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- Sam Altman rallies the troops
Sam Altman rallies the troops
PLUS: Cloudflare creates pay-per-crawl AI marketplace
Zach Mink & Rowan Cheung
July 02, 2025
Good morning, AI enthusiasts. “Someone breaking into our home" is how OpenAI executives are describing Meta's aggressive recruiting push, and Sam Altman just rallied the troops.
A fiery late-night message to staff revealed a CEO betting that purpose beats paychecks — and one that believes building AGI requires more than just the highest bidder.
In today’s AI rundown:
Altman fires back at Meta's poaching spree
Cloudflare creates pay-per-crawl AI marketplace
Create competitive intelligence reports with Claude
OpenAI’s high-level enterprise consulting business
4 new AI tools & 4 job opportunities
LATEST DEVELOPMENTS
OPENAI
Image source: GPT-4o / The Rundown
The Rundown: OpenAI CEO Sam Altman sent a fiery Slack message to researchers Monday night, according to WIRED — dismissing Meta's recruiting tactics as "distasteful" while pitching why building AGI at OpenAI beats chasing paychecks.
The details:
Altman said Meta failed to land their top targets despite offering packages up to $300M over four years, saying they had to go “quite far down their list.”
The CEO promised that OAI is evaluating compensation across the research division, arguing its stock has "much, much more upside" than Meta.
He also warned Meta's tactics would create "deep cultural problems," contrasting OAI's mission-driven culture with a "flavor of the week" mentality.
Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg introduced “Meta Superintelligence Labs” to employees this week, with 11 new hires from OpenAI, Google, and Anthropic.
Why it matters: Sama is rallying the troops in the face of what CRO Mark Chen compared to “someone breaking into our home,” hoping that OpenAI’s culture and vibes can outlast Meta’s “mercenary” offers. But only time will tell how impactful the losses are on both OpenAI’s model lead and the reshaping of Meta’s AI operations.
TOGETHER WITH TELY AI
The Rundown: You’re in a niche industry. Customers search on Google, ChatGPT, and Perplexity — but your company doesn’t show up, because there’s no content answering their questions. Tely AI fixes that by analyzing your industry and site to find what people search for and creating expert-level articles on autopilot. No need for a marketing team.
With Tely AI, you can:
Start with 60 high-quality articles a month
Get indexed on Google in as little as 2 weeks
Be featured in ChatGPT and Perplexity answers
Enjoy full automation for topics, writing, and publishing
CLOUDFARE
Image source: Reve / The Rundown
The Rundown: Web infrastructure giant Cloudflare just made a major change to automatically block AI crawlers by default on new websites, alongside the launch of a marketplace where publishers can charge bots micropayments for accessing content.
The details:
Cloudflare will require AI companies to get explicit permission before scraping any of the 20% of websites it protects, reversing decades of open web policies.
Publishers can set individual prices for AI crawlers through Pay per Crawl, choosing whether bots pay for training data, search results, or other uses.
Media outlets like Condé Nast, TIME, and The Atlantic joined the initiative, citing traffic losses due to AI answering queries without the original sources.
Data shows OAI’s crawlers scrape sites 1,700 times per referral sent back, with Anthropic at 73,000 times per referral — compared to 14-to-1 for Google.
Why it matters: This potentially positions Cloudflare as one of the gatekeepers for the data needed for a coming wave of agents that browse on our behalf. The marketplace could force healthier AI-publisher relationships, but also might create an internet divided between premium content and free sites that become AI's default sources.
AI TRAINING
The Rundown: In this tutorial, you will learn how to use Claude's web search and research capabilities to analyze competitors and generate interactive executive dashboards that reveal market opportunities.
Step-by-step:
Head over to Claude and enable Extended Thinking for deeper analysis
Request it to search 5-7 competitors with company overviews, funding data, and recent strategic moves
Select the “Research” tool to conduct a comprehensive competitive assessment covering financial analysis, product, and market positioning
Ask it to create an interactive executive dashboard using Artifacts
Pro tip: Claude Opus 4's research mode can conduct multi-source competitive analysis that rivals professional market research firms.
PRESENTED BY KORBIT
The Rundown: In healthtech, moving fast is only part of the equation — shipping secure, high-quality software is the real challenge. This live event with InVita and Korbit explores how leading healthcare teams are integrating AI into the code review process to reduce risk, improve code quality, and free up developers for high-impact work.
Join and discover:
The hidden risks of manual code reviews in regulated healthcare software
Why AI-powered reviews are critical for security, quality, and team alignment
How InVita cut review time and improved developer productivity using Korbit
OPENAI
Image source: Reve / The Rundown
The Rundown: OpenAI is building out a consulting arm that charges enterprises at least $10M to customize AI models, according to a new report from The Information — putting the AI leader in competition with industry giants like Palantir and Accenture.
The details:
OpenAI hired nearly a dozen "forward-deployed engineers,” many from Palantir, to guide customers through model customization and app development.
Customers must commit at least $10M for access to OpenAI researchers, with some deals reaching hundreds of millions over multiple years.
The startup aims to develop billion-dollar custom AI solutions while partnering with data labeling firms like Snorkel AI for specialized domain expertise.
OpenAI recently secured a $200M defense contract with the Pentagon, with other enterprise clients including Morgan Stanley and Grab.
Why it matters: Companies are rushing to integrate AI, and who better to guide them than the researchers who helped build it? Custom AI models trained on proprietary data unlock capabilities that generic chatbots can't touch and could result in billions in operational efficiency and competitive advantage — even with the lofty price tags.
QUICK HITS
🤖 Ernie 4.5 - Baidu’s latest open-source family of advanced AI models
🧬 Chai-2 - AI capable of creating functional antibodies for drug development
⚙️ Cursor Agents - Work with a powerful coding assistant on browser & mobile
📝 Co-STORM - Write Wikipedia-like articles from scratch based on AI search
🔁 The Rundown - Strategic Partnerships (AI University)
📈 OpenAI - Market Researcher, Brand
🤝 Captions - Customer Success Manager
🛠️ Together AI - Senior Developer Productivity Engineer
Amazon rolled out DeepFleet, an AI that routes warehouse bots 10% faster to trim costs and shorten delivery times, while announcing the company’s millionth robot.
Cursor reportedly hired Boris Cherny and Cat Wu, two members of Anthropic’s Claude Code product team — with plans to work on “agent-like” features in the new roles.
Ai2 released SciArena, a new benchmarking platform focused specifically on scientific literature knowledge, with OpenAI’s o3 ranking atop the leaderboard.
X is reportedly launching a new pilot program that will allow AI chatbots to create Community Notes on the social media platform.
The English Premier League announced a partnership to integrate Microsoft’s Copilot into its platforms, allowing fans to have more personalized interactions.
Grammarly acquired AI-first email platform Superhuman, aiming to create a multi-agent AI productivity platform centered around users’ inboxes.
COMMUNITY
Join our next workshop this Friday, July 4th, at 4 PM EST with Dr. Alvaro Cintas, The Rundown’s AI professor. By the end of the workshop, you’ll confidently wire MCP into both conversational AI and your favorite coding IDEs
RSVP here. Not a member? Join The Rundown University on a 14-day free trial.
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. |
See you soon,
Rowan, Joey, Zach, Alvaro, and Jason—The Rundown’s editorial team
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