Good morning, {{ first_name | AI enthusiasts }}. If you thought distinguishing AI images from reality was already difficult, a new open model may have just made the lines even blurrier.

With Black Forest Labs and Krea’s new FLUX.1 Krea, the era of waxy skin and blurry backgrounds may be quickly coming to an end for photorealistic generations.

Reminder: Our next live workshop is today at 4 PM EST! Join and learn practical AI prompting strategies to get the perfect responses. RSVP here.

In today’s AI rundown:

BFL, Krea tackle ‘AI look’ with new image model

OpenAI expands Stargate to Europe

Automate presentations with ChatGPT Agents

Anthropic takes enterprise AI lead as spending surges

4 new AI tools & 4 job opportunities

LATEST DEVELOPMENTS

BLACK FOREST LABS & KREA

🎆 BFL, Krea tackle ‘AI look’ with new image model

Image source: Black Forest Labs

The Rundown: AI image startup Black Forest Labs and creative platform Krea just released FLUX.1 Krea, an open-weight image model focused on eliminating the typical “AI look” with upgraded photorealism and quality.

The details:

The model was trained on a diverse, curated dataset to avoid common AI outputs like waxy skin, blurry backgrounds, and oversaturated colors.

The companies call FLUX.1 Krea SOTA amongst open models, while rivaling top closed systems (like BFL’s own FLUX 1.1 Pro) in human preference tests.

The release is fully compatible with the FLUX.1 [dev] ecosystem, making it easy to integrate for developers and within other applications.

Why it matters: An open model of this quality shows how far things have come in the image world, with the AI aesthetics problem now looking like one that can be solved via selective training. The internet was already largely fooled by the older models, and this next wave will make telling real humans from AI images even more difficult.

TOGETHER WITH VANTA

🛡️ Continuous compliance without the headaches

The Rundown: Navigating new compliance requirements can be a daunting task, but with the right automation tools, it doesn't have to be. Whether you’re a fast-growing startup or an established security team, Vanta can help you achieve continuous compliance (and more).

In this live demo on August 20, you'll learn:

Automated evidence collection and audit techniques across frameworks

How continuous control monitoring builds and reinforces your security foundation

AI solutions for vendor risk management and security questionnaire automation

Plus, get your questions answered directly by the Vanta team — secure your spot today.

OPENAI

🇳🇴 OpenAI expands Stargate to Europe

Image source: Aker

The Rundown: OpenAI just announced the launch of Stargate Norway, the company’s first European AI data center that will house 100,000 Nvidia GPUs and run entirely on renewable energy by late 2026.

The details:

The facility near Narvik will start with 230MW of capacity, expandable to 520MW, making it one of Europe's largest AI computing centers.

The project leverages Norway's cool climate and renewable energy grid, with waste heat from GPUs being redirected to power local businesses.

Norwegian industrial giant Aker and infrastructure firm Nscale committed $1B for the initial phase, splitting ownership 50/50.

Norway also becomes the first European partner in the “OpenAI for Countries” program, introduced in May.

Why it matters: The most recent rumblings surrounding Stargate hinted at partnership issues and potentially scaling back. But between a massive deal with Oracle and new expansion into Europe, OpenAI is painting a different picture, with the project starting to spread AI’s cost and infrastructure demands across the globe.

AI TRAINING

🤖 Automate presentations with AI Agents

The Rundown: In this tutorial, you will learn how to use ChatGPT’s Agent Mode to combine deep research capabilities with autonomous actions and generate comprehensive reports and presentations autonomously.

Step-by-step:

Head over to ChatGPT and select “Agent Mode” in Tools

Connect sources if needed, or let the agent work with any website autonomously

Create a detailed prompt: “Research [topic]. Deliver a 2-page report citing academic sources, plus a 5-slide deck.”

