The Rundown AI
@TheRundownAI • 222,582 subscribers
The world’s largest AI newsletter keeping 2,000,000+ readers ahead of the curve. Get the latest AI news and how to apply it in 5 minutes. By @rowancheung
Videos
69% of baseball fans say they'd rather have a computer vision AI system call balls and strikes than a human umpire. This season, the MLB gave them one. For the first time in league history, a human ump's ball-strike call is not final. A Sony computer vision system called Hawk-Eye makes the ruling. It can read the seam pattern on the ball, measure spin axis, and detect spin decay mid-flight. Hawk-Eye's Head of Computer Vision Engineering says the pipeline runs "various AI and machine learning models" from camera capture to data output. On Saturday, one umpire had 6 of 8 challenged calls overturned. Three of those missed by over 2 inches. The team ran out of challenges by the fourth inning trying to correct him, then the manager got thrown out for arguing a call they couldn't challenge. An AI computer vision system accurate to a sixth of an inch, sitting next to a human who misses by two. The crowd cheered for the machine.
The Rundown AI198,306 views • 3 months ago
Paris-based startup SquareMind recently raised $18M to launch Swan, the world’s first robot designed to capture standardized, full-body dermoscopic skin imaging. The funding round was led by Sonder Capital, founded by Fred Moll, the “father of surgical robotics” who built Intuitive Surgical’s da Vinci system in the 1990s. Swan uses a robotic arm to scan a patient’s entire skin surface in minutes, paired with AI software that tracks new or changing moles across visits. The tech addresses a critical bottleneck in dermatology, where months-long waitlists collide with the fact that 80% of melanomas are new lesions. Commercial launch in the US and Europe is expected later this year.
The Rundown AI42,735 views • 26 days ago
Sony AI just published the first autonomous robot to beat elite humans at a competitive physical sport. Its name is Ace. The sport is table tennis. The paper dropped in Nature today. 9 cameras triangulate the ball in 3D. Three systems zoom in on the ball's logo mid-flight to read its spin axis. End-to-end reaction time is around 20 milliseconds, roughly 10x faster than a human. It learned by playing itself for 3,000 hours in simulation. No human demonstrations. In April 2025, Ace beat 3 of 5 elite players and lost to both pros. By December, it had beaten a pro. At one point, Ace returned an impossible backspin shot. Kinjiro Nakamura, a 1992 Barcelona Olympian, watched from the side: "No one else would have been able to do that. I didn't think it was possible. But the fact that it was possible means there is a possibility that a human could do it too."
The Rundown AI61,547 views • 2 months ago
Legendary filmmaker Martin Scorsese signed on last year as an adviser to Black Forest Labs, the German AI startup behind FLUX image models. On Tuesday he went public, testing the tool on a single scene during preproduction. His use is narrow: storyboarding only, complementing the same hand-drawn work he's done himself for 70 years. No generated actors, sets, or footage. "Cinema is a young medium, only around 125 years old, so we have to be open to how it can evolve," he told the NYT. See Scorcese's process in action, via Black Forest Labs:
The Rundown AI23,797 views • 27 days ago
A startup called Sabi just came out of stealth with a beanie that reads your thoughts. 70,000 to 100,000 miniature EEG sensors woven into the fabric. You put it on like a winter hat and type by imagining the words. Sabi's bet is that if you throw enough sensors at the skull, you don't need to open it. They've already logged 100,000 hours of brain data from 100 volunteers to train a "brain foundation model." First product ships by the end of 2026. A baseball cap version is next. Backed by Vinod Khosla, who also wrote an early check to OpenAI. Khosla: "The biggest and baddest application of BCI is if you can talk to your computer by thinking about it. If you're going to have a billion people use BCI for access to their computers every day, it can't be invasive." The first consumer BCI won't look like a medical device, but instead like something you already own.
The Rundown AI52,847 views • 2 months ago
Perplexity just launched "Personal Computer", an always-on AI agent that merges their cloud-based Computer system with a Mac Mini. It accesses local files, apps, and sessions, orchestrates 19+ AI models, and can run 24/7. The Mac Mini continues to have its AI moment:
The Rundown AI20,847 views • 3 months ago
1. Wondercraft AI Text to studio quality podcast in seconds. 🔗:
The Rundown AI121,549 views • 3 years ago
![3. Quiz yourself: Prompt: "Give me a short quiz that teaches me [what you want to learn]"](https://image.24vids.com/tw-1653462624099598336/ext_tw_video_thumb/1653462551143804928/pu/img/g6e1kkD1xmLavIv6.jpg)