Rowan Cheung
@rowancheung • 590,752 subscribers
Founder of the world’s most read daily AI newsletter @therundownai. Sharing the latest developments in the world of artificial intelligence.
Shorts
Videos
Google DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis says we’re in the ‘foothills of the singularity’ I sat down with him to talk about what that means, curing every disease, and human meaning post-AGI: 0:00 Intro 0:45 What Demis is most excited about at I/O 1:46 Have AGI timelines shifted? 3:30 What's still missing before AGI 6:50 AI curing every disease 9:19 What diseases get cured first? 10:50 What Demis works on after AGI 11:48 Human meaning after AGI 13:50 The human skills that get more valuable 15:19 What's underhyped in AI right now
Rowan Cheung105,895 views • 8 days ago
Google just revealed Omni, personalized cross-device intelligence, and Spark agents at I/O 2025. I sat down with CEO Sundar Pichai to figure out what comes next: 1:46 Omni: "Nano Banana for video" 4:59 The future of YouTube 7:04 Advice for AI skeptics 9:33 Why your mom should switch to Gemini 11:13 Google's vision for personalized intelligence 13:02 What AI looks like in 3 years 16:08 What tasks AI agents won't replace 17:58 Sundar's advice for an 18-year-old 19:33 Would Sundar still go to college today?
Rowan Cheung115,299 views • 13 days ago
Fun fact: The first transatlantic internet cable is being pulled off the ocean floor right now. Almost no one knows it's happening. TAT-8 went live in 1988. First fiber-optic cable to connect Europe and the US. Isaac Asimov called it a "maiden voyage across the sea on a beam of light." The engineers behind it genuinely believed it might be the last transatlantic cable the world would ever need. The tech was so far ahead of copper they thought global bandwidth was solved. But it filled to capacity within 18 months. That forced the industry to immediately start laying more cables, a race between demand and infrastructure that still hasn't stopped. After developing a fault too expensive to fix, the cable was retired in 2002. It's been sitting on the seabed ever since. Now a small crew aboard this ship is dragging it back up. Meanwhile, Meta announced Project Waterworth last year, a 50,000 kilometer cable stretching across 5 continents, partly to feed the data demands of AI. ...The entire global internet runs on cables like this, built and maintained by a few thousand people working in places most of us will never see.
Rowan Cheung453,309 views • 2 months ago
AI continues to make unbelievable advances in healthcare. Researchers have just created a brain implant that decodes thoughts into synthesized speech allowing paralyzed patients to communicate through a digital avatar. This is incredible: -The implant converts brain signals into text at nearly 80 words per minute, focusing on phonemes vs. whole words to enhance speed. -The AI generates realistic vocals (mirroring a patient’s pre-injury voice) and facial animations that aim to enable more natural communication. -The breakthrough brings the tech closer to real-world use, with the next step being a wireless model that doesn’t require a physical connection to the interface. Restoring communication for those with paralysis is an innovation that would change countless lives. While it sounds crazy, mind-reading implants seem to be inching closer to reality.
Rowan Cheung5,081,652 views • 2 years ago
Google DeepMind just dropped 'Genie', an AI that can generate interactive video games. This is a huge deal. Genie is trained on 200,000 hours of unsupervised public internet gaming videos and can generate video games from a single prompt or image. But here's what's insane: Despite not being trained on action or text annotations, the foundation model can determine who the main character is and enable a user to control that character in the generated world. It does this through its Latent Action Model, Video Tokenizer, and Dynamics Model (will go more in-depth on this in tomorrow's newsletter for those interested). And for those asking, yes, it's research-only and not publicly available (here come the Google memes), and it does come with some limitations, like only currently creating games at 1FPS. But this is the worst AI will ever be. Anyone will be able to create their own entirely imagined virtual worlds soon, and that's a wild sentence to say out loud.
Rowan Cheung3,376,399 views • 2 years ago
Exclusive: Meta just released Llama 3.1 405B — the first-ever open-sourced frontier AI model, beating top closed models like GPT-4o across several benchmarks. I sat down with Mark Zuckerberg, diving into why this marks a major moment in AI history. Timestamps: 00:00 Intro 00:38 Meta’s Llama 3.1 rundown 03:44 Real-world use cases for Llama 3.1 06:15 Educating developers on open-source AI tools 09:43 Societal implications of open-source AI 13:00 Balancing power and managing bad actors 14:40 Open source and global competition 16:59 Accelerating innovation and economic growth 20:04 Zuck on Apple and lessons from the past 24:22 Future of AI: Llama 3 and beyond 26:43 Prediction: Billions of personalized AI agents 31:32 Factors to changing anti-AI sentiment
Rowan Cheung2,621,262 views • 1 year ago
🚨 BREAKING: Nvidia just released Chat with RTX, an AI chatbot that runs locally on your PC. It can summarize or search documents across your PC's files and even YouTube videos and playlists. The chatbot runs locally, meaning results are fast, you can use it without the internet, and the user's data stays private. New day, new chatbot. Let's go.
Rowan Cheung2,724,970 views • 2 years ago
MIT researchers just replicated human muscles with AI-controlled fibers. Inside each fiber is a sealed tube of electrically charged liquid and a tiny electric pump. When the pump activates, one side contracts while the other relaxes, just as your biceps and triceps do when you bend your arm. How it works: > The pump injects electrical charge into the fluid > This creates ions that drag the liquid along with them > No motors, no external pumps, completely silent Because they're fibers, they bundle together just like real muscles, scaling up force by adding more strands. In demos, these fibers were strong enough to bend a robotic arm and curl a dumbbell... but gentle enough to shake someone's hand. From prosthetics to exoskeletons to industrial robots, this is what happens when engineers stop building around motors and start building around biology.
Rowan Cheung137,884 views • 1 month ago
