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OpenAI's $20,000 AI agents
PLUS: Google's ‘AI Mode’ for conversational search
Rowan Cheung
March 06, 2025
Good morning, AI enthusiasts. OpenAI is reportedly set to put a massive price on AI expertise—with plans to launch specialized agent subscriptions costing as much as senior executive salaries.
But, with investors already placing multibillion-dollar bets, Sam Altman’s prediction of seeing AI agents “joining the workforce” this year may be quickly coming to fruition.
In today’s AI rundown:
OpenAI launching premium AI agents
Google Search adding new ‘AI Mode’
Connecting Claude Projects with GitHub repos
Alibaba’s cheap and efficient QwQ-32B AI
4 new AI tools & 4 job opportunities
LATEST DEVELOPMENTS
OPENAI
Image source: Ideogram / The Rundown
The Rundown: OpenAI is reportedly preparing to launch a suite of specialized AI agents with price tags ranging from $2,000 to $20,000 a month for skills like knowledge work and Ph.D.-level research.
The details:
OpenAI is planning three agent tiers: business professionals ($2k/mo), advanced software devs ($10k/mo), and PhD-level researchers ($20k/mo).
Investor SoftBank has already reportedly committed $3B to these agent products for 2025 alone.
The agentic offerings are expected to generate up to 25% of OpenAI's long-term revenue as the company expands beyond its current offerings.
In January, CEO Sam Altman predicted that 2025 would see the first AI agents “join the workforce and materially change the output of companies.”
Why it matters: With price tags rivaling senior employee salaries, OpenAI is betting big that specialized AI agents can deliver enough value to justify the enterprise-level subscription. The move could set new precedents for AI agent pricing while revealing just how much companies are willing to pay for automated expertise.
TOGETHER WITH SANA
The Rundown: Sana's unified agent platform brings AI capabilities to your company with a single interface that connects seamlessly to your existing data ecosystem — no need for complex implementation.
Sana's platform enables you to:
Turn manual processes into automated workflows in minutes
Create meeting assistants that capture insights and action items
Develop agents that work across multiple applications seamlessly
Search across every app and deploy agents for deep research
Image source: Google
The Rundown: Google just launched AI Mode, a Search Labs experiment that turns traditional search into a conversational experience powered by a custom Gemini 2.0, along with updates to AI Overviews.
The details:
AI Mode uses a "query fan-out" technique, launching simultaneous searches across diverse sources to assemble detailed answers with relevant sourcing.
Users can continue their search by asking follow-up questions directly in AI Mode, receiving well-reasoned responses with curated links to explore further.
Google also upgraded AI Overviews with Gemini 2.0, improving responses to more challenging topics like coding, advanced math, and multimodal queries.
The company also said it is expanding access to AI Overviews to teens and removing sign-in requirements.
Why it matters: Search continues to evolve in the AI era, and Google faces serious pressure from rivals like Perplexity, Grok, and ChatGPT. The new AI Mode looks to create a bridge between familiar search interactions and advanced, conversational AI — resulting in a potentially more comfortable (yet powerful) web experience.
AI TRAINING
The Rundown: In this tutorial, you will learn how you can use Claude's GitHub integration to connect repositories directly to your AI assistant for comprehensive code understanding and support.
Step-by-step:
Set up a Claude project named “Code Assistant: [Repo Name]" with description: “Workspace to analyze and improve [Repository Name] codebase.”
Select "GitHub" from the “Add Content” menu and authorize the Claude GitHub app when prompted.
Choose your repository and select specific files you’ll need help with.
Start asking questions about your code – Claude can explain functions, suggest improvements, and even help with debugging.
Pro tip: You can also use the "Sync now" button to update your project whenever your repository changes, ensuring Claude always works with your latest codebase.
PRESENTED BY AIRCOVER
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GTM teams in the Fortune 1000 have seen:
40% more deals move past Stage 1 with better discovery
Elimination of 90% of busywork with instant insights, CRM updates, and price quotes
4x higher win rates with reps enabled to answer technical and competitive questions on day one
Explore Aircover and start closing more deals today.
ALIBABA
Image source: Qwen
The Rundown: Alibaba’s Qwen team released QwQ-32B, a new AI reasoning model that leverages reinforcement learning to match or surpass the performance of larger competitors like DeepSeek-R1 at a fraction of the cost.
The details:
QwQ-32B uses reinforcement learning at scale, significantly boosting performance on advanced math, coding, and reasoning-based tasks.
The model is roughly 20x smaller than DeepSeek-R1 yet delivers comparable or superior performance across key benchmarks.
It is priced at just $0.20 per million input and output tokens, a roughly 90% reduction compared to similar performing models like R1 and o1-mini.
Qwen has open-sourced the model under the Apache 2.0 license, with availability on Hugging Face and Alibaba Cloud's ModelScope platform.
Why it matters: China’s open-source models continue to accelerate — with this latest launch from Qwen showing off some major performance gains despite shrinking size (near-frontier intelligence on-device is here) and cost. Clever training approaches are still proving their worth over raw model size as labs continue to push closer to AGI.
QUICK HITS
👁️ Aya Vision - Cohere’s new SOTA multilingual visual model
🗣️ Sesame - Conversational speech model for natural, engaging conversations
🎵 DiffRhythm - Generate complete 4-min songs w/ vocals in just 10 seconds
🎬 ReframeAnything - Resize any video in one click
Social media platform Digg is being revived by former founder Kevin Rose and Reddit co-founder Alexis Ohanian, with AI-enhanced moderation and UX.
OpenAI rolled out its GPT-4.5-Preview model to all Plus users after launching last week exclusively to Pro and developers via API.
A federal judge officially denied Elon Musk's request to block OpenAI's transition from nonprofit to for-profit status but allowed other aspects of his lawsuit to proceed.
Andrew Barto and Richard Sutton won the 2024 Turing Award for pioneering reinforcement learning in the 1980s and warned against rapid AI deployment.
Scale AI secured a multimillion-dollar contract from the U.S. DoD for “Thunderforge,” a program that will deploy AI agents for military planning and operations.
Codeium released Windsurf Wave 4, introducing new features like AI-powered previews for rapid app iteration, tab-to-import functionality, and suggested actions.
Luma Labs introduced three new features to its Ray2 video model, with Keyframes, Extend, and Loop offering more control over generations.
COMMUNITY
Join our next workshop this Friday at 3:30 PM EST with Dr. Alvaro Cintas, The Rundown’s AI professor. You'll learn how to use the latest AI tools to take your coding to the next level, and how we're leveraging AI-powered coding at The Rundown.
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See you soon,
Rowan, Joey, Zach, Alvaro, and Jason—The Rundown’s editorial team
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