just revealed that its analytics vendor Mixpanel suffered a security incident, with an attacker exporting some of its API users’ profile information — although no chat data, API keys, payment details, or credentials were compromised.

The details:

  • The breach occurred on November 9, covering Mixpanel’s systems that provided web analytics on the frontend interface of OpenAI’s API product.

  • The data the attacker exported included profile information associated with the API product, such as names, emails, locations (city/state), and device details.

  • OpenAI confirmed that users of ChatGPT and other products were not impacted, and no chat, API data, credentials, or payment details were leaked.

  • It removed Mixpanel and is notifying affected users directly, while urging vigilance against potential phishing attempts that could use the leaked data.

Why it matters: While OpenAI’s defenses held, this incident serves as a stark reminder of the security risks third-party partners can introduce. For affected API users, the immediate danger isn’t account compromise but rather social engineering, where attackers may use the leaked emails to create even more trouble.

AI TRAINING

The Rundown: In this tutorial, you’ll learn how to use Nano Banana Pro to generate a full 9-image Instagram feed from just one inspiration photo, turning your product shots into cohesive, high-quality visuals for social media campaigns.

Step-by-step:

  1. Go to Gemini → Tools → Create Images, ensure Pro mode is enabled, and upload an inspiration image that reflects your desired style or aesthetic

  2. Upload your product image, describe it, then prompt with: “Create a 9-image Instagram feed for this product with varied angles, people, and environments”

  3. Click Submit to generate your 9-image grid. Review results and, if needed, ask Nano Banana to regenerate or isolate specific shots

  4. Download your favorite visuals and post them directly to Instagram, TikTok, or your brand’s storefront for an instant, consistent feed

Pro tip: The more specific and visually aligned your examples are, the better the AI matches your desired aesthetic.

PRESENTED BY YOU.COM

The Rundown: Most companies get stuck tinkering with prompts and wonder why their agents fail to deliver dependable results. This guide from You.com breaks down the evolution of agent management, revealing the five stages for building a successful AI agent and why most organizations haven’t gotten there yet.

In this guide, you’ll learn:

  • Why prompts alone aren’t enough and how context and metadata unlock reliable agent automation

  • Four essential ways to calculate ROI, plus when and how to use each metric

  • Real-world challenges at each stage of agent management and how to avoid them

If you’re ready to go beyond the prompt, this is the playbook for you.

AI RESEARCH

Image source: NVIDIA

The Rundown: NVIDIA and the University of Hong Kong published a paper suggesting that the future of AI might not come from scaling but from smarter orchestration, with their new tool training small models that can surpass frontier AI at a fraction of the cost.

The details:

  • ToolOrchestra trains an “orchestrator” model that decides when to reason internally and when to call specialized tools and models, based on the task.

  • An 8B model trained with the system surpassed GPT-5 and Claude Opus 4.1 on Humanity’s Last Exam, scoring 37.1% while being 2.5x more efficient and faster.

  • Even when tested with unseen tools, the orchestrator adapted well — showing its ability to work with changing toolsets and pricing structures.

  • Prior agents overused the strongest (and most expensive) tools and models, but ToolOrchestra avoided this by orchestrating targeted model and tool usage.

Why it matters: In line with Ilya Sutskever’s recent comments, ToolOrchestra challenges the “bigger is better” ideology. Instead of one giant system, NVIDIA shows how small models coordinating tools may be the path forward. If orchestration beats scaling, the smartest model/tool conductor will be the next big AI breakthrough.

QUICK HITS

  • 🤳 Perplexity - AI answer engine, now with virtual try-on for shopping

  • 🧠 Math V2 - DeepSeek’s open-source mathematical reasoning model

  • 🤖 Stories - Character AI’s interactive experience for kids

  • 🎆 FLUX.2 - Black Forest Labs’ new visual intelligence model

Jeff Bezos’ new stealth AI venture, "Project Prometheus," quietly acquired General Agents, an agentic computing startup, Wired reports.

OpenAI lost a key discovery ruling, forcing it to hand over internal communications about why it deleted two datasets of allegedly pirated books, boosting authors’ chances of proving willful copyright infringement.

Perplexity launched persistent memory, enabling the assistant to remember user preferences, interests, and conversations for valuable context on relevant tasks.

Perplexity also updated its email assistant to work across multiple calendars at once, currently available for Gmail and Outlook.

Cohere expanded its partnership with SAP, taking its agentic AI platform, North, to SAP’s Cloud infrastructure and Business Technology Platform.

Alibaba released Quark AI Glasses, a smart eyewear line powered by its in‑house Qwen LLMs and Quark assistant, in China — with prices starting at 1,899 yuan ($268).

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 W. in Santa Barbara, CA:

“I'm a songwriter trained in traditional folk music. I write songs, and then ChatGPT helps me translate them into indie folk. I give it the lyrics and ask how an indie folk songwriter would write these lyrics. ChatGPT wants to do everything, like determine chord structure, tempo, etc., but I keep it only on the lyrics.”

How do you use AI? Tell us here.

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.

Login or Subscribe to participate in polls.

See you soon,

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

Reply

or to participate.