Good morning {{first_name| Artificial intelligence lovers}}. The release of R1 last year turned DeepSeek into the face of cheap Chinese AI overnight.
The V4 is less shocking, but perhaps more practical – it combines the strong performance of the open model with pricing and Huawei chipset support that makes the US lead look weaker on the margins than it does in pure intelligence.
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The Whale returns with the cheap and effective DeepSeek V4
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Roundtable Rundown: Our AI Use Cases
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How to do a brand refresh with Cloud Design
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Anthropic’s AI Agents Broker ‘Enterprise Deal’
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4 new tools for AI, community workflows, and more
Deep research
Image source: Images 2.0 / Rundown
Rundown: Chinese AI lab DeepSeek only foot Preview the highly anticipated V4 releases, with new open source AI models featuring 1M-token context windows, Huawei chip support, and pricing that significantly undercuts frontier competitors.
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Early external tests placed the V4 Pro near the top of open models, with DeepSeek’s own evaluations placing the V4 Pro near GPT-5.4 and Gemini 3.1-Pro in terms of inference.
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V4 Pro Tops Vals AI’s Vibe Code Bench benchmarks, but sits at tier 4 on the AA’s Intelligence Index alongside Meta’s Muse Spark.
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At $1.74/$3.48 per million I/O codes, V4 Pro comes in much cheaper than GPT-5.5 ($5/$30) and Opus 4.7 ($5/$25).
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Chinese chipmaker Huawei said Ascend chips can support V4, giving a powerful working example of AI infrastructure outside Nvidia’s portfolio.
Why it matters: DeepSeek’s technology is back, and while it didn’t beat the US stock market this time, V4 makes the AI race about price as much as it is about ability. But the Huawei angle may be the biggest development, as Nvidia’s homegrown alternative shows it can fill chip gaps imposed on the country by export restrictions.
Along with the stagnation of Salesforce
Rundown: Is Microsoft Teams designed to fit the way your team wants to work and grow? As AI reshapes how work gets done, the tools you choose matter more than ever. Slack combines AI agents, automated workflow, and enterprise search, all in one place, connected to the apps your team is already using.
Learn how Slack and Microsoft Teams compare at:
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Native AI features built right into your workspace
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Automation that connects the entire application ecosystem
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Enterprise research that finds answers across Slack, Salesforce, Google Drive, and more
RUNDOWN ROUND TABLE
Image source: Ideogram/The Rundown
Rundown: The Rundown Roundtable is a weekly feature in which we poll The Rundown staff members about how we use AI in our work and daily lives.
Mayur, Content Manager: I was initially told by CA that I might owe nearly $10k in taxes on my income. Since this seemed higher than expected, I decided to double-check the account using Cloud.
I shared the contract structure, invoicing and payment flow, and asked him to review how my services were categorized under GST. While looking at the latest regulations, she directed me to a recent government circular explaining how some digital services provided to customers could be considered an export of services.
I discussed this with the CA who reviewed it and confirmed it applied to my case. This reduced my tax liability by several thousand dollars.
Reishi growth: We’re currently hiring a creative strategist at The Rundown, so I gave Claude our job description and asked him to search LinkedIn for high-quality candidates. It took over my browser, searched for key terms, and created a spreadsheet of 20 high-quality filters.
I then asked him to draft personalized messages for each of them and to contact me. It took me about 15 minutes to review the spreadsheet and refine the messages, but it saved me 2-3 hours of manual work!
Artificial intelligence training
Rundown: In this guide, you’ll learn how to use Claude Design for a complete brand design system, including typography, colors, web components, a full website, and PowerPoint templates.
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Take a screenshot of your current website, drop it into your favorite AI, and ask: “Analyze this website and create an updated brand description. Keep what works, but improve the placement, visual direction, typography, and color palette. Give me a concise brand summary I can use at Claude Design.”
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Take this description and have your AI create a logo and text tagline. We liked the ChatGPT image template, but you can use any option
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Go to claude.ai/design, click on the Design Systems tab, and paste your site name into the first box and your edited brand description into the last box
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Finally, upload your logo, wordmark, and any other images or assets you want Claude to use, then press Enter.
Pro Tip: Once Claude is finished, review the marketing page, web app page, and slide decks he created. Then click Share and export it to Claude Code.
Provided by UNWRAP
Rundown: Unwrap’s customer intelligence platform collects all your feedback (surveys, reviews, support tickets, social comments, etc.) into one view, then uses AI and natural language processing to surface actionable insights and deliver them directly to your inbox.
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All customer reviews are automatically rated
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Ask for feedback using Unwrap Assistant, or in your favorite tools via MCP
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Real-time alerts of feedback as it appears, and clear visibility into customer sentiment
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Trusted platform and extensively tested by Oura, DoorDash, Perplexity, Stripe, Clay, lululemon, WHOOP, Ro and more
Artificial intelligence research
Rundown: Anthropic only published Results from Project Deal, a one-week experiment where Claude’s agents handled buying and selling for 69 of its employees in Slack’s private marketplace and completed 186 deals worth more than $4,000.
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The agents were given a budget of $100, used short interviews with Claude to identify targets, then posted listings, made offers, and negotiated on their own.
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Identical items fetched an additional $3.64 under Opus dealers on average, with one folding bike selling for $65 through Opus but just $38 through Haiku.
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Despite the sales gap, Haiku users still rated their deals at 4.06/7 in terms of fairness, essentially tied at 4.05 for Opus users – with users not noticing the difference.
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Almost half (46%) said they would pay for the service, but Anthropic warned that the “political and legal frameworks” for the agent trade “simply do not yet exist”.
Why it matters: Sell the project Show that Claude can run a small shop; Project Deal shows what happens when each shopper has their own agent. What’s even more interesting is that fairness ratings barely move when users “lose” the price – meaning that the ease of AI trades may be as important as extracting every dollar.
xAI Fired Grok Voice Think Fast 1.0, a new SOTA voice agent that leads speech standards across the board, already powers Starlink’s phone support line.
Google He is Investment Up to $40 billion in Anthropic, including $10 billion now at a $350 billion valuation, and $30 billion more if Anthropic hits performance targets, plus 5 gigawatts of cloud computing.
dead I fell A deal with AWS to add millions of Graviton5 core chips to power AI workloads, making it one of AWS’ top buyers.
United Arab Emirates Announce A two-year plan to deploy agentic AI across 50% of government services, with mandatory AI training for every federal employee.
cohere Agreed To acquire German company Aleph Alpha, in a $20 billion merger targeting governments and companies wary of relying on American artificial intelligence giants for important tools.
In each newsletter we show how the reader is using AI to work smarter, save time or make life easier.
Today’s workflow comes from the reader Tim M. Lake Luzerne, New York:
“I used Kimi K2.6 to create the TickDetect app which uses my phone’s camera to look for ticks or red target marks left by ticks. I found it very difficult to be able to see my back as I tried to turn my head in the mirror to see if there were any ticks or marks.
I can now set my phone on the bathroom counter and slowly move up and down and let my phone do the work. The app runs entirely locally and allows me to delete all photos after it creates a local PDF file on my phone which I can download with results showing potential percentages for each area of interest.
How do you use artificial intelligence? Tell us here.
That’s all 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.
Rowan, Joey, Zack, Shubham and Jennifer – the humans behind The Rundown
