TRD This AI factory builds tiny machines from code
Posted: Mon Oct 12, 2026 9:00 am
.bh__table, .bh__table_header, .bh__table_cell { border: 1px solid #C0C0C0; } .bh__table_cell { padding: 5px; background-color: #FFFFFF; } .bh__table_cell p { color: #2D2D2D; font-family: 'Helvetica',Arial,sans-serif !important; overflow-wrap: break-word; } .bh__table_header { padding: 5px; background-color:#F1F1F1; } .bh__table_header p { color: #2A2A2A; font-family:'Trebuchet MS','Lucida Grande',Tahoma,sans-serif !important; overflow-wrap: break-word; } Read Online | Sign Up | AdvertiseGood morning, {{ first_name | AI enthusiasts }}, and welcome to our 8,982 new readers. Jeff Holden helped create Amazon Prime and ran Uber’s self-driving program. Now he wants to make building a machine as easy as editing a line of code.His startup, Atomic Machines, just emerged from six years of stealth with $250M and a vision of “universal command of matter” through an AI-guided factory that builds tiny machines straight from a digital design.In today’s AI rundown:
Atomic Machines’ AI turns code into tiny machines
Image source: Atomic MachinesThe Rundown: Atomic Machines, a California startup led by former Uber self-driving chief Jeff Holden, just emerged from stealth after six years with $250M raised and an AI-guided factory it says can turn digital designs into tiny, working machines.The details: 
Innovation needs infrastructure
The Rundown: AI in finance is only as good as what it knows. Plaid makes permissioned financial data not just accessible, but understood: a paycheck read as income, an irregular pattern recognized as risk. That understanding can't be prompted into existence. It's infrastructure, built for finance.What this looks like:
The Rundown Roundtable: Our AI use cases
The Rundown: The Rundown Roundtable is a weekly feature where we poll members of The Rundown staff about how we use AI in our work and daily lives.Rishi, Growth: I use Instinct, an AI assistant I text or send voice notes to over iMessage, to manage personal to-dos that used to live in my head or in a pile of iPhone alarms. Many tasks come up when I’m away from my desk, so I used to forget them. Alarms didn’t help much either: they went off once, I swiped them away, and the task was gone.Now, I send Instinct a quick voice note. For example: “Remind me tomorrow at 10 AM to respond to book my dental appointment, and follow up until I say it's done.” Instinct turns the voice note into a clean reminder with a time attached. If I don’t reply “done,” it checks back in and keeps following up until I close out the task.I use the same thread for recurring tasks, partner follow-ups, ad hoc tasks, and advertising to-dos, so everything I owe people lives in one place. Capturing a task takes a few seconds, which means I actually do it. The built-in follow-up keeps things from slipping just because I was busy when the reminder went off, and the workflow lives in iMessage, where I already am throughout the day.Shubham, Editor: I’m a nerd for deals, so I built a Personal Credit Card Optimizer in ChatGPT. I wanted a simpler way to figure out which store and card would save me the most money on any item I want to purchase.The workflow maintains a database of my credit and debit cards—recording their series, but not their exact numbers—along with their rewards, fees, and benefits. Whenever I want to buy something, I add a product link. It scans retailers for better prices, checks current bank offers against my specific cards, and compares instant discounts, cashback, reward points, and other benefits to determine where I should buy and which card will provide the most value.It’s now an ongoing skill in my ChatGPT project. No more manually checking a dozen bank offers or discovering at checkout that my card isn’t eligible.AI TRAINING
Turn a product photo into three matching ads
The Rundown: In this guide, you’ll use Nano Banana 2.1 to turn one product photo into a matching set of campaign images. You’ll change the layout, test a short headline, and check that the product still looks right.Step-by-step:
Celeris takes the lead in decision models
The Rundown: Every lab shipped a decision model this quarter. All of them hand you a probability. Celeris-1 Decision, from the lab behind the fastest LLM on Artificial Analysis, hands you the reason too, and beats Jev, OpenAI, and Perplexity on accuracy and Brier score.Celeris-1 Decisions gives you:
Microsoft CEO: Treat AI like it’s already been hacked
Image source: Satya Nadella (@satyanadella on X) The Rundown: Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella published an essay on X urging companies to guard advanced AI models like a powerful employee who could slip up or get hacked, including an “emergency brake” and controls the AI can’t touch.The details: 
Trending AI Tools
Everything else in AI todayAnthropic reported unintended Claude outcomes during testing, with Haiku 4.5 sending a fake tip to police on a homicide and another model hacking a university server.Nvidia is reportedly exploring an acquisition or acqui-hire of Reflection AI, the $25B U.S. open model startup it already has significant backing in. Chinese mathematicians are creating an AI research alliance led by Fields medalist Shing-Tung Yau, with Yau pushing back against backlash toward the tech following OpenAI’s 700+ paper release. xAI introduced a feature for Grok Bot that allows the agent to obtain and run its @mail.grokbot email address, letting it email businesses and book meetings for users.Anthropic unveiled the Anthropic Cyber Mission, an initiative to utilize Claude for cybersecurity defense for critical infrastructure and open-source code. 
Highlights: News, Guides & Events
Source: https://therundownai.beehiiv.com/p/this ... -from-code
- Atomic Machines’ AI turns code into tiny machines
- The Rundown Roundtable: Our AI use cases
- Turn a product photo into three matching ads
- Microsoft CEO: Treat AI like it’s already been hacked
Atomic Machines’ AI turns code into tiny machinesImage source: Atomic MachinesThe Rundown: Atomic Machines, a California startup led by former Uber self-driving chief Jeff Holden, just emerged from stealth after six years with $250M raised and an AI-guided factory it says can turn digital designs into tiny, working machines.The details: - Holden says a 3D printer only alters an object’s shape, while his Matter Compiler builds a whole new device when the code changes, without needing retooling.
- Each production step is checked before a part moves on, with the process feeding the AI new data on which materials actually work, the company said.
- It focuses on gadgets with moving parts too small to see without a microscope, like tiny pumps, motors, and gears that chip factories can’t produce.
- Its first machine is PrimeSwitch, a fingertip-sized power switch for AI server farms that it says is faster than traditional breakers and more efficient than silicon.
Innovation needs infrastructureThe Rundown: AI in finance is only as good as what it knows. Plaid makes permissioned financial data not just accessible, but understood: a paycheck read as income, an irregular pattern recognized as risk. That understanding can't be prompted into existence. It's infrastructure, built for finance.What this looks like:- A network that reveals patterns that individual systems can’t see in isolation
- Models trained on real financial data
- Infrastructure built with security and compliance at its core
The Rundown Roundtable: Our AI use casesThe Rundown: The Rundown Roundtable is a weekly feature where we poll members of The Rundown staff about how we use AI in our work and daily lives.Rishi, Growth: I use Instinct, an AI assistant I text or send voice notes to over iMessage, to manage personal to-dos that used to live in my head or in a pile of iPhone alarms. Many tasks come up when I’m away from my desk, so I used to forget them. Alarms didn’t help much either: they went off once, I swiped them away, and the task was gone.Now, I send Instinct a quick voice note. For example: “Remind me tomorrow at 10 AM to respond to book my dental appointment, and follow up until I say it's done.” Instinct turns the voice note into a clean reminder with a time attached. If I don’t reply “done,” it checks back in and keeps following up until I close out the task.I use the same thread for recurring tasks, partner follow-ups, ad hoc tasks, and advertising to-dos, so everything I owe people lives in one place. Capturing a task takes a few seconds, which means I actually do it. The built-in follow-up keeps things from slipping just because I was busy when the reminder went off, and the workflow lives in iMessage, where I already am throughout the day.Shubham, Editor: I’m a nerd for deals, so I built a Personal Credit Card Optimizer in ChatGPT. I wanted a simpler way to figure out which store and card would save me the most money on any item I want to purchase.The workflow maintains a database of my credit and debit cards—recording their series, but not their exact numbers—along with their rewards, fees, and benefits. Whenever I want to buy something, I add a product link. It scans retailers for better prices, checks current bank offers against my specific cards, and compares instant discounts, cashback, reward points, and other benefits to determine where I should buy and which card will provide the most value.It’s now an ongoing skill in my ChatGPT project. No more manually checking a dozen bank offers or discovering at checkout that my card isn’t eligible.AI TRAINING
