Runway on the big screen, China's AI plan & more (July 29, 2025)

Good morning!

While the US debates model alignment, China’s flooding the world with open-source AI. Meanwhile, Microsoft transforms your tabs into to-do lists, Excel gets its own AI analyst, and Runway just landed a deal to bring AI-generated films to the silver screen.

Let’s get into it.

🧠 Model Wars & Agentic Browsers

🇨🇳 Z.ai’s GLM-4.5 Puts China at the Open-Source Frontier

Z.ai (formerly Zhipu) just dropped GLM-4.5, a 355B parameter model built for reasoning, coding, and agentic tasks. It claims to be the top open-source model, besting Grok 4 and Gemini 2.5 Pro in tool-use benchmarks. Also released: “slime,” their new training framework.

🌐 Microsoft Copilot Mode Brings AI to Your Tabs

Microsoft introduced “Copilot Mode” in Edge, letting AI search your tabs, summarize content, and act on your behalf, like booking travel or comparing products. It’s opt-in and free (for now), but premium tiers are likely coming.

🔢 Excel Gets Its ChatGPT Moment

Fundamental Labs’ Shortcut agent outperformed McKinsey and Goldman analysts in 89% of head-to-heads. It builds models, fills in data, and acts like a full-stack strategy analyst inside Excel. Financial analysts, beware. Spreadsheets just got smart…and fast.

🎬 AI-Generated Cinema, Open Video Models & China’s AI Gambit

🍿 Runway AI Films Coming to IMAX Screens

Runway has signed a partnership with IMAX to bring short films from its 2025 AI Film Festival to theaters across ten U.S. cities this August. These films, generated entirely with Runway’s AI tools, showcase what’s possible when storytelling and generative video collide.

🖼️ Alibaba’s Wan2.2 Pushes Cinematic AI Forward

Tongyi Lab’s new video model, Wan2.2, beats top competitors like Sora and Seedance in aesthetics, text rendering, and camera movement. It was trained on 83% more video data than its predecessor and features dual AI “experts” to separate motion and detail generation.

🧭 China’s AI Strategy Aims to Rewrite the Rules

Premier Li Qiang outlined China’s national AI roadmap at WAIC: push AI across every industry, build domestic alternatives to US chips, and offer low-regulation tech to the Global South. The goal? Shape the global AI order before the West can react.

🛠️ Tools of the Day

• PopResume – Resume builder with AI
• Findable – SEO-focused content generation
• Naptha – Web-native agentic infrastructure
• Dreamflow – Turn prompts into full Flutter apps

🧾 Prompt of the Day

Business Plan Generator
"Adopt the role of an expert strategist and create a detailed business plan. Start with an executive summary, then include market analysis, marketing/sales strategy, financials, and an action roadmap."

⚡ Quick Hits

• Tesla signs $16.5B AI chip deal with Samsung for AI6 production in Texas
• Claude Code now has weekly limits due to 24/7 usage strain
• Julius raises $10M to make data visualization effortless
• Grok “Imagine” will soon support image and video gen
• Chrome adds AI review summaries to online stores
• Alibaba teases Quark smart glasses, powered by Qwen

🧠 TLDR

Z.ai’s GLM-4.5 adds pressure to OpenAI, Microsoft Copilot turns tabs into tasks, and Runway’s AI films are hitting IMAX screens. Meanwhile, China’s national AI plan is less about catching up, and more about overtaking.

Catch you tomorrow,
David