Cartoon AI filmmaking & more (April 9, 2025)

Hey friends,

Today’s newsletter is packed. Between Amazon clawing back relevance, Stanford and NVIDIA building minute-long AI cartoons, and Google turning Gemini into a legit research assistant, it feels like we’re watching the next AI wave take shape — one that’s less about novelty, more about actual utility.

Let’s jump in.

🎥 AI Learns to Tell a Story (Finally)

After years of choppy, forgettable AI video clips, NVIDIA and Stanford just raised the bar with Test-Time Training — a new technique that stitches together consistent, minute-long animations.

The model uses neural networks as a kind of working memory, and it shows. In demos with Tom & Jerry-style shorts, scenes flow logically and characters stay recognizable. It’s still early, but this is a real step toward actual AI filmmaking.

🔊 Amazon’s New Audio + Video Stack = Not Playing Around

If you thought Amazon was sitting out the GenAI race, think again.

They just dropped:

• Nova Sonic — A voice model that beats OpenAI on latency and clarity in noisy settings
• Nova Reel 1.1 — A video model that now generates 2-minute clips, with multi-shot control

Both models are live in Bedrock, and they’re cheap — Sonic clocks in at around 80% less than OpenAI’s equivalents. Combine that with their agentic browser tool (Nova Act) and Alexa+ rollout, and Amazon suddenly feels like a very real player again.

🔎 Gemini 2.5 Pro Becomes a Full-Fledged Researcher

Google’s Gemini Advanced users can now leverage an AI researcher by trying out “Deep Research” — a new mode that synthesizes sources, adds audio summaries, and integrates cleanly with NotebookLM and AI Mode. It’s positioned less as a chatbot and more as an end-to-end knowledge worker.

Other new upgrades:

• Visual input recognition (you can upload images for context-aware answers)
• Geospatial reasoning (think satellite imagery analysis + urban planning insights)
• Audio Overviews (podcast-style summaries of long-form research)

It’s one of the first AI tools that actually feels like it could replace some human workflows instead of just summarizing them.

🧠 Murati’s Secret Lab Assembles the OGs

Mira Murati’s startup, Thinking Machines, now has nearly half its team composed of OpenAI alumni. New additions include:

• Bob McGrew, ex-Chief Research Officer at OpenAI
• Alec Radford, co-creator of GPT

No one knows exactly what they’re building yet — but with this roster, it’s either going to be amazing… or a very expensive ghost ship.

📊 Quick Hits

• Meta’s Llama 4 is great at math and reasoning, but struggles with long-context tasks.
• NVIDIA’s new open model (Nemotron Ultra) beats DeepSeek R1 and Llama 4 at half the size.
• Together AI’s DeepCoder-14B is open-source and rivals top closed-code models.
• Waymo might use in-car camera footage for training + ads, prompting privacy alarms.
• ElevenLabs’ MCP server now enables real-time AI voice agents across platforms (we use them too!).
• Perplexity just launched a $5K credit program for early-stage startups.

⚒️ 5 New Tools Worth Checking Out

• Stepsailor – Turn your product into a guided learning experience.
• Recall – Your AI-powered second brain for organizing scattered ideas.
• ezsite – One-click AI website builder (zero-code).
• Midjourney v7 Alpha – Better coherence, smoother image generation.
• Supaboard – Secure, no-code dashboard builder.

If this helped you cut through the noise, forward it to someone who’s been asking “What’s real in AI right now?”

Or hit reply and tell me: what’s one tool or idea from today’s newsletter you’re actually going to try?

Talk soon,
David