Turn a product photo into three matching adsThe Rundown: In this guide, you’ll use Nano Banana 2.1 to turn one product photo into a matching set of campaign images. You’ll change the layout, test a short headline, and check that the product still looks right.Step-by-step:- Open Google Flow, choose Nano Banana 2.1 in the standard image controls, and add a clear product photo. Check the usage cost before generating
- Make one square image with a simple background and room for text. Compare the product with your original photo before approving it
- Change one small detail, such as a cloth’s color. Check that the product and the rest of the image stayed as close as possible to the version you approved
- Use the original photo and approved image as references for a portrait and wide version. Change the layout while keeping the same product, light, and style
- Add a short headline and check every word. Open the downloaded files and review the product details, crop, and text before using them
Celeris takes the lead in decision modelsThe Rundown: Every lab shipped a decision model this quarter. All of them hand you a probability. Celeris-1 Decision, from the lab behind the fastest LLM on Artificial Analysis, hands you the reason too, and beats Jev, OpenAI, and Perplexity on accuracy and Brier score.Celeris-1 Decisions gives you:- Highest accuracy of any hosted decision model, 80.0 on jev-bench vs Jev's 73.1
- Decisions in 67 ms median, fast enough to run inside the request instead of behind a queue
- Up to 64 questions on text, data, or images, each with a probability and a reason
Microsoft CEO: Treat AI like it’s already been hackedImage source: Satya Nadella (@satyanadella on X) The Rundown: Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella published an essay on X urging companies to guard advanced AI models like a powerful employee who could slip up or get hacked, including an “emergency brake” and controls the AI can’t touch.The details: - Nadella argued that engineers could previously trace a misbehaving program or bug back to its code, but today’s AI models can’t always be explained that way.
- He wants AI’s permissions and activity logs kept where the AI can’t edit them and no model grading its own work, with a focus on auditable and verifiable systems.
- Nadella also said AI should have an “emergency brake” a human can use to shut down a system mid-task, saying firms should “assume a model is compromised.”
- He also wants models to show their reasoning in plain words, saying “Neuralese,” or AI thinking in its own unreadable code, isn’t an excuse to hide it.
Trending AI Tools
Odyssey-3 - Odyssey’s world model that turns prompts into explorable scenes
HeyGen Voice - HeyGen’s new top-ranked text-to-speech model- Microsoft-Decision-1 - Microsoft’s AI for yes/no and multiple-choice decisions
Gumloop Browser - Gumloop’s browser for AI agents
Everything else in AI todayAnthropic reported unintended Claude outcomes during testing, with Haiku 4.5 sending a fake tip to police on a homicide and another model hacking a university server.Nvidia is reportedly exploring an acquisition or acqui-hire of Reflection AI, the $25B U.S. open model startup it already has significant backing in. Chinese mathematicians are creating an AI research alliance led by Fields medalist Shing-Tung Yau, with Yau pushing back against backlash toward the tech following OpenAI’s 700+ paper release. xAI introduced a feature for Grok Bot that allows the agent to obtain and run its @mail.grokbot email address, letting it email businesses and book meetings for users.Anthropic unveiled the Anthropic Cyber Mission, an initiative to utilize Claude for cybersecurity defense for critical infrastructure and open-source code. 
Highlights: News, Guides & Events- Read our last AI newsletter: Fired OpenAI researchers hit back
- Read our last Tech newsletter: Apple brings touch to the Mac
- Read our last Robotics newsletter: Meet Roger the bomb squad humanoid
- Today’s AI tool guide: Turn a product photo into three matching ads
- RSVP to next workshop on Oct. 21: Get real work out of Microsoft Copilot
Source: https://therundownai.beehiiv.com/p/this ... -from-code