PLUS: Harvard researchers create AI agent for medicine
Good morning, AI enthusiasts. China’s AI acceleration is back, with tech giant Baidu launching two powerful AI models at just 1% the price of OpenAI’s GPT-4.5, and half of the price of DeepSeek’s R1.
With impressive performance claims and radically lower costs, we’re likely witnessing the beginning of a global AI price war.
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China’s Baidu launches ultra-cheap AI models
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Judge rejects Musk's bid to block OpenAI's evolution
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How to code with AI, directly in your editor
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Harvard team creates AI agent for personalized medicine
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4 new AI tools & 4 job opportunities
BAIDU
The Rundown: Chinese tech giant Baidu just released two aggressively priced multimodal AI models — ERNIE 4.5, a significant upgrade to their foundational model, and a new deep-think-capable model called Ernie X1.
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ERNIE 4.5 stands out with enhanced “EQ” and language skills as well as improved hallucination prevention, logical reasoning, and coding abilities.
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According to Baidu, ERNIE 4.5 outperforms GPT-4o across multiple benchmarks while costing just 1% of its price — approximately $0.55 and $2.20 per million input and output tokens.
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ERNIE X1, Baidu’s first reasoning model, matches the capabilities of top Chinese competitor DeepSeek's R1 at half the price.
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Like DeepSeek’s R1, ERNIE X1 uses a step-by-step "thinking" approach, excelling in complex calculations and tasks like document understanding.
Why it matters: China continues to build intelligence too cheap to meter. With ERNIE 4.5 at 1% the cost of GPT 4.5, and ERNIE X1 matching DeepSeek's R1 at half the price, we're likely witnessing the start of a global AI price war. This strategy could force Western competitors to slash rates, democratizing access to advanced AI worldwide.
TOGETHER WITH HUBSPOT
The Rundown: HubSpot’s ‘AI For Business Builders’ free guide shows you how to join the savvy entrepreneurs quietly leveraging artificial intelligence for real business growth — with no P.H.D. needed.
This no-BS guide cuts through the hype, giving you:
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A jargon-free breakdown of large language models (the engine behind AI's magic)
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Concrete steps to leverage AI for immediate business growth
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Real-world examples that turn "prompt engineering" from gibberish into a secret weapon
OPENAI
Image source: Getty Images / Reuters
The Rundown: A federal judge has denied Elon Musk’s request for a preliminary injunction against OpenAI's structural changes, while fast-tracking the trial and dismissing several of Musk's claims entirely, according to a March 4, 2025 ruling.
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The judge said Musk didn’t have "the high burden” for a preliminary injunction but allowed other aspects of the lawsuit with an expedited trial this fall.
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Internal emails cited by OpenAI allegedly show Musk once wanted to merge OpenAI into Tesla as a for-profit entity—contradicting his current legal position.
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Musk sued OpenAI and its CEO, Sam Altman, last year over straying from their original mission of developing AI for the good of humanity, not corporate profits.
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OpenAI and Altman have denied the accusations, saying the non-profit is not going—and any restructuring of for-profit subsidiaries will only better support it.
Why it matters: With OpenAI's rumored ~$40B SoftBank investment hanging on its pivot to a for-profit model, this lawsuit could reshape the company's trajectory and its AI models' evolution. Having last raised $6.6B at a $157B valuation, the stakes for both the company and the broader AI landscape could not be higher.
AI TRAINING
The Rundown: In this tutorial, you will learn to use ChatGPT's updated macOS app and its "Work with Apps" feature to edit code directly in your preferred development environment.
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Install the proper extension in your code editor—search for "openai.chatgpt" in the Extensions marketplace (VS Code/Cursor) or sideload the VSIX file for other editors.
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Open the ChatGPT app, find the "Work With" panel in the sidebar, and select your code editor from the list.
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Open any code file in your editor, and ChatGPT will automatically connect to it.
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Ask ChatGPT to explain sections or modify your code by typing natural language requests, review it, and click "Apply" to instantly update your file.
Pro tip: Different ChatGPT models offer varying levels of code expertise - choose based on whether you need quick edits or complex refactoring.
PRESENTED BY FIDDLER
The Rundown: Fiddler AI and AWS’s upcoming webinar breaks down how to increase visibility and security for AI agent workflows — helping you drive innovation without sacrificing compliance or trust.
In this live webinar, you'll discover:
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How AI observability boosts transparency in agent decision-making processes
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Best practices to protect agents from risks using tools like Guardrails
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Essential tips for balancing innovation, compliance, and operational security
AI RESEARCH
The Rundown: Researchers from Harvard and MIT just introduced TxAgent, an AI agent that leverages multi-step reasoning and real-time biomedical knowledge retrieval to generate trusted, personalized treatment recommendations for patients.
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TxAgent utilizes 211 specialized tools to analyze drug interactions and contraindications and suggest patient-specific treatments in real time.
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It evaluates drugs at molecular, pharmacokinetic, and clinical levels, identifying risks based on comorbidities, ongoing medications, age, and genetic factors.
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The system synthesizes evidence from biomedical sources, iteratively reasoning and refining recommendations through structured function calls.
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TxAgent's toolkit is available as "ToolUniverse" featuring trusted data sources like openFDA and Open Targets to ensure validated medical insights.
Why it matters: TxAgent signals a major step in personalized medicine, offering doctors an AI-powered assistant for delivering safer, more tailored treatments. With optimized suggestions, this system can also fast-track medical consultations, especially in developing regions where healthcare systems are already strained.
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🚀 OLMo 2 32B - First fully open model that beats GPT-3.5 and GPT-4o mini
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🎥 Freepik AI Video Upscaler - Upscale low-quality videos to 4K in one click
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🧠 Command A - Cohere’s ultra-fast enterprise AI with 256K context window
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💻 BrowserAgent - Create and run AI workflows in browser with no API costs
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✍️ The Rundown - Course Copywriter/Designer
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📈 Findem - PLG Senior Product Marketing Manager
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🎨 Sanctuary AI - Technical Artist, Simulation
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⚡ C3 AI - AI Engagement Director (Energy)
Google’s new Gemini 2.0 Flash model is reportedly being used by people to remove watermarks from images, including those from platforms like Getty.
Humanoid robot maker Figure announced the launch of BotQ, a new manufacturing facility capable of producing 12,000 humanoids a year—with plans to scale up to 100,000.
Patronus AI launched the industry’s first multimodal LLM-as-a-judge, a tool designed to help developers detect and mitigate reliability issues in multimodal AI apps.
Pika Labs released 16 new effects for its AI video platform, enabling users to morph images into different character videos.
Sesame, which recently went viral for its realistic AI voice tech demo, open-sourced its Conversation Speech Model (CSM-1B) for text-to-speech tasks.
Vogent AI launched voice agents that design and improve themselves, learning from real failure cases and requiring no prompt engineering.
Y Combinator CEO reported that nearly a quarter of their current startups now have 95% of their code written by AI, enabling small teams to reach $10M in revenue with dramatically fewer engineers.
OpenAI's CPO Kevin Weil just predicted 2025 is the year AI will permanently surpass humans at programming, calling it a "democratizing effect" that will allow anyone to create software.
Join our next private workshop this Wednesday at 4 PM EST to learn about how you can apply AI to enhance your advertising and creative production workflows, with Tony Pu, Product Marketing Lead at Kling AI.
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Rowan, Joey, Zach, Alvaro, and Jason—The Rundown’s editorial team
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