Meta's mind-reading movie AI

PLUS: KAIST AI designs cancer drugs from scratch

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Rowan Cheung & Zach Mink
August 12, 2025

Good morning, AI enthusiasts. Meta’s FAIR team just built an AI that knows what your brain will do before you even press play on a video — and it doesn't need a single brain scan to do it.

With the company’s TRIBE model, Meta is pushing the frontiers of brain science — but is also potentially writing the instruction manual for neural-level addictive content in the process.

P.S. — Not familiar with a certain term in the newsletter? Check out our AI dictionary, a quick-reference guide for different models, AI labs, technical lingo, and more.

In today’s AI rundown:

  • Meta’s AI predicts brain responses to videos

  • OpenAI's reasoner snags gold at programming olympiad

  • Create professional music tracks for projects

  • Korean researchers’ AI designs cancer drugs

  • 4 new AI tools, community workflows, and more

LATEST DEVELOPMENTS

META FAIR

Image source: Midjourney / The Rundown

The Rundown: Meta’s FAIR team just introduced TRIBE, a 1B parameter neural network that predicts how human brains respond to movies by analyzing video, audio, and text — achieving first place in the Algonauts 2025 brain modeling competition.

The details:

  • TRIBE analyzes video, audio, and dialogue from movies, accurately predicting which of the viewer’s brain regions will activate without any brain scanning.

  • The AI correctly predicted over half brain activity patterns across 1,000 brain regions after training on subjects who watched 80 hours of TV and movies.

  • It works best in brain areas where sight, sound, and language merge, outperforming single-sense models by 30%.

  • Meta's system also showed particular accuracy in frontal brain regions that control attention, decision-making, and emotional responses to content.

Why it matters: We’ve only uncovered the tip of the iceberg when it comes to understanding the brain and its processes, and TRIBE and other AI systems are ramping up that knowledge. But they are also providing new formulas for maximizing attention on a neural level, potentially making doomscrolling even more irresistible.

TOGETHER WITH FUEL iX

The Rundown: In the race to innovate with GenAI, stop gambling with GenAI security. Join TELUS Digital, Fuel iX, and guest Forrester for a discussion on how product teams can fast-track secure GenAI development without compromising on safety or speed.

This exclusive session will explore:

  • Battle-tested security frameworks from leading enterprises

  • Practical automation strategies for enterprise-wide protection

  • Real implementation stories

Watch on-demand to see industry experts share their proven paths to secure, scalable GenAI deployment.

OPENAI

Image source: Sheryl Hsu (@SherylHsu02 on X)

The Rundown: OpenAI announced that its reasoning model achieved a gold-level score at the 2025 International Olympiad in Informatics (IOI), placing 6th against humans and first among AI in the world’s top pre-college programming competition.

The details:

  • The AI competed against top student programmers worldwide, solving coding problems with the same time and submission limits as human contestants.

  • OpenAI’s model was a general-purpose reasoner, without specific fine-tuning for programming and relying on just basic tools.

  • The system scored in the 98th percentile, a massive jump from a 49% score just a year ago.

  • The same model also won gold at the International Math Olympiad and AtCoder, showing strength across a range of complex problem-solving areas.

Why it matters: The 2x leap in score shows how fast reasoning capabilities have truly moved over the past year. The days of humans ahead of AI in competitions are numbered, and these achievements will likely be the stepping stones towards future models that are capable of discovering new science, math, physics, and more.

AI TRAINING

The Rundown: In this tutorial, you will learn how to generate studio-grade music from simple text prompts using the new ElevenLabs music model that supports multiple languages and gives you complete creative control.

Step-by-step:

  1. Visit ElevenLabs and navigate to the Music section

  2. Write a detailed prompt: “Upbeat acoustic folk song with fingerpicked guitar, warm male vocals, cheerful and inviting with cozy vibes”

  3. Choose your desired number of variants and duration

  4. Generate your track, then edit individual sections and download in studio quality

Pro tip: Start broad (“upbeat pop song”) then get specific (“80s synths, female vocals, catchy summer hook”) for perfect results.

PRESENTED BY IBM

The Rundown: Lockheed Martin’s AI takeoff began with data cleanup — cutting its tools by 50% and replacing them with a single unified system that runs on IBM’s watsonx.data to drive faster, smarter engineering.

Learn how Lockheed Martin leveraged watsonx to:

  • Help 10,000 engineers build scalable AI products in its AI Factory

  • Respond to employee questions using AI, boosting accuracy by 20%

  • Overcome data silos to create a single accessible, connected data environment

AI & DRUG DISCOVERY

Image source: …

The Rundown: Researchers at the Korea Advanced Institute of Science & Technology (KAIST) developed BInD, a new diffusion model that designs optimal cancer drug candidates from scratch without any prior molecular data or training examples.

The details:

  • The AI designs both the drug molecule and how it will attach to diseased proteins in one step, rather than creating and then testing in multiple iterations.

  • BInD created drugs that target only cancer-causing protein mutations while leaving healthy versions alone, showing precision medicine capabilities.

  • Unlike older AI systems that could only optimize for one criterion at a time, BInD ensures drugs are safe, stable, and possible to manufacture all at once.

  • The model also learns from its successes, reusing winning strategies with a recycling technique to design better drugs without starting from scratch.

Why it matters: Drug discovery continues to be one of the biggest beneficiaries of AI acceleration. While the first AI-designed drugs are just starting to come to market, it feels like we’re only a few steps away from the floodgates opening on humanity-altering medicine advances designed by advanced AI models.

QUICK HITS

  • 📺 Hera - Create animated videos like CTAs, charts, and ads with text prompts in seconds*

  • 🧠 Grok 4 - xAI’s next-gen model, available for free to all users for a limited time

  • 🧊 Copilot 3D - Turn images into 3D models with one click

  • ⚙️ Kombai - AI agent for frontend development

*Sponsored Listing

Chinese AI lab Z AI released GLM-4.5V, a new open-source visual reasoning model that achieves top scores on over 40 different benchmarks.

GitHub CEO Thomas Dohmke announced that he is leaving the company to pursue his own startup, with GitHub now being woven into Microsoft’s CoreAI department.

The U.S. government is reportedly set to enter into a new agreement with chipmakers Nvidia and AMD that would provide a 15% cut of chip sales to China.

Pika Labs introduced a new video model rolling out to its social app, with the ability to generate HD-quality outputs with lip-sync and audio in six seconds or less.

Alibaba announced that its Qwen3 models have been upgraded with ultra-long context capabilities of up to 1M tokens.

Anthropic unveiled new memory capabilities in Claude for Max, Team, and Enterprise users (excluding the Pro tier), giving the ability to reference previous chats.

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 Joel L. in Raleigh, NC:

"We are using AI to reactivate old leads. Our system will engage with old or dead customers, nurture the leads, and weed out leads that are not interested or not a good fit. Then the AI will book the appointment with the sales team. All the sales team has to do is show up to the warm booked call and close them.”

How are you using AI in your work? 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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