AI Rundown: Thinking Machines Fallout

Morning Brief: AI, startups, and the latest industry moves

Good morning, {{ first_name | AI enthusiasts }}. Sam Altman wasn't just waiting to welcome Thinking Machines talent back — he'd been talking to them for months. New reporting shows last week's messy split at Mira Murati's startup had been brewing behind the scenes, with co-founders unhappy about direction and OpenAI positioned to pick up the pieces.

Today's AI rundown

• Inside the Thinking Machines meltdown
• Google hires Hume's CEO and engineers
• Learn any subject with NotebookLM podcasts
• Runway: 90% can't spot video
• 4 new AI tools, community workflows, and more — plus gaming news

OPENAI & THINKING MACHINES

Inside the Thinking Machines meltdown

New details emerged about last week's split at Mira Murati's Thinking Machines Lab, with reporting from the NYT and The Information. The story describes a tense meeting, secret talks with Sam Altman, and a failed acquisition discussion with Meta.

• What happened: CTO Barrett Zoph and two co-founders reportedly confronted Murati days before his firing to press for control of technical decisions. Murati allegedly told Zoph to "just do his job," and he was fired later that week.
• Aftermath: Nine other TML employees left for OpenAI or received offers. Zoph had reportedly been in contact with Altman for months.
• Context: Co-founders pushed for a sale to Meta while Murati resisted. TML reportedly struggled to raise funds at a $50B target valuation.
• Where Zoph lands: He will now lead OpenAI's enterprise AI sales plans as part of a reorg aimed at closing the gap between research and product teams.

Why it matters: What looked like a sudden departure now reads like a months-long power struggle. OpenAI was ready to catch the fallout.

TOGETHER WITH AUTH0

Auth for the agentic era

AI agents are reshaping digital experiences. But securing them means rethinking identity and access controls built for human-first systems. Auth0 for AI Agents is now generally available and aims to give developers a complete auth solution for agentic workflows.

• Token Vault for secure agent-to-app connections
• Human-in-the-loop approvals for critical actions
• Fine-grained authorization for RAG to reduce data leaks
• Native support for LangChain, LlamaIndex, Cloudflare Agents, and more

GOOGLE & HUME

Google brings on Hume's CEO and engineers

Google DeepMind hired Hume AI's CEO Alan Cowen and about seven engineers under a licensing and acqui-hire arrangement. Hume's emotionally intelligent voice technology will be integrated into Gemini's voice features.

• Hume will continue operating under a new CEO, Andrew Ettinger, and still supply voice training data to other labs.
• This follows Google's prior $3B Character AI licensing move and mirrors similar hires by Microsoft and Meta.

Why it matters: Voice interaction is becoming central to AI. Emotional nuance and tone separate a useful assistant from a clunky one—especially as AI wearables and devices near mainstream adoption.

AI TRAINING

Learn any subject with NotebookLM podcasts

NotebookLM can turn scattered sources into an audio learning experience. Use it to create short podcasts from PDFs, web pages, and videos. This helps digest information while you commute, exercise, or do chores.

1. Go to notebooklm.google.com and create a new notebook. Add sources such as YouTube links, PDFs, or websites.
2. Control which sources the model uses via the left sidebar.
3. Under "Studio," click "Audio Overview" to generate a podcast (takes 5–10 minutes).
4. When ready, use the three-dot menu to download the mp3 or listen in-browser or on the NotebookLM mobile app.

Pro tip: Use the "interactive" button to "call in" and ask questions to the AI podcast hosts.

PRESENTED BY SCROLL AI

AI-powered experts for serious work

Scroll.ai transforms knowledge bases into domain-specialist AI experts to automate complex workflows. Use it to generate compliance responses, RFPs, and accurate documentation quickly.

• Deploy custom AI experts tailored to your field.
• Automate repetitive tasks for sales, marketing, and legal teams.

AI RESEARCH

Runway: 90% can't spot video

Runway's research shows over 90% of participants couldn't tell which short clips were by its Gen-4.5 model. The study asked 1,000+ people to evaluate 20 five-second clips.

• Only 99 participants scored 75% or higher.
• Nature scenes and buildings were hardest to distinguish; generated clips often looked more convincing.
• Gen-4.5 ranks highly among text-to-video models and now offers image-to-video features.

Why it matters: Realistic AI video undermines "seeing is believing." Verification standards are critical, but detection remains challenging.

Trending AI tools

• Qwen3-TTS — Alibaba's open-source, state-of-the-art text-to-speech models
• Ernie 5.0 — Baidu's new omnimodal, top-ranked Chinese model
• Gen-4.5 — Runway's powerful video model with image-to-video conversion
• Pencil — An infinite design canvas for Claude Code

Everything else in AI today

• Shane Legg (Google DeepMind co-founder) posted a "Chief AGI Economist" job, saying AGI is on the horizon.
• OpenAI CFO Sarah Friar floated "value sharing" at Davos—licensing stakes in discoveries made using OAI's models, starting with drug development.
• Amazon One Medical launched an agentic health assistant for personal medical insights and booking care.
• xAI updated Grok Imagine for generations up to 10 seconds with improved audio/video.
• Google added "Personal Intelligence" features in AI Mode for Search to reference Gmail and Photos content.
• Yelp will acquire AI startup Hatch for $270M to automate customer communication for service businesses.

Community AI workflows

Each newsletter highlights a reader's AI workflow. Today's submission comes from Nicole S. in the UAE.

"I use NotebookLM to create audio summaries from newsletters, PDFs, and URLs. I listen during short yoga stretches, housework, or lunch—giving my eyes a rest while the learning continues."

Want to share how you use AI? Tell us here.

See you soon,

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

Note: For readers interested in gaming news, we'll include more coverage of AI's role in game development, voice agents in games, and tools used for procedural content generation in upcoming editions.