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Good morning, {{ first_name | AI enthusiasts }}. The Stargate Project is sending mixed signals — OpenAI is celebrating a major Oracle deal, but the WSJ revealed just a day earlier that the broader initiative is already hitting major roadblocks.
With OpenAI and SoftBank reportedly deadlocked and 2025 plans scaled back, can the $500B AI infrastructure dream still deliver on its world-changing promises?
In today’s AI rundown:
OpenAI, Oracle ink Stargate deal amid turbulence
Amazon acquires AI wearable startup
Improve AI coding workflows with Claude Code
AI models transmit ‘subliminal’ learning traits
4 new AI tools & 4 job opportunities
LATEST DEVELOPMENTS
OPENAI
🏗️ OpenAI, Oracle ink Stargate deal amid turbulence
Image source: OpenAI
The Rundown: OpenAI and Oracle just struck a massive 4.5GW data center deal, coming on the heels of a WSJ report revealing that the broader Stargate venture is facing internal disputes and scaled-back ambitions just six months after its unveiling.
The details:
The deal brings current U.S. data center footprint to over 5GW, with Sam Altman saying Stargate will “significantly expand” past initial $500B claims.
Oracle’s agreement will generate $30B annually, providing the equivalent of “two Hoover Dams“ of computing power.
The WSJ reported that SoftBank and OAI are deadlocked over site selection and terms for Stargate, scaling back 2025 plans to just one data center site.
OpenAI said construction is advancing at the Abilene, TX site, with Oracle delivering Nvidia GB200 racks and already running early training workloads.
Elon Musk doubled down on his claims that SoftBank “doesn’t have the money” for Stargate, replying to the WSJ article that “they simply don’t.”
Why it matters: The Stargate trio of companies threw out some eye-popping numbers at the unveiling in January — and despite the new Oracle deal, the WSJ report paints a far less positive outlook of how the broader project and SoftBank partnership is proceeding. But ultimately, only time will tell if Stargate can reach its lofty ambitions.
TOGETHER WITH HOSTINGER HORIZONS
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The Rundown: Hostinger Horizons puts no-code web development at your fingertips — allowing you to design, code, and launch your site or web app in minutes from just a single prompt.
With Hostinger Horizons, you can:
Create and edit by chatting with AI or uploading images
Enable logins, accept payments, and go live with a single click
Access hosting, domains, email, and 24/7 live support — all included
AMAZON & AI WEARABLES
🐝 Amazon acquires AI wearable startup
Image source: Bee
The Rundown: Amazon is acquiring Bee, a startup that makes a $50 AI-powered wearable wristband that continuously records conversations for daily summaries, insights, and reminders.
The details:
The Fitbit-style device records and transcribes conversations throughout the day, generating daily digests, to-do lists, and recommendations via its app.
Users can grant access to emails, contacts, calendar, and more for deeper personalization, with Bee saying recordings are not used for training or stored.
All Bee employees reportedly received job offers, though the terms of the deal were not disclosed, with the acquisition expected to close soon.
Why it matters: Amazon is making a notable move in the AI wearable sector, though reviews of Bee make it sound like it falls victim to the same issues that plagued the likes of Humane, Rabbit, and other rivals. But despite OpenAI, Meta, and other AI giants pushing into the wearable realm, it still feels like an area wide open for the taking.
AI TRAINING
🤖 Improve AI coding workflows with Claude Code
The Rundown: In this tutorial, you will learn how to use Claude Code to improve your development process by getting contextual code analysis, debugging assistance, and project insights—right from your terminal or within AI-powered coding environments.
Step-by-step:
Install Claude Code by typing npm install -g @anthropic-ai/claude-code in your terminal
Open Cursor and run claude in the integrated terminal
Explore your project by asking “What's the overall structure?” and follow up with specific questions about components
Use it for real-time code generation by requesting it to code or fix a new feature in your code
Pro tip: Treat it like a pair programming partner; the longer your conversation, the better it understands your project and coding style.
PRESENTED BY AMAZON
🚀 Build the future of AI with Amazon
The Rundown: Amazon is transforming every aspect of AI technology, from custom chips to breakthrough applications that benefit millions of customers worldwide. Discover how Amazon’s unique blend of startup energy and global scale fuels innovation — and how you can be part of it.
Check out Amazon’s AI experts discussing:
Innovation across every layer of AI — Trainium2 chips, Nova models, and more
The real-world impact of our 1,000+ generative AI services and applications
How collaborative culture empowers scientists and engineers to think bigger
Why industry leaders choose Amazon to turn ideas into innovation
AI RESEARCH
🦉 AI models transmit ‘subliminal’ learning traits
Image source: Anthropic
The Rundown: Researchers from Anthropic and other organizations published a study on “subliminal learning,” finding that “teacher” models can transmit traits like preferences or misalignment via unrelated data to “student” models during training.
The details:
Models trained on sequences or code from an owl-loving teacher model developed strong owl preferences, despite no references to animals in the data.
The effect worked with dangerous behaviors too, with models trained by a compromised AI becoming harmful themselves — even when filtering content.
This “subliminal learning” only occurs when models share the same base architecture, not when coming from different families like GPT-4 and Qwen.
Researchers also proved transmission extends beyond LLMs, with neural networks recognizing handwritten numbers without seeing any during training.
Why it matters: As more AI models are trained on outputs from other “teachers,” these results show that even filtered data might not be enough to stop unwanted or unsafe behaviors from being transmitted — with an entirely new layer of risk potentially hiding in unrelated content that isn’t being picked up by typical security measures.
QUICK HITS
🛠️ Trending AI Tools
👑 Qwen3 - Alibaba’s newly updated SOTA open-source model
🧠 Hierarchical Reasoning Model - Brain-inspired open-source reasoner
🎥 Pika Social AI Video - AI-only social video app
🎥 Act-Two - Runway’s motion capture AI model, now available via API
📰 Everything else in AI today
Alibaba’s Qwen released Qwen3-Coder, an agentic coding model that tops charts across benchmarks, and Qwen Code, an open-source command-line coding tool.
Google released Gemini 2.5 Flash-Lite as a stable model, positioning it as the company’s fastest and most cost-effective option at just $0.10/million input tokens.
Meta reportedly hired Cosmo Du, Tianhe Yu, and Weiyue Wang, three researchers from Google DeepMind behind its recent IMO gold-medal math model.
Anthropic is reversing its stance on Middle East investments, with its CEO saying, “No bad person should ever benefit from our success is a pretty difficult principle to run a business on.”
Elon Musk revealed that xAI is aiming to have the AI compute equivalent of 50M units of Nvidia’s H100 GPUs by 2025.
Microsoft reportedly poached over 20 AI engineers from Google DeepMind over the last few months, including former Gemini engineering head Amar Subramanya.
Apple rolled out a beta update for iOS 26 to developers, reintroducing ‘AI summaries’ that were previously removed over hallucinations and incorrect headlines.
COMMUNITY
🎥 Join our next live workshop
Join our next workshop this Friday, July 25th, at 4 PM EST with Dr. Alvaro Cintas, The Rundown’s AI professor. By the end of the workshop, you’ll know how to build useful AI agents with ChatGPT and understand the broader ecosystem of agentic tools out there.
RSVP here. Not a member? Join The Rundown University on a 14-day free trial.
See you soon,
Rowan, Joey, Zach, Alvaro, and Jason—The Rundown’s editorial team
