New York Times, Amazon ink AI deal

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Good morning, {{ first_name | AI enthusiasts }}. One of journalism’s last major AI holdouts just fell — with the New York Times officially signing its first-ever AI licensing deal with Amazon.

Despite ongoing lawsuits against OpenAI and Microsoft, a change in user habits (and financial streams for editorial outlets) may be forcing a decisive new chapter in the industry’s uneasy AI embrace.


In today’s AI rundown:

  • NYT signs AI licensing agreement with Amazon

  • Black Forest Labs’ new image editing model

  • Automate patient consultation documentation

  • AI achieves first peer-reviewed paper acceptance

  • 4 new AI tools & 4 job opportunities

LATEST DEVELOPMENTS

THE NEW YORK TIMES & AMAZON

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Image source: Gemini / The Rundown

The Rundown: The New York Times just its first-ever AI licensing deal with Amazon, allowing the company to use NYT editorial content across its platforms and to train its AI models.

The details:

  • The multi-year deal covers licensed content, including articles from the Times, recipes from NYT Cooking, and sports content from The Athletic.

  • Amazon will incorporate the content into products like Alexa smart speakers, which will attribute NYT content and provide links for a full reader experience.

  • The deal is the NYT’s first AI licensing deal, and comes amidst ongoing against OpenAI and Microsoft over the use of its content for training.

Why it matters: One of the last major holdouts in journalism is finally giving in to the AI wave — but is notably (though unsurprisingly, at least in OpenAI’s case) going with Amazon over stronger AI rivals. The tech has quickly changed how and where users consume content, and even the staunchest detractors are now changing course.

TOGETHER WITH TELY AI

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The Rundown: With Tely AI, you don’t need an SEO expert or content team — AI does it for you. Tely AI learns your business, niche, and competitors, then creates niche-specific content for topics your customers are already searching for.

Tely AI does SEO for you on autopilot:

  • Deep keyword research and topic selection.

  • Publishes 60+ articles and lead magnets monthly on autopilot

  • Gets content indexed by Google in 2 weeks and first traffic in 30 days

  • Works in EN, FR, DE, ES, PT, and other languages

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BLACK FOREST LABS

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Image source: Black Forest Labs

The Rundown: Black Forest Labs just FLUX.1 Kontext, a new AI system that understands both text and images — enabling users to edit and transform images with simple text commands while maintaining character consistency across iterations.

The details:

  • Unlike other text-to-image models, Kontext processes visual and text inputs together, enabling targeted editing at speeds up to 8x faster than rival models.

  • The system excels at character preservation, local editing, style transfer, and maintaining consistency across multiple steps and versions of an image.

  • BFL released two versions: Kontext [pro] for fast multi-step editing and [max] for higher quality, better prompt following, and enhanced typography.

  • The company also introduced Playground, a web-based platform for businesses to test models before integrating them via APIs.

Why it matters: OpenAI’s 4o / gpt-image-1 release was a major step forward in editing via text prompts, but often appears to recreate its own rendering of an image rather than preserving important details for specific characters. BFL’s latest release looks to be a step up in maintaining consistency at much faster speeds.

AI TRAINING

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The Rundown: In this tutorial, you will learn how to build an automated system that transcribes your patient consultations, generates medical summaries, extracts treatment plans, and compiles everything into a document.

Step-by-step:

  1. Visit , click the plus button, and create a “New Agent”

  2. Configure your agent to trigger when new (anonymized) audio files are uploaded to a specified folder in Google Drive

  3. Add three essential tools: ChatGPT to transcribe the audio, ChatGPT again to create a medical summary and extract treatment recommendations, and Google Docs to compile everything into a structured clinical document

  4. Test your setup with simulated data and activate your agent

Note: Always obtain patient consent before recording, remove identifiable info before processing, and ensure storage methods comply with healthcare privacy regulations.

PRESENTED BY GOOGLE CLOUD

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The Rundown: Startup School: Agentic AI from Google Cloud is back with expert-led workshops that provide actionable strategies for integrating agent technology into your startup’s core offerings.

Join this training series for:

  • Insights into agent capabilities and why there’s never been a better time to adopt them

  • Hands-on guidance for implementing Google Cloud’s AI tools and pre-trained models

  • Access to Google Cloud and AI experts to help solve your scaling challenges

— it all starts on June 10.

INTOLOGY AI

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Image source: Intology

The Rundown: Intology AI’s Zochi just the first AI to independently achieve peer-reviewed publication at ACL 2025, an A* natural language processing conference, showing the ability to conduct scientific research at the highest academic standards.

The details:

  • Zochi autonomously completed the entire research process, from analyzing thousands of papers to designing experiments and writing the manuscript.

  • The system’s “Tempest” on multi-turn jailbreaking achieved a 4.0 meta-review score, placing it in the top 8.2% of all ACL submissions.

  • Operating without human intervention except for formatting fixes, Zochi identified research gaps, implemented new methods, and validated results.

  • Intology plans to release Zochi in beta as a collaborative research tool, starting with a general copilot before expanding to full autonomous capabilities.

Why it matters: We’ve seen plenty of competition in the AI scientist arena, but ACL’s selective acceptance rate and the paper’s score reflect one of the most impressive publications to date from an agentic system. As AI begins contributing original research alongside humans, the pace of discovery is about to exponentially increase.

QUICK HITS

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  • 🤖  – New upgraded reasoning and overall improvements

  • 🖥️ – Opera’s new agentic web browser

  • 🎥  – Summarize and ask questions about Google Drive videos

  • 🛠️ – Turn your APIs & data into tools AI workers can use

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  • 🤖  – Field Engineering Manager, Robotics

  • 💻 – Software Engineer, Backend

  • 📊  – Revenue Operations Data Analyst

  • 🧠  – Strategic Programs Lead

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DeepSeek’s new update to its R1 model  into the No. 3 slot on the Artificial Analysis leaderboard, now behind only OpenAI’s o3 and o4-mini.

Tencent’s Hunyuan HunyuanVideo-Avatar, an open-source model that turns still images into short videos with sound.

Perplexity Labs, a new feature for Pro users that enables content creation like analytical reports, through multi-tool integrations for more complex tasks.

Hume EVI 3, a new speech language model that creates custom voices through speech-to-speech interaction and outperforms OpenAI’s GPT-4o in testing.

Resemble AI Chatterbox, a free new voice cloning model that the company claims surpasses leaders like ElevenLabs in testing.

Manus Manus Slides, a new feature allowing the agentic system to create tailored slide decks autonomously.

COMMUNITY

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Join our next workshop today at 4 PM EST with Dr. Alvaro Cintas, The Rundown’s AI professor. By the end of the workshop, you’ll confidently be able to use AI coding agents to improve your development workflow.

RSVP . Not a member? Join on a 14-day free trial.

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We’ll always keep this newsletter 100% free. To support our work, consider with your friends, and we’ll send you more free goodies.

See you soon,

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

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