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Good morning, {{ first_name | AI enthusiasts }}. A fresh challenger just entered the AGI arena — and its founder wrote the framework that powers modern AI.
François Chollet’s new AI lab, Ndea, is approaching artificial general intelligence from a new angle—but can it outmaneuver the massive compute advantages of other tech giants?
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In today’s AI rundown:
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François Chollet founds new AGI lab
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Microsoft expands Copilot access with free tier
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Try on any clothes virtually with AI
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Luma Labs drops new next-gen AI video model
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4 new AI tools & 4 job opportunities
LATEST DEVELOPMENTS
AI RESEARCH
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Image source: Ndea
The Rundown: François Chollet, former Google researcher and the creator of the popular Keras AI framework, just Ndea, a new AI lab aiming to achieve AGI through an alternative research method, alongside Zapier founder Mike Knoop.
The details:
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Ndea’s core strategy combines deep learning with program synthesis, aiming to create AI that can learn and adapt with human-level efficiency.
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The startup positions itself as an alternative to the dominant large-scale deep learning approach, arguing that training data limits current AI.
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Ndea plans to build what they call a “factory for rapid scientific advancement,” focusing on both known frontiers like drug discovery and unexplored territories.
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Chollet also recently the ARC Prize Foundation, a nonprofit that is developing benchmarks to evaluate human-level AI capabilities.
Why it matters: Chollet is a massive figure in AI — and his decision to create his own lab could offer a fresh perspective in the race to AGI. With Ndea, Ilya Sutskever’s SSI, and many of the brightest minds in AI taking different research angles, the groundbreaking achievement could come from any corner of the industry.
TOGETHER WITH HUMAN[X]
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The Rundown: The HumanX 2025 agenda is officially here, offering a jam-packed lineup of sessions and speakers from companies like OpenAI, Anthropic, and Amazon that dive into AI’s impact on creativity, business, and the human experience.
Attend can’t-miss sessions like:
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How AI will transform the human experience with OpenAI
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The future of AI starts here: Lessons from Amazon
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Anthropic’s vision for the future of AI
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Inside Canva’s dream lab: Designing the future of creativity
using code HX25n_therundown for $150 off a GA pass.
MICROSOFT
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Image source: Microsoft
The Rundown: Microsoft just Microsoft 365 Copilot Chat, a rebranded free entry-level version of its AI assistant platform that introduces pay-per-use agent capabilities while maintaining core AI features for business users.
The details:
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The new tier offers free access to GPT-4o-powered chat, which includes web-based knowledge, file analysis capabilities, and image and code generation.
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Users can access custom for task automation, with a consumption-based model at $0.01 per message or $200 for 25,000 messages monthly.
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Agents can leverage knowledge sources for a range of tasks and actions, and the Copilot Control System allows IT teams to manage the platform easily.
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The offering aims to bridge the gap between free users and the full Microsoft 365 Copilot subscription ($30/user/month).
Why it matters: Microsoft’s launch is a shot at Gemini’s free push into its Workplace apps, but the differentiator (for now) is the agentic capabilities. For orgs looking to continue integrating AI easily across their knowledge bases and employees, Microsoft still looks like a powerhouse — though it will have no shortage of fast-moving rivals.
AI TRAINING
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The Rundown: Hugging Face’s new Leffa space allows you to try on any piece of clothing virtually by uploading your photo and a garment image.
Step-by-step:
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Visit the Leffa project on Hugging Face – no registration is needed.
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Upload your full-body photo and the garment you want to try.
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In Advanced Options, select your garment type (upper, lower, or dress) and click Generate to see yourself in new clothes.
Pro tip: For the best results, use clear, front-facing photos against simple backgrounds. This is perfect for previewing online shopping purchases.
PRESENTED BY CONTEXTUAL
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The Rundown: Contextual AI, pioneers of Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG), just launched the Contextual AI platform to help organizations build specialized RAG agents designed for complex, technical, and knowledge-intensive tasks.
With the Contextual AI Platform, you can:
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Build specialized RAG agents that achieve exceptional accuracy on knowledge-intensive tasks
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Reason over massive volumes of unstructured and structured data
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Maximize user trust with protections against hallucinations and precise citations
to learn more and request platform access.
LUMA LABS
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Image source: Luma Labs
The Rundown: Luma Labs just Ray 2, the startup’s next-generation AI video model — which promises unprecedented motion quality and physics realism through a new multimodal architecture trained with 10x more computing power than its predecessor.
The details:
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The model can generate high-quality video clips up to 10 seconds long from text prompts, and it has advanced motion and physics capabilities.
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Ray2 demonstrates a sophisticated understanding of object interactions, from natural scenes like water physics to complex human movements.
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Ray2 can currently handle text, image, and video-to-video generations, and Luma will soon add editing capabilities to the model.
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The system is launching first in Luma’s Dream Machine platform for paid subscribers, with API access coming soon.
Why it matters: Veo 2’s launch around the holidays felt like a new level of realism and quality for AI video, and now Luma punches back with some heat of its own. It’s becoming impossible to discern AI video from reality — and the question is which lab will crack longer-length, coherent outputs and unlock a new realm of creative power.
QUICK HITS
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🧠 – Ultra-long context open-source LLM assistant
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🗓️ – Schedule tasks and reminders in ChatGPT
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🤖 – Automate tasks with AI agents that work for you 24/7
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💪 – AI vision app to turn your phone into a pushup trainer
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📊 – Analytics Engineer
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🛠️ – Director, Strategic Sourcing and Procurement
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📈 – Business Operations Analyst
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💼 – Head of FP&A
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Free event: How to Educate Kids on AI. Hear from a panel of edtech leaders, incl. Sora Schools CEO Garrett Smiley on Jan. 26. .*
Sakana AI Transformer2, a self-adaptive language model that dynamically adjusts neural pathways for different tasks, outperforming traditional approaches while using fewer parameters.
Google is with the Associated Press to feed real-time news into its Gemini AI assistant, marking the tech giant’s first AI deal with a news publisher.
AI video platform Synthesia a $180M Series D, raising the Nvidia-backed company’s valuation to $2.1B.
OpenAI its news partnership with Axios, announcing the funding of four new local newsrooms integrated with ChatGPT and other AI tools.
Cisco AI Defense, a new safety and security platform that tackles unauthorized AI tampering and data leakage through network-level protection and automated safety checks.
*Sponsored listing
COMMUNITY
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Join our next workshop this Friday to learn about how to prompt ChatGPT o1 models effectively for Coding, Reasoning, and Advanced Research with Dr. Alvaro Cintas, The Rundown’s AI professor.
RSVP . Not a member? Join on a 14-day free trial.
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See you soon,
Rowan, Joey, Zach, Alvaro, and Jason—The Rundown’s editorial team