🍏 OpenAI's Apple hardware heist

Good morning, AI enthusiasts. OpenAI’s secretive hardware projects are getting a bit clearer, and the development could be coming straight out of the Apple playbook.

Armed with Apple's former talent, manufacturers, and even Jony Ive's design vision, the AI giant is betting that the best way to shape the device future is to hire the people who built the past.

In today’s AI rundown:

• OpenAI raids Apple for hardware push

• xAI’s cost-efficient Grok 4 Fast

• Use Notion AI to build a CRM pipeline

• AI artist Xania Monet lands $3M record deal

• 4 new AI tools, community workflows, and more

LATEST DEVELOPMENTS

OPENAI & APPLE

🍏 OpenAI raids Apple for hardware push

The Rundown: OpenAI has launched a major hiring offensive focused on Apple's hardware teams, according to The Information, while also forging production partnerships with iPhone manufacturers for its upcoming AI device portfolio.

The details:

• OAI has recruited dozens of Apple hardware vets, offering $1M+ packages to interface designers, audio engineers, and manufacturing specialists.

• Former Apple exec Tang Tan is leading the hardware effort, selling candidates promises of reduced red tape and an ambitious product vision.

• Production agreements now link OAI with iPhone manufacturers Luxshare and Goertek, discussing the creation of a display-less, smart speaker-type device.

• Other products in consideration include glasses, a pin wearable, and a voice recorder, aiming for an inaugural release in “late 2026 or early 2027”.

Why it matters: OAI’s hardware ambitions are being shaped by former Apple designer Jony Ive, and it sounds like both talent acquisition and manufacturing are coming from the old Apple playbook. With the secrecy and hype around the upcoming devices, the eventual release will be one of the most anticipated product launches in recent memory.

TOGETHER WITH TURING

🧪 The research accelerator for frontier AI labs

The Rundown: While data factories churn out quantity, leading AI labs need partners who co-own research goals and engineer the complex human-AI loops that push models from promising to state-of-the-art. Turing specializes in closing capability gaps through custom research acceleration.

Turing's research-focused approach includes:

• Co-owned experimental outcomes, not just data delivery, and vendor neutrality

• Quality-by-design workflows with transparent data lineage and auditable results

• Custom RL environments and SFT/RLHF/DPO pipelines designed for your benchmarks

Partner with the research accelerator that understands what frontier AI labs actually need.

XAI

💨 xAI’s cost-efficient Grok 4 Fast

The Rundown: xAI unveiled Grok 4 Fast, a new hyper-efficient reasoning model that delivers near-frontier performance and top speed at a fraction of the compute cost of its predecessor, Grok 4.

The details:

• Grok 4 Fast achieves comparable results to Grok 4, despite using 40% fewer thinking tokens on average, resulting in a 98% price reduction.

• Benchmarks place it above Claude 4.1 Opus and Gemini 2.5 Pro, hitting 85.7% on GPQA Diamond (science) and 92% on AIME 2025 (math).

• The model also rose to No. 1 in LMArena's Search Arena, and showed strong performance on coding benchmarks — even surpassing the larger Grok 4.

• Grok 4 Fast also supports a 2M token context, along with native tool integration for web browsing and code execution.

Why it matters: xAI’s cost-efficiency gains with this new release are wild, with Grok 4 Fast competing with the top models in the world despite massive decreases in cost. When leaders like Sam Altman speak of ‘intelligence too cheap to meter,’ this model is part of the trend that exemplifies that coming reality.

AI TRAINING

🔥 Use Notion AI to build a CRM pipeline

The Rundown: In this tutorial, you will learn how to create a CRM dashboard for your sales pipeline with Notion AI. Instead of manually creating pages, subpages, and toggles, all of this will be done for you using AI prompts.

