Good morning, {{ first_name | AI enthusiasts }}. Three years ago, Elon Musk assembled 11 co-founders to take on OpenAI and Anthropic with a new AI startup. Nine of them are now gone.
With Musk admitting xAI is now "being rebuilt from the foundations up," and raiding Cursor for coding talent, it is clear that the billionaire is suddenly running a startup reset while preparing for one of the largest public listings in history.
In today’s AI rundown:
xAI down two more co-founders as Musk rebuilds
The Rundown Roundtable: Our AI use cases
Create an intro animation for your brand
AI-designed vaccine shrinks rescue dog's tumor
4 new AI tools, community workflows, and more
LATEST DEVELOPMENTS
XAI
Image source: Lovart / The Rundown
The Rundown: Elon Musk just posted that xAI "was not built right" and needs a ground-up rebuild, with 9 of 11 original co-founders now gone and the company actively hiring major coding talent to help Grok catch up to the industry’s frontier.
The details:
Zihang Dai and Guodong Zhang are the latest departures, leaving just two of the original 11 co-founders (Manuel Kroiss and Ross Nordeen) at xAI with Musk.
Zhang, who led Grok Code and reported directly to Musk, was reportedly blamed by Musk for Grok’s coding shortfalls before departing.
xAI hired senior Cursor leaders Andrew Milich and Jason Ginsberg last week, coming after Musk's admission that Grok is "currently behind" on coding.
Why it matters: It’s been a year of highs and lows for xAI, but it appears Musk is tearing things down for a major rebuild. With splashy new coding hires and a nearly complete exodus of co-founders, xAI has some serious work to do to hit Musk’s lofty goals — especially while trying to navigate an upcoming IPO in the process.
TOGETHER WITH BLAND AI
The Rundown: Bland AI automates phone calls for over 250+ enterprise customers. No phone trees. No hold music. Just faster, smarter customer conversations.
Here are some of the outcomes they've driven for businesses:
Idaho Finance saved $750k/yr by replacing their IVR with AI Voice Agents
MyPlanAdvocate added $40M/yr by automating their inbound lead qualification
And Needle saves $1M/yr by automating outbound calls
Book a demo today to see how they can work for your business.
THE RUNDOWN ROUNDTABLE
The Rundown: The Rundown Roundtable is a weekly feature where we poll members of The Rundown staff about how we use AI in our work and daily lives.
Billy, University Educator: “Each day my OpenClaw checks the local inventory of Toyota dealerships within 250 miles for black or white RAV-4's with heated seats because my wife wants to buy the most popular car in the world and they don't stay on the lots very long.”
Zach, AI Writer: I have been testing Perplexity Computer, and it really makes you rethink a lot of workflows. It has been particularly useful for surfacing interesting and viral social content across X and Reddit, with internet search abilities that seem much more capable for quick canvassing of different platforms.
I have also used it for clipping and captioning video content for social, with Computer able to find, transcribe, give recommendations on the most viral quotes/sections, and caption in just minutes — a wild process that would normally take me (with little video experience) much longer and have to leverage a ton of different apps to make happen.
AI TRAINING
The Rundown: In this guide, you will learn how to use Manus to generate branded intro, transition, and outro bumper videos for your brand with no motion designer or video editor required.
Step-by-step:
Open a Manus task, upload logo/wordmark, and prompt: “I want a branded intro bumper, transition, and outro bumper video based on these logos. Ask 3-5 MCQs about style and vibe before starting. Use the video generator skill.”
Answer the questions Manus asks about vibe, animation style, and colors. When it shows options, ask it to visualize them so you can pick the best one.
Type “/video-generator” and tell it to generate the chosen concept — Manus will generate keyframes using Nano Banana and then animate them with Veo 3.
Use the default mode to save on tokens. Once it’s done, you can download the finished clips and drop them into your video editor.
Pro tip: Manus will try to find and add royalty-free audio to your clips. We recommend you tell it to skip this. It doesn’t usually find the best audio and ends up eating tokens.
