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Elon's $97B OpenAI offer
PLUS: OpenAI makes advertising debut at the Big Game
Rowan Cheung
February 11, 2025
Good morning, AI enthusiasts. The next chapter of the Elon vs OpenAI feud just arrived, with Musk offering $97B to control his former company.
With billions at stake and egos colliding, Silicon Valley's ultimate power struggle continues to create reality-TV-level drama.
In today’s AI rundown:
Musk launches $97B bid to retake OpenAI
AI joins Super Bowl prime time with major commercials
Transform your ideas into songs with AI
ByteDance unveils Goku AI image and video creation
4 new AI tools & 4 job opportunities
LATEST DEVELOPMENTS
ELON MUSK & OPENAI
Image source: Grok / The Rundown
The Rundown: Elon Musk and a group of investors just made an unsolicited $97.4B offer to acquire control of OpenAI's nonprofit arm, escalating tensions once again with his former company and CEO Sam Altman.
The details:
The bid was submitted by Musk's attorney to OpenAI's board, with backers including xAI, Valor Equity Partners, Baron Capital, and other investment firms.
The offer comes as OpenAI attempts to transition from nonprofit to for-profit status, with a pending $40B investment from SoftBank at a $260B valuation.
Musk said he aims to return OpenAI to its open-source roots and promised to match or exceed any competing bids for control of the organization.
Altman responded dismissively on X, offering to "buy Twitter for $9.74B" instead, leading Musk to call the CEO a ‘swindler.’
Why it matters: The drama never ceases between two of the biggest figures in the tech world, but it's no surprise to see Altman rebuff the offer after Musk’s lawsuits and prodding. With both heavily involved in the U.S. government’s tech push, this likely isn’t the last we’ll see of Musk’s vendetta against the company he helped create.
TOGETHER WITH TURING
The Rundown: Turing’s white paper breaks down why misaligned training, weak evaluation, and poor optimization create the biggest ROI hurdles for LLMs—not just the model itself.
Inside, you’ll learn how to:
Avoid hidden costs from ineffective LLM training
Improve model accuracy and long-term efficiency
Build a scalable LLM strategy that delivers real business impact
Download the white paper now and learn how to get the most from your AI investments.
THE SUPER BOWL AND AI
Image source: OpenAI
The Rundown: AI played a prominent role in Super Bowl LIX’s commercial lineup, with OpenAI, Google, Meta, and others shelling out for advertising slots during the big game with mixed audience results.
The details:
OpenAI made its SB debut with an artistic black-and-white spot that positioned ChatGPT alongside other historical innovations, such as electricity and space travel.
Google featured Gemini Live helping a father balance job hunting and parenting, with an earlier spot axed after backlash for incorrect cheese facts.
Meta showcased its AI-powered Ray-Ban glasses, with Chris Hemsworth and Chris Pratt utilizing features like video recording and its multimodal assistant.
Other AI products advertised included Salesforce’s Agentforce autonomous agent platform and GoDaddy’s new Airo website creation tool.
Why it matters: AI was everywhere during this year’s Super Bowl, with the usual big players all getting in on the action (with mixed results) on USA Today’s ad rankings. OpenAI’s presence was the biggest wildcard — with the company’s first major spot feeling like a key moment in its transition from a startup into a universally known brand.
AI TRAINING
The Rundown: Suno lets you create original music that matches your creative vision with AI (no musical experience needed).
Step-by-step:
Access Suno, select “Create” in the menu options, and enable custom mode.
Generate lyrics using either Classic (structured) or ReMi (creative) models.
For the style, start with genre tags and add specific instruments, effects, and moods.
Once your song is created, expand it using Cover, Persona, or Extend features.
Pro tip: We did an extensive workshop with Sara Adkins, machine learning engineer and artist in residence at Suno, which you can access here (alongside an exclusive Rundown University member free code for a 1-month Premier Plan).
PRESENTED BY INNOVATING WITH AI
The Rundown: Innovating with AI's new program, AI Consultancy Project, transforms AI enthusiasts into professional consultants — tapping into a market projected to reach $54.7B by 2032.
The 6-month program delivers:
Proven frameworks for client acquisition and service delivery
A step-by-step path to six-figure consulting income
Students who land their first AI client in as little as 3 days
AI RESEARCH
Image source: ByteDance
The Rundown: ByteDance and the University of Hong Kong just introduced Goku and Goku+, a family of AI models that bridge image and video generation, showing top performance across multiple visual benchmarks and enabling hyperrealistic commercial content for advertising and marketing.
The details:
Goku achieves top performance on major benchmarks, setting records for both image and video quality with a unified architecture to handle both tasks.
An advanced "rectified flow" technique enables seamless transitions between images and videos, with the system trained on 160M images and 36M videos.
An enhanced Goku+ specifically targets advertising and marketing needs, with the ability to create photorealistic human avatars and product demos.
The + platform includes specialized tools for turning product photos into video clips and creating realistic human-product interactions for commercial content.
Why it matters: Goku’s ability to create extended, high-quality commercial content and product demos shows that AI video production is reaching a new level of sophistication. It is transforming how marketing content is created and consumed, but it is also making it harder than ever to distinguish AI generations from reality.
QUICK HITS
💬 Krea Chat - Use natural language commands to create and edit images
🤖 Mistral Small 3 - Open-source, 24B model with enhanced speed and accuracy
🗣️ Talo - Real-time voice translator for video calls
📝 Tana - Put your notes to work with voice and AI
🤖 The Rundown - Writer (Robotics/Tech)
📣 Databricks - Field Marketing Manager, Central Europe
💻 Coreweave - Data Center Technician
👔 Curai - Manager, Provider Operations
OpenAI will reportedly finalize the design for its first generation of in-house AI chips this year and plan to work with TSMC on the initial fabrication.
Zyphra launched Zonos-v0.1 beta, featuring two open-source text-to-speech models with real-time voice cloning capabilities and competitive pricing and quality to rivals.
Anthropic published its Economic Index, a new study tracking AI’s labor market impact — finding that AI usage primarily augments rather than automates work.
Luma AI launched new image-to-video capabilities for its next-gen Ray2 model, showcasing impressive realism and natural motion.
French President Emmanuel Macron unveiled plans for €109B in AI investments ahead of the Paris AI Action summit, including a massive UAE-backed datacenter campus and a €20B commitment from Brookfield to develop infrastructure.
Saudi Arabia pledged a new $1.5B investment into AI inference startup Groq, marking one of the largest single-country commitments to specialized AI chip development.
Sam Altman posted a blog detailing exponential cost reductions in AI computing, predicting widespread AI agent deployment that will reshape economic productivity over the next decade.
COMMUNITY
Join our next workshop this Thursday at 4 PM EST to learn how to build your own AI-powered personal assistant to streamline your daily tasks with Dr. Alvaro Cintas, The Rundown’s AI professor.
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That's it for today!Before you go we’d love to know what you thought of today's newsletter to help us improve The Rundown experience for you. |
See you soon,
Rowan, Joey, Zach, Alvaro, and Jason—The Rundown’s editorial team
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