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SoftBank and OpenAI announce 'Cristal Intelligence'

PLUS: Automate meeting prep with AI Agents

Author

Rowan Cheung
February 04, 2025

Good morning, AI enthusiasts. SoftBank just announced a massive $3B annual commitment to OpenAI alongside 'Cristal Intelligence'’ a joint venture to bring customized AI tools exclusively to Japanese businesses.

With Stargate's $500B data centers and now Cristal Intelligence, are we witnessing Japan's big move in the global AI race?

Community note: We’re hosting a live workshop today at 3 PM EST going in-depth how to build and deploy complete mobile apps with AI. RSVP here.

In today’s AI rundown:

  • SoftBank and OpenAI announce 'Cristal Intelligence'

  • Anthropic challenges hackers to break its AI

  • Automate meeting prep with AI Agents

  • EU invests $56M to build open-source AI rival

  • 4 new AI tools & 4 job opportunities

LATEST DEVELOPMENTS

SOFTBANK

Image source: SoftBank

The Rundown: SoftBank just announced a $3 billion annual commitment to OpenAI's technology while launching ‘Cristal Intelligence,’ a joint venture to bring customized OpenAI tools exclusively to Japanese businesses.

The details:

  • SoftBank will spend $3B annually on OpenAI technology across its subsidiaries, including Arm and PayPay.

  • Cristal Intelligence will offer a specialized business version of ChatGPT and OpenAI's API, which is exclusively available in Japan.

  • The joint venture aims to provide secure, customized enterprise integrations, potentially competing with traditional consulting firms.

  • This partnership follows SoftBank's involvement in "Stargate," a $500B data center initiative with OpenAI and Oracle.

Why it matters: This massive investment ($3B per YEAR) signals Japan's serious push into the global AI race through SoftBank's growing alliance with OpenAI. With their recent Stargate partnership and now Cristal Intelligence, SoftBank is going all in on building the infrastructure to dominate AI deployment across Asia.

TOGETHER WITH HUBSPOT

The Rundown: HubSpot’s free ‘AI Task Delegation’ playbook helps turn artificial intelligence into your own personal assistant, enabling you to delegate routine work effectively, boost productivity, and reclaim over 10 hours each week.

Inside, you’ll find:

  • The exact templates used by top performers to delegate 80% of routine work to AI

  • An all-in-one Command Center to integrate and manage your AI tools

  • A step-by-step implementation guide to mastering AI delegation in under 60 minutes

  • A built-in ROI calculator for time savings, advanced ChatGPT prompts, and more

ANTHROPIC

Image source: The Rundown / Ideogram

The Rundown: Anthropic just unveiled Constitutional Classifiers, a new AI safety system with promising results, and is inviting the public to help stress-test it after surviving over 3,000 hours of unsuccessful bug bounty attempts.

The details:

  • The system uses AI to generate training data in multiple languages and writing styles, helping it catch diverse jailbreak attempts.

  • In testing against 10,000 advanced jailbreak attempts, it blocked 95.6% of attacks, compared to just 14% for unprotected Claude.

  • 183 bug bounty hunters spent over 3,000 hours trying to break the system for a $15,000 reward, but none succeeded in fully jailbreaking it.

  • Anthropic is inviting the public to test the system until February 10.

Why it matters: As AI models become increasingly powerful, it is crucial to prevent them from being manipulated to cause harm. While most companies rely mainly on training for AI safety, Anthropic's new approach of using AI to catch jailbreaks shows promise, and opening it to public testing flaunts their commitment to making AI safer.

AI TRAINING

The Rundown: Lindy AI allows anyone to create AI agents with no code, such as a ‘Pre-meeting Prep Agent‘ that automatically researches attendees, gathers email history, and sends you a comprehensive pre-meeting brief before every meeting.

Step-by-step:

  1. Visit Lindy AI and create a new automation from scratch, or select a starting template.

  2. Set up ‘Calendar Event Started trigger’ (customize timing for pre-meeting briefs).

  3. Add conditions to check for external attendees and configure research actions, e.g., internet search or email history.

  4. Set up email brief delivery with all the gathered information.

  5. Your AI agent can send briefs 15 minutes pre-meeting, saving you time to prep in between tight windows.

Pro tip: We did an extensive workshop with Flo Crivello, CEO of Lindy AI, which you can access here (alongside an exclusive Rundown University member discount rate).

PRESENTED BY SYNCLY

The Rundown: Syncly (YC W23) is a customer feedback intelligence platform that processes customer feedback—giving you actionable insights to reduce churn, refine products, and improve customer experiences at scale.

Syncly helps you:

  • Quickly identify and address issues impacting customer experience

  • Stay ahead of churn by spotting and engaging at-risk customers before they leave

  • Employ self-training AI for deeper insights with less hands-on effort

  • Leverage analytics to spot new opportunities and operational improvements

Book a free trial now and uncover your customer intelligence today.

EUROPEAN UNION

Image source: The Rundown / Ideogram

The Rundown: The European Union has announced a $56M investment to develop OpenEuroLLM, a new open-source large language model that works with all 30 European languages.

The details:

  • The project will leverage EU supercomputers like Spain's Mare Nostrum and Italy's Leonardo.

  • While $56M is tiny compared to OpenAI's reported $40B raise, it's 10x what DeepSeek claimed to have spent on their breakthrough model.

  • The initiative promises fully open models, software, and data that can be fine-tuned for specific sectors like healthcare and banking.

  • The goal is to create an open-source LLM that European companies and governments can build upon, with EU values "baked in."

Why it matters: After years of scrutiny focusing on AI regulation, the EU is finally stepping into the AI race (…sort of). While $56M is puny compared to major AI giants investing billions, the EU may succeed in specialized, industry-specific AI, especially following DeepSeek's recent success with low-budget open-source models.

QUICK HITS

  • 🧠 OpenAI Deep Research - A new ChatGPT Pro plan feature that does extensive web research and delivers detailed reports with citations

  • 🕵️ Geospy AI - Finds the location from any photo by analyzing its pixels

  • 📝 Tana - An AI-native workspace that turns notes into work tasks

  • 🔥 Open Deep Research - An open-source alternative to Gemini and OpenAI Deep Research

ARC Prize found OpenAI’s new o3-mini AI model to patch o1 on its ARC-AGI-1 Semi-Private Test Set while being 100x less the cost.

Meta published its Frontier AI Framework, emphasizing its commitment to open-source development while focusing on mitigating cybersecurity and weapon risks.

The Beatles won a Grammy for Best Rock Performance with "Now and Then," an AI-enhanced song that used noise reduction to clean up an old Lennon demo.

OpenAI expanded ChatGPT's WhatsApp integration globally, adding image uploads and voice message support simply by texting 1-800-CHATGPT (1-800-242-8478).

UK researchers developed self-healing asphalt using biomass waste and Google Cloud's AI, potentially solving the country's ‘pothole crisis’.

Microsoft is forming a new unit called the Advanced Planning Unit (APU) within its AI division to study AI's implications for society, health, and work.

COMMUNITY

Join our next live workshop today at 3 PM EST for a special 90-minute deep dive into building revenue-generating mobile apps using AI with Kevin Hou, Head of Product Engineering at Codeium.

RSVP here. Not a member yet? Join The Rundown University on a 14-day free trial.

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See you soon,

Rowan, Joey, Zach, Alvaro, and Jason—The Rundown’s editorial team

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