A new Flash trio covers speed, low-cost use, and cybersecurity, and the company’s “most ambitious pre-training run yet” for Gemini 4 is already in progress. But the delayed 3.5 Pro model expected to challenge frontier rivals? Still nowhere to be found.Reminder — Our next live workshop is today at 12 PM EST! Join and learn how to go from idea to working product without a technical team using AI tools for research, prototyping, iteration, and more. RSVP here. In today’s AI rundown:
- Google drops new Flash models as Pro stays missing
- AI's biggest copyright bill comes due
- Sell high-value AI workflow audit as a consultant
- Poolside resurfaces with a top open-weights coder
- 4 new AI tools, community workflows, and more
Google drops new Flash models as Pro stays missingImage source: GoogleThe Rundown: Google just released a trio of Gemini models, led by 3.6 Flash, alongside a speed-focused 3.5 Flash-Lite and a security-fine-tuned 3.5 Flash Cyber, prioritizing efficiency over intelligence, as the long-awaited 3.5 Pro remains in testing. The details: - 3.6 Flash brings efficiency upgrades over its predecessor, but is still topped by similar-priced rivals like Grok 4.5 and GPT-5.6 Luna on a variety of tests.
- On Artificial Analysis’ Intelligence Index, 3.6 Flash strangely shows no upgrade over 3.5, slotting in near Meta’s Muse Spark and Z AI’s open GLM 5.2 model.
- 3.5 Pro remains unreleased after several delays, with Google's Logan Kilpatrick saying the model is "testing with partners" and "will hopefully land soon."
- Google also ended the announcement with an update on Gemini 4, saying the company has kicked off its "most ambitious pre-training run yet".
Find the embers before they become fires
The Rundown: Unwrap is a customer intelligence platform that pulls your feedback (surveys, reviews, support tickets, social comments) into one view, using AI and NLP to surface actionable insights and deliver them straight to your inbox.With Unwrap, you get:- All customer feedback automatically categorized
- Query feedback using Unwrap Assistant, or in your favorite tools using Unwrap's MCP
- Real-time alerts and a clear view of customer sentiment as it shifts
- The tools trusted at scale by Perplexity, DoorDash, Southwest, lululemon, and Oura
AI's biggest copyright bill comes due
Image source: Images 2.0 / The RundownThe Rundown: Anthropic secured court approval for a $1.5B settlement with book authors, clearing payouts of nearly $3,000 a title across 482K works pulled from piracy sites — a record for U.S. copyright cases that leaves AI training standing as fair use.The details:- The case dates back to 2024, when novelist Andrea Bartz and other writers accused Anthropic of training Claude on texts lifted from internet piracy hubs.
- Judge William Alsup split the case in 2025, ruling AI training as legal fair use but treating Anthropic's 7M-book pirated stockpile as its own violation.
- The settlement spared Anthropic a jury trial that was set for last December, where it faced potential damages of several hundred billion (!) dollars.
Sell a high-value AI workflow audit as a consultant
The Rundown: In this guide, you will learn how to turn your AI knowledge into a focused consulting offer. Using Claude, you will choose a narrow problem, collect client context, and create a one-page opportunity brief leading to an implementation project.Step-by-step:- Ask Claude to interview you about the work, industries, and tools you know best, then suggest three consulting angles. Pick the one that works best
- Ask Claude to build an AI assessment for a prospect to uncover AI opportunities in their business, scored out of 100, and publish as a live Artifact
- Save their answers. Then, feed those responses, along with the prospect’s website, into Claude, asking it to find the highest-return workflow to fix with AI
- Ask Claude to turn the findings into a client-ready slide deck, complete their audit result, the bottleneck, practical solutions, and a sensible next step
Turn generative media concepts into production apps
The Rundown: Bridging the gap between a multimodal sandbox demo and a scalable product is a massive engineering challenge. The Startup technical guide on generative media provides the architectural blueprint to actually build and deploy your ideas.Inside the guide, you’ll learn how to:- Architect multimodal workflows that orchestrate media pipelines
- Turn models like Veo and Lyria into high-traffic, user-facing apps
- Build backends for economic scaling, deterministic output, and reliability
Poolside resurfaces with a top open-weights coder
Image source: PoolsideThe Rundown: Poolside launched Laguna S 2.1, a new open-weights coding model that tops the Western open-source field while staying small enough to live on a single desktop — the strongest sign of America’s response to China's open-model lead.The details: - S 2.1 uses just 8B of 118B parameters at a time, letting it fit on one Nvidia DGX Spark desktop box, with the weights free to grab on Hugging Face.
- Poolside’s model tops coding benchmarks for U.S. open systems, but still trails significantly behind Kimi K3 and several other Chinese open models.
- Laguna arrives a week after Mira Murati's TML released its Inkling as its first-ever model, with both expanding the U.S.’ limited open source pool.
- Poolside said training took under nine weeks, with co-CEO Jason Warner telling Forbes the aim is to create "the most capable open model in the West."
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Laguna S 2.1 - Poolside's open-weight coding AI with a 1M-token context
Gemini 3.6 Flash - Google’s newest Flash variant with upgraded efficiency
Qwen-Image-3 - Alibaba’s new image model with strong text rendering
Everything else in AI todayMozilla released its 2026 State of Open Source AI Report last week, revealing open models now rival Big Tech's best. Learn more.*Twitter and Block founder Jack Dorsey unveiled Buzz in early access, an open-source workspace where AI agents join team chats as coworkers. Substack introduced a new partnership with Pangram that embeds its AI writing detector tool into the platform for both readers and publishers.Anthropic rolled out Record a skill, a feature (similar to Codex’s upgrade) that allows users to screen-record a workflow to let Claude create a skill around the task.Sakana AI released Fugu-Cyber, a security model that bundles specialist agents behind one API, claiming benchmarks on par with GPT-5.5-Cyber and Mythos Preview. *Sponsored ListingCOMMUNITY
Community AI workflowsEvery newsletter, we showcase how a reader is using AI to work smarter, save time, or make life easier.Today’s workflow comes from reader Jonathan in Waxhaw, NC:“I'm writing a novel. Asking AI 'is it good?' receives flattering positive feedback — annoying.I've developed an evaluation protocol which prompts multiple AIs to assess the material through market research simulation, from four perspectives: reader acceptance, publication acceptance, production acceptance, and marketability. The protocol instructs the AI to generate four personas — some antagonistic, some YA-biased, some literature aficionados, and some business-biased. I've input prose and pitch decks, and results have identified gaps, inconsistencies, and positives. Running across multiple AIs gives results that differ but frequently identify the same strengths and weaknesses. These results are LLM training-biased, but different draft revisions and comparing across AIs gives valuable feedback.”How do you use AI? Tell us here.
Highlights: News, Guides & Events- Read our last AI newsletter: Claude disproves an 87-year-old math problem
- Read our last Tech newsletter: China’s plan to knock an asteroid off course
- Read our last Robotics newsletter: The world’s first humanoid cage fight
- Today’s AI tool guide: Sell a high-value AI workflow audit as a consultant
- RSVP to next workshop today @ 12 PM EST: No-code product building
Source: https://www.therundown.ai/p/google-gemi ... sized-hole