AI Comes to Hollywood; Older Adults Use Bots; AI Literacy @ Walmart

🎬 OpenAI Backs “Critterz” Animated AI Film

Hollywood’s first openly AI-made feature is underway. OpenAI is supplying compute, GPT-5, and image generation models to “Critterz,” a full-length animated movie aiming for a 2026 Cannes debut. The project, led by creative specialist Chad Nelson, has been years in gestation - the first characters were sketched out using DALL-E back when “AI art” was still a curiosity.

The economics are as unusual as the production method: sub-$30M budget and nine months of development, compared to the three-year, $100M+ slog of traditional animation. Human actors will voice characters, but much of the labor-intensive rendering is handed to AI.

The gamble is less about whether AI can make a coherent film - we've shown tech can - but whether audiences, unions and critics will embrace a movie that loudly declares itself an AI creation instead of quietly sneaking tools into pipelines.

Read more: The Rundown AI, The Wall Street Journal (paywalled)

🩺 AI Voice Agents Boost Blood Pressure Monitoring

Researchers at Emory University piloted AI voice agents with 2,000 seniors to track blood pressure by phone. The agents reached 85% of patients (in English and Spanish), logged reliable readings for 1,939 people with outdated records, and escalated concerning results directly to nurses.

The assumption that older adults would resist bots was upended

The kicker: costs dropped nearly 90% compared to using human nurses, while satisfaction scores averaged above 9/10. The assumption that older adults would resist bots was upended; many welcomed the convenience, as has generally been reported by Dr. Brittne Kakulla in AARP's tech trends study

This fits a bigger pattern - voice AI creeping into healthcare and eldercare. Imagine layering in vision tools like Gemini Live so the system not only asks questions but also “watches” a patient take a reading. Remote care suddenly feels a lot less remote.

Read more: The Rundown AI,

🛎️ Walmart Turns Checkout Lines Into AI Bootcamps

Walmart is tying its nearly $1B annual skills budget directly to OpenAI, pledging free AI certifications for 3.5M associates through its Academy. Every cashier and office worker will get an OpenAI-branded credential track starting in 2026.

For Walmart, this isn’t so much HR window dressing but rather a bid to make AI literacy as fundamental as scanning a barcode. If it sticks, it rewires labor dynamics: unions lose bargaining leverage, middle managers get squeezed, and competitors either copy the playbook or get left behind.

For OpenAI, this is distto boon: a credential pipeline wired into the U.S.’s largest private employer. That’s more than market penetration - it’s cultural penetration.

Read more: AI Secret

🎓 'Jill Watson' TA Crushes ChatGPT In Classrooms

Georgia Tech’s “Jill Watson” virtual teaching assistant, first prototyped in 2016, has outperformed general chatbots like ChatGPT in real classroom use. Unlike open LLMs, Jill is course-tuned, plugged into textbooks, transcripts and structured curricula.

Accuracy runs at 75–97%, with far fewer hallucinations. Instructors report it reduces TA workloads, cuts office hours, and even raises student grade distributions. For publishers and edtech vendors, this is disruptive: Jill eats into the paid “extras” they sell (support sites, online quizzes).

The big lesson: in education, vertical AI my trump general AI. Blackboard standardized online classes; Jill could standardize AI tutors.

Read more: AI Secret

📉 AI Adoption Slows At Corps, Rises In Small Firms

The U.S. Census Bureau’s survey of 1.2M firms shows a split: large enterprises dropped from 14% to under 12% adoption between June and August 2025 - the steepest slide since 2023. Small firms, meanwhile, keep climbing, with micro-firms (<4 employees) hitting record highs.

Interpretation: AI isn’t stalling; it’s decentralizing. The Fortune 500 are cooling after early over-spending, but small businesses - unencumbered by legacy costs - keep stacking AI into their workflows. Adoption is bottom-up, not top-down.

Read more: AI Secret

📧 Daily Tip: Automating Gmail Drafts

Because no one dreams of spending hours in Gmail, The Rundown offers a workflow guide: pair Zapier with Google Sheets to instantly generate Gmail drafts whenever a new contact row is added.

The steps are Zapier-simple:

1. Trigger on “new row” in a Google Sheet.
2. Action → Gmail “Create Draft.”
3. Map sheet columns into dynamic fields (to, subject, body).
4. Test and save.

Why it matters: these little “duct tape” automations can save staggering amounts of time in roles where email still eats the day. And by leaving drafts unsent, you preserve a human in the loop for tone and accuracy: you.

Read more: The Rundown AI

🛠 Tools & Launches

🎥 VidAU
Turns product photos into short, polished video ads for TikTok and Instagram. Essentially a one-click creative studio for e-commerce.

🧊 Tripo AI 3.0
Upgraded to generate production-ready 3D assets from text or images. v3.0 improves fidelity and realism, making it viable for game and metaverse pipelines.

🏗️ Solid
A new AI builder for full-stack web apps (Node.js, React). Unlike earlier toy generators, Solid emphasizes scalability and production quality.

🗂️ Vectorize 2.0
Major update adds hosted no-code chatbots, website widgets, and smarter retrieval. The aim: let non-coders stand up data-driven assistants quickly.

📚 Heardly
Summarizes bestselling books into AI-generated digests. A “Blinkist 2.0” contender, though fidelity will be closely watched.

🎓 Resea AI
An academic research agent that automates lit reviews, data pulls, and analysis ... a “PhD copilot,” though the accuracy stakes are high.

🤖 Momen
A no-code platform for building fully customizable, production-ready apps. Think Webflow for software.

🪶 CopyOwl
Pitches itself as the “first AI research agent” - deep research in one click. Aimed at analysts and students pressed for time.

Read more: AI Secret

⚡ Quick Hits

• Sam Altman says social media feels “very fake” due to AI bots (yes, the irony isn’t lost).
• Motion AI raised $38M at a $550M valuation to build the “Microsoft Office of AI” for SMBs.
• OpenAI admits its grading systems incentivize hallucination - models are rewarded for guessing.
• Google expanded AI Mode to five new languages: Hindi, Indonesian, Japanese, Korean, and Brazilian Portuguese. It's becoming the default.
• Cisco launched Data Fabric, a unified layer for machine data + AI analytics.

Today’s Sources:

The Internet
AI Secret
The Rundown AI