Sunday Rundown #105: Chinese LLMs & Neck Vault
Sunday Bonus #65: Claude Artifact that creates tailor-made prompts.
Happy Sunday, friends!
Welcome back to the weekly look at generative AI that covers the following:
Sunday Rundown (free): this week’s AI news + a fun AI fail.
Sunday Bonus (paid): an exclusive segment for my paid subscribers.
In case you missed it, here’s this week’s Thursday deep dive:
Let’s get to it.
🗞️ AI news
It was an atypically slow week, but here’s all the new stuff.
👩💻 AI releases
New stuff you can try right now:
Alibaba news:
Qwen VLo is a multimodal model that can understand and create/edit images via chat (a la Gemini Flash and GPT-4o image generation).
Qwen‑TTS is an expressive text‑to‑speech model that supports English and Chinese (including local regional dialects).
Baidu open-sourced ERNIE 4.5, a family of 10 large-scale multimodal models.
Cursor made its Cursor Agent available on the web and mobile, so you can work with it via any browser. (Try it here.)
Genspark launched AI Docs that turn simple prompts into professionally designed documents with rich text and markdown support.
Google news:
Workspace for Education users can now access Vids and 30+ no-cost AI tools for teachers in Google Classroom. (Try them here.)
Veo 3 expanded to 159 countries in the Gemini app and now gives Pro users three daily video generations.
HeyGen rolled out upgrades to Avatar IV with sharper lip sync, real micro-expressions, reduced flicker, animated backgrounds, and a Turbo Mode.
Songscription is a new service that converts any song into professional sheet music in seconds. (Try it here.)
🔬 AI research
Cool stuff you might get to try one day:
Dynamics Lab unveiled Mirage, a real-time game engine that lets players build and reshape game worlds on the fly using text or controller input.
Meta is testing AI-powered product recommendations in WhatsApp to help businesses suggest what to buy based on your chats.
X is piloting AI-written Community Notes to provide context faster and curb misinformation.
📖 AI resources
Helpful AI tools and stuff that teaches you about AI:
“June 2025 Coding Agent Report” [REPORT] - a comprehensive evaluation of 15 AI coding agents based on real-world testing.
🤦♂️ AI fail of the week
Man, that horizontal bar is a real pain in the neck.
Send me your AI fail for a chance to be featured in an upcoming Sunday Rundown.
💰 Sunday Bonus #65: Create better prompts with my “Smart Prompt Maker”
I strongly support the idea of arriving at your own prompts instead of chasing off-the-shelf solutions.
No two tasks are the same, so cookie-cutter templates only get you so far.
But let’s be honest: Most of us aren’t always sure what info is relevant or how to structure it.
That’s where my new Smart Prompt Maker comes in. This Claude-powered Artifact turns your half-formed requests into detailed prompts.
All you need is a free Claude account.
Here’s how it works:
You briefly describe your task.
Smart Prompt Maker asks you relevant follow-up questions.
You answer as best you can.
Smart Prompt Maker follows best practices to create a structured prompt.
You copy-paste the finished prompt into your favorite LLM.
Dan’s Coffee Cup will take the world by storm.
Nothing crazy. Just a handy tool that interviews you and takes care of the prompting.
Try it here: