🐳The Whale Returns with Cheap, Efficient DeepSeek V4
Chinese AI lab DeepSeek just introduced preview versions of its highly anticipated V4, with new open-source AI models featuring 1M-token context windows, Huawei chip support, and pricing that significantly undercuts the frontier competitors.
- —Early outside tests put V4 Pro near the top of open models, with DeepSeek's own evals placing V4 Pro near GPT-5.4 and Gemini 3.1-Pro on reasoning
- —V4 Pro tops Vals AI's Vibe Code Bench benchmark, but falls in a fourth tier on AA's Intelligence Index alongside Meta's Muse Spark
- —At $1.74/$3.48 per 1M input/output tokens, V4 Pro comes in significantly cheaper than GPT-5.5 ($5/$30) and Opus 4.7 ($5/$25)
- —Chinese chipmaker Huawei said its Ascend chips can support V4, giving a strong working example of AI infrastructure outside of Nvidia's stack
Why it matters: DeepSeek is back, and while it didn't take down the U.S. stock market this time, V4 makes the AI race about price as much as capability. But the Huawei angle may be the bigger development, with a domestic Nvidia alternative showing its viability to eat into the chip gaps that export restrictions have put on the country.
💡The Rundown Roundtable: Our AI Use Cases
The Rundown Roundtable is a weekly feature where staff share how they use AI in work and daily life.
- —Content Manager Mayur used Claude to double-check tax calculations, discovering a digital services export exemption that saved thousands of dollars
- —Growth lead Rishi had Claude search LinkedIn for candidates based on a job description, create a spreadsheet of 20 prospects, and draft personalized outreach messages, saving 2-3 hours of manual work
Why it matters: AI is moving from toy to real productivity tool—tax review and candidate screening, traditionally time-consuming tasks, are being dramatically accelerated.
🧑💻 How to Do a Brand Refresh with Claude Design
This guide shows how to use Claude Design to build a complete brand design system—including typography, colors, web components, a full website, and PowerPoint templates—in minutes.
- —Screenshot your current site and have AI analyze it to generate a refreshed brand description
- —Use AI to generate a logo and wordmark, then go to claude.ai/design and input your brand and description
- —Upload logo, wordmark, and other assets; Claude auto-generates marketing pages, web app pages, and slide decks
- —Click Share to export to Claude Code for continued development
Why it matters: AI design tools are shrinking brand upgrades from weeks to minutes, giving non-designers access to professional-grade design systems.
🤝Anthropic's AI Agents Broker Trades in 'Project Deal'
Anthropic published results from Project Deal, a one-week experiment where Claude agents handled buying and selling for 69 employees in a private Slack marketplace, completing 186 deals worth over $4,000.
- —Agents were given a $100 budget and used short Claude interviews to set goals, then posted listings, made offers, and negotiated on their own
- —Identical items fetched $3.64 more under Opus agents on average, with one folding bike selling for $65 via Opus but only $38 via Haiku
- —Despite the sales gap, Haiku users still rated their deals 4.06/7 for fairness, essentially tied with Opus users' 4.05—users didn't notice the difference
- —Nearly half (46%) said they would pay for the service, but Anthropic warned "policy and legal frameworks" for agent commerce "simply don't exist yet"
Why it matters: Project Vend showed Claude could run a tiny store; Project Deal shows what happens when every shopper has their own agent. The most interesting finding: fairness ratings barely moved when users 'lost' on price—meaning convenience for AI commerce might matter just as much as extracting every dollar.