Step-by-step:

1. Go to Notion.so, open Notion AI, and collapse the side panel for a cleaner workspace

2. Use this prompt: "A CRM pipeline database where I can track leads from first contact through conversion. Add filters for email, type of subscriber, first contact, second contact, did they convert, and why didn't they convert"

3. Click Submit and let Notion AI build the database structure, then agree to suggested additions like follow-up stages and next steps

4. Review the generated "CRM – Sales Pipeline" page and refine fields by changing toggles to checkboxes or adding filters like deal size

Pro Tip: Experiment with prompt styles. For example, instead of saying "create me a CRM," try "create a sales pipeline with Kanban stages" or "build a lead tracker with follow-up reminders." The more specific you are, the better your results.

PRESENTED BY ENCORD

📊 Double your CV Model robustness

The Rundown: Encord is the universal data layer for multimodal AI, consolidating curation, annotation, and model evaluation pipelines. Teams can accelerate model iteration cycles by using Encord’s agentic AI data workflow system to prepare balanced, accurately labeled datasets 10x faster.

Join Encord on Sept. 24 for an edge case and model evaluation masterclass on:

• Uncovering edge cases your accuracy metrics are blind to

• Cutting labeling time by prioritising edge-case data

• Curating datasets for model performance in variable environments

Save your spot.

AI & MUSIC

🎵 AI artist Xania Monet lands $3M record deal

The Rundown: Mississippi poet Talisha Jones secured a multimillion-dollar contract for her AI-generated R&B persona Xania Monet, coming on the heels of the artist’s music debuting on Billboard’s charts and racking up 10M streams in the U.S. last week.

The details:

• Jones created Monet’s identity using AI tools and uses Suno for music creation, but claims to use ‘live elements’ and writes all the lyrics herself.

• Multiple labels bid for the artist before Hallwood Media secured the $3M deal, though some also had copyright concerns about the use of Suno.

• Hallwood Media also signed top Suno creator Imoliver in July after a single hit 3M streams on the platform, which was the first known signing of a Suno artist.

Why it matters: We’re at a strange inflection point in AI and music, where the tech’s use is both controversial and still being identified. The latest music generation models have already reached quality levels imperceptible from professional tracks – meaning there’s likely already a flow of AI music blending into the streaming scene.

QUICK HITS

🛠️ Trending AI Tools

• ⚙️ Grok 4 Fast - xAI’s new cost-efficient reasoning model

• ✍️ Metaprompt - A simple tool to make AI prompts more powerful

• 🔊 Studio 3.0 - ElevenLabs’ editing platform with new video support

• 🎥 Ray3 - Luma AI’s new reasoning video model with studio-grade outputs

📰 Everything else in AI today

Scale AI introduced SWE-Bench Pro, an updated, more challenging version of its agentic software development benchmark widely used across the industry.

Satya Nadella shared that he’s “haunted” by the prospect of Microsoft becoming irrelevant with AI, saying its “biggest businesses” might not be as relevant in the future.

Mistral AI released Magistral Small and Medium 1.2, updates to its reasoning model family that bring multimodal capabilities, upgraded tool use, and performance boosts.

Sam Altman posted that OpenAI is releasing some new “compute-intensive offerings” over the next few weeks, available to Pro subscribers.

Oracle is reportedly in talks with Meta for a $20B multi-year cloud computing deal to provide AI model training and deployment capacity.

Anthropic’s Jan Leike criticized “Leading the Future, a pro-AI, $100M+ super-PAC from a16z, Greg Brockman, and others that Leike says is “bad news for AI safety".

COMMUNITY

🤝 Community AI workflows

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 Ibrahim I. in Türkiye:

"I use AI as my "second brain"—it scans my calendar, mood logs, and to-do lists to predict when I’ll procrastinate… then automatically schedules micro-tasks with funny motivational nudges. ("Your 3pm slump called—it wants you to knock out 1 email before coffee.”

How do you use AI? Tell us here.

🎓 Highlights: News, Guides & Events

• Read our last AI newsletter: Google brings AI to Chrome

• Read our last Tech newsletter: Nvidia and Intel’s $5B plot twist

• Read our last Robotics newsletter: Figure soars to $39B valuation

• Today’s AI tool guide: Use Notion AI to build a CRM pipeline

• RSVP to next live workshop @ 4PM EST Friday: Automated Deep Research

See you soon,

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