PRESENTED BY BLOTATO
The Rundown Publish 100+ on-brand social media posts per week with your AI marketing team. This simple guide shows you how to use Claude Code + Blotato MCP to automate your brand's growth, with no coding required.
In this course, you’ll learn how to:
Install Claude Code
Teach Claude to write like you
Make infographics, carousels, and videos
Schedule & publish directly to 9 social media platforms
Watch the course and start building your AI marketing team with Blotato MCP.
AI & MEDICINE
Image source: Paul Conyngham / The Australian
The Rundown: Sydney AI consultant Paul Conyngham built a custom mRNA cancer vaccine for his dog Rosie by chaining ChatGPT, Grok, DeepMind’s AlphaFold, and UNSW's genomics lab to turn 350 GB of tumor data into a treatment with real results.
The details:
Rosie was diagnosed with mast cell cancer in 2024 and given months to live despite chemo and surgery.
Conyngham used ChatGPT to map the research, paid $3K for genomic sequencing, then fed the data through AlphaFold to model Rosie's mutations.
The UNSW RNA Institute helped turn the formula into a custom vaccine, with Conyngham also revealing the “final vaccine construct was designed by Grok”.
One tumor shrank by half after her December injection, with Conyngham now working to create a second vaccine for her other non-responding tumors.
Why it matters: A year ago, a pet owner with no biology training couldn't turn a cancer diagnosis into sequenced DNA data, modeled proteins, and a working vaccine blueprint. Rosie isn't completely cured, but the fact that AI provided the tools to take a real swing at a previously hopeless situation with real impact is a powerful thing.
QUICK HITS
🔄 Crafting for Agents - Promote your enterprise coding agents to senior software engineers and ship code safely with closed-loop validation*
🧠 Nemotron 3 Super - Nvidia's 120B reasoning AI with 1M token context
🚀 Claude - Anthropic’s AI, now able to create charts and diagrams in chat
🗣️ TADA - Hume's TTS AI that syncs text and audio for no hallucination speech
*Sponsored Listing
The global launch of Seedance 2.0, ByteDance’s viral video AI, is reportedly being suspended, with the delay coming after a major copyright backlash from Hollywood.
Elon Musk revealed that Tesla’s Terafab semiconductor manufacturing facility is launching in a week, aiming to create custom silicon chips for use across its tech.
A Florida man used ChatGPT to help handle selling his home, including pricing, marketing, scheduling, and contracts, closing in five days and saving 3% in agent fees.
Meta is reportedly planning layoffs that could cut 20% of its nearly 79K workforce, as the company looks to offset $600B in planned AI infrastructure spending.
Ex-Anthropic researchers are set to raise $175M for Miraendil, a new AI startup building specialized AI for scientific R&D in biology and materials science.
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 Adam B. in New York City, NY:
"I’m looking for a business to buy, so I used ChatGPT and Claude to develop a personal OS to help analyze potential deals. I started by telling ChatGPT my personal preferences, which included my financial overview, personality traits, business types, and then took it to Claude and asked it what it thought, and asked it to analyze my OS.
I took its advice and brought it back to Chat, and went back and forth until I got to v31. Now, when I receive a business’s CIM and any other docs, I upload them to Claude alongside my OS, and it generates a 20+ page full evaluation, not only of the business, but also of how the business is for me specifically. In 5 minutes, I get to know whether to pursue or not.
How do you use AI? Tell us here.
Read our last AI newsletter: Google brings Gemini to the road
Read our last Tech newsletter: Apple’s foldable iPhone leaks
Read our last Robotics newsletter: Figure’s humanoid cleans living rooms
Today’s AI tool guide: Create an intro animation in 15 minutes
RSVP to our next workshop on March 19: AI coding bootcamp pt. 2
That's it for today!
See you soon,
Rowan, Joey, Zach, Shubham, and Jennifer — the humans behind The Rundown