Watch the agent work for 15-25 minutes as it searches, analyzes, and creates content automatically, and extend your research with follow-ups

Pro tip: Agent Mode can handle multiple complex tasks in one prompt, from research to presentation creation to contact finding, all while working completely autonomously.

PRESENTED BY TOGETHER AI

⚙️Automate, debug, and solve with SOTA open source models

The Rundown: Together AI's Inference & Fine-Tuning platform lets developers deploy open source models at scale, offering both serverless and dedicated endpoints for models like Kimi K2 — a new SOTA agentic intelligence model with 1T parameters, 128K context, and native tool use.

With Together AI, you’ll experience:

High-performance infrastructure designed for the lowest possible latency

Developer-friendly APIs that simplify integration

An extensive model library featuring the top open-source AI models like Kimi K2

Try Kimi K2 now and get all the benefits of open-source AI without the complexity.

AI RESEARCH

📊 Anthropic takes enterprise AI lead as spending surges

Image source: Menlo Ventures

The Rundown: Menlo Ventures just released its mid-year LLM market report, revealing that enterprise AI spending is continuing to surge, with Anthropic emerging as the new market leader over OpenAI with a 32% model usage share.

The details:

The report surveyed 150 technical leaders, finding that enterprises doubled their LLM API spending to $8.4B in the last 6 months.

Anthropic captured the top spot with 32% market share, ahead of OpenAI (25%) and Google (20%) — a major shift from OAI’s 50% dominance in 2023.

Code generation emerged as AI's “breakout use case”, with developers shifting from single-product tools to an ecosystem of AI coding agents and IDEs.

Enterprises also rarely switch providers once they adopt a platform, with 66% upgrading models within the same ecosystem instead of changing vendors.

The report also found that open-source LLM usage among enterprises has stagnated, with companies prioritizing performance and reliability over cost.

Why it matters: Enterprise AI spending is going up, but the real story is how sticky platforms have become, with companies rarely switching providers. Combined with the lack of open-source adoption, a winner-take-most market is emerging where early tech advantages of the AI leaders are becoming the competitive moat.

QUICK HITS

🛠️ Trending AI Tools

📺 Showrunner - Platform for creating personalized, playable TV episodes

⚙️ NEO - Neo AI’s new SOTA autonomous ML engineer

📸 FLUX.1 Krea [dev] - BFL and Krea’s open advanced image model

🌎 AlphaEarth Foundations - Google’s AI model for on-demand maps

💼 AI Job Opportunities

🛡️ The Rundown - Product Marketing

📊 Horizon3 - Senior Business Intelligence Analyst

💵 Perplexity AI - Payroll Manager

🧠 xAI - AI Engineer & Researcher, Reasoning Post-training

📰 Everything else in AI today

AI in Action, Aug 6: Discover how MongoDB Atlas + Azure turn vectors into real-world value in this webinar with MongoDB + Microsoft. Build scalable, secure, flexible AI apps.*

Cohere introduced Command A Vision, a new model that achieves SOTA performance in multimodal vision tasks for enterprises.

OpenAI has reportedly reached $12B in annualized revenue for 2025, with around 700M weekly active users for its ChatGPT platform.

StepFun released Step3, an open-source multimodal reasoning model that achieves high performance at low cost, outperforming Kimi K2, Qwen3, and Llama 4 Maverick.

Both Runway and Luma AI are exploring robotics training and simulations with their video models as a source of revenue, according to a new report from The Information.

AI infrastructure platform Fal raised a new $125M funding round, bringing the company’s valuation to $1.5B.

Agentic AI startup Manus launched Wide Research, a feature that leverages agent-to-agent collaboration to deploy hundreds of subagents to handle a single task.

*Sponsored Listing

COMMUNITY

🎥 Join our next live workshop

Join our next workshop today, August 1, at 4 PM EST with Dr. Alvaro Cintas, The Rundown’s AI professor. By the end of this workshop, you’ll have practical prompting strategies to get AI to do exactly what you want.

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