Oracle, Larry Ellison cash in on AI boom

PLUS: Pull Reddit insights for market research using Gumloop

Good morning, AI enthusiasts. Forget building the next ChatGPT — Oracle and Larry Ellison just proved the real AI money is in renting out the servers to run it.

A $300B OpenAI infrastructure deal and massive stock surge helped propel Ellison past Elon Musk as the world's richest person, with the AI "picks and shovels" strategy minting insane wealth just as fast as the models themselves.

P.S. — our next live workshop is Friday, Sept. 19 at 4 PM EST! Join and learn how to turn your data into a reliable AI assistant, not just another chatbot. RSVP here.

In today’s AI rundown:

  • Oracle, Larry Ellison cash in on AI boom

  • Replit triples valuation, launches Agent 3

  • Pull Reddit insights for market research

  • Web publishers unite for AI licensing standard

  • 4 new AI tools, community workflows, and more

LATEST DEVELOPMENTS

ORACLE & OPENAI

Image source: Seedream 4.0 / The Rundown

The Rundown: Oracle's stock surged by 40% Wednesday after revealing $455B in future AI infrastructure contracts, including a massive $300B deal with OpenAI — with the rise sending founder Larry Ellison past Elon Musk as the world's richest person.

The details:

  • Oracle disclosed securing four multibillion-dollar AI infrastructure contracts during its latest quarter, predicting its revenue backlog will exceed $500B.

  • A WSJ report revealed that OpenAI accounts for $300B of future revenue, committing to around $60B annually starting in 2027 for compute capacity.

  • Ellison's net worth jumped over $100B in a single day, surpassing Musk's $385B fortune after Oracle’s stock posted its best one-day gain since 1992.

  • Oracle projects cloud infrastructure revenue will grow from $18B this year to $144B within five years, with most already locked in with signed contracts.

Why it matters: The AI boom turned Nvidia into a kingpin for chipmaking, and now Oracle is following suit with infrastructure… While minting a new world’s richest man in the process. With initiatives like Stargate and tech giants all scrambling for compute, the “picks and shovels” sectors of AI continue to generate eye-popping revenue.

TOGETHER WITH PROMPTQL

The Rundown: The root cause of enterprise AI failures is less about technology and more about choosing the wrong approach. PromptQL’s practical 3x3 framework helps companies avoid this trap by aligning the right approach to each use case.

In this guide, you’ll learn:

  • Key challenges with current AI assessment methods

  • A durable 3x3 framework for classifying enterprise AI systems

  • Insights from analysing 100+ tools using this approach

REPLIT

Image source: Replit

The Rundown: AI coding platform Replit just announced a new $250M raise at a $3B valuation, alongside the release of Agent 3 — the company’s “most autonomous agent yet” that can build and test applications for over three hours straight.

The details:

  • The coding startup’s revenue increased from $3M to $150M in the past year, with the new funding round nearly tripling its valuation.

  • Agent 3 can generate other agents, create workflow automations for Slack and email, and auto-test applications by simulating user interactions in browsers.

  • Replit claims Agent 3 can run for 200 minutes without manual oversight, a 10x increase in autonomous abilities from its V2 predecessor.

  • Replit CEO Amjad Masad called Agent 3’s autonomous upgrades the “Full Self-Driving moment of software”.

Why it matters: METR’s analysis earlier this year showed the length of tasks AI can handle is growing fast, and Agent 3 follows that curve — going from 20 to 200 minutes of building in a single upgrade. Replit’s rise is also another win for the agentic coding sector, joining Lovable, Cognition, Cursor, and others with major funding.

AI TRAINING

The Rundown: In this tutorial, you will learn how to utilize Gumloop to automatically gather and analyze Reddit discussions, uncovering real customer pain points, product feedback, and market sentiment without manually scrolling through individual threads.

Step-by-step:

  1. Go to Gumloop and find the "Reddit Insights Generator" template — all nodes are pre-configured, just customize your inputs

  2. Enter parameters such as the Subreddit name (e.g., apps), topic of interest (e.g., mobile app for calorie tracking), and timeframe. Then click Run.

  3. Gumloop pulls top posts, comments, and opinions, then organizes everything into clear patterns and sentiment analysis

  4. Review the output: You'll get a subreddit summary, real examples with context, and sentiment data showing if the market is excited, frustrated, or indifferent

  5. Analyze patterns like why people build certain apps, common feature complaints, and community response to new launches

Pro Tip: You can set up loops in Gumloop that's going to run this workflow at a regular cadence for you to always stay up-to-date with the market's opinion.

PRESENTED BY MOCHA

The Rundown: Other app builders make you juggle Supabase, Firebase, and half a dozen APIs just to get basic functionality working. Mocha takes a different approach — everything you need is built in from day one.

With Mocha, get instant access to:

  • Complete backend infrastructure, auth, payments, hosting, and database

  • AI features like chatbots and image generation built right in

  • One-click deployment from prototype to production

AI LICENSING

Image source: Seedream 4.0 / The Rundown

The Rundown: Major web publishers, including Reddit, Yahoo, and Medium, just launched Real Simple Licensing (RSL), a new protocol that establishes payment terms for AI companies scraping their content.

The details:

  • The RSL protocol builds on robots.txt files, letting publishers specify licensing payment options to their content, ranging from free to pay-per-crawl.

  • A nonprofit RSL Collective will negotiate collective rates with AI firms, modeled after royalty organizations in the music industry like ASCAP and BMI.

  • RSS co-creator Eckart Walther is leading the technical development, bringing credibility from building the protocol that powered early blog sharing.

  • Reddit CEO Steve Huffman endorsed the initiative despite his company's existing deals with OpenAI and Google worth $60M annually.

Why it matters: Publishers are hitting the music royalty playbook, creating a scalable marketplace where both sides win. Theoretically, AI companies can get legal clarity and simplified licensing, and sites get to monetize content that's been fueling models for free — but enforcement and adoption are difficult barriers to overcome.

QUICK HITS

  • 📊 Claude - Now create files for PowerPoint slides, Excel sheets, and PDFs

  • 🌱 Seedream 4.0 - ByteDance’s unified image creation and editing model

  • 🤖 ERNIE X1.1 - Baidu’s new SOTA reasoning model

  • 🎥 Veo 3 - Google’s video AI, now with 1080p vertical outputs, reduced price

Exclusive AI Rippling x Cursor Event, Sept 16: When every hire is a 10x hire — Parker Conrad & Michael Truell reveal the hyper-scale playbook. Save your seat.*

Adobe introduced the AI Agent Orchestrator program with six specialized agents, including Audience Agent and Journey Agent, to automate CX and marketing.

Mira Murati’s Thinking Machines Lab published research on making AI responses more consistent and predictable, taking its initial step toward sharing work openly.

Stability AI launched Stable Audio 2.5, a new audio model for enterprise-grade outputs that can create three-minute tracks in seconds.

The UAE released K2 Think, a 32B parameter open-source reasoner built on Alibaba’s Qwen 2.5 model with speed and strong performance despite its small size.

ElevenLabs introduced Voice Remixing, a new feature allowing users to change aspects of both designed and user voices for more customizable outputs.

*Sponsored Listing

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 Gigi G. in Dubois, Wyoming:

"I am a fitness trainer for women 50 and over. I build strength training and nutrition programs for my online fitness business. I use ChatGPT to assist me in my social media posts, case study letters, onboarding, and welcome letters for new clients. If I need an idea for a post on menopause or osteoporosis or any of the various pain points that women 50 and over experience, I use ChatGPT to get my point across, but in a more eloquent way."

How do you use AI? Tell us here.

That's it for today!

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

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