AI Reading for Wednesday January 7

Vera Rubin will make you Very Rich. At CES 2026, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang unveiled the Vera Rubin platform—six chips slated for mass production in H2 2026—while analysts split: Wedbush's Dan Ives projects a $6 trillion path and DA Davidson's Gil Luria warns of a datacenter peak. - Yahoo

Nvidia is ramping H200 AI-chip production for China and expects a White House agreement to resume AI-chip exports soon, which would restore H200-class accelerator access for Chinese cloud and data-center customers, CEO Jensen Huang said. - Financial Times

Huang statements hit chip cooling stocks as new chips said to run cooler. - NBC News

$20b here, $20b there, pretty soon you're talking about real money - x.ai

xAI raised $20 billion, potentially lifting its valuation above $230 billion, with investors including Fidelity, the Qatar Investment Authority, Valor Equity Partners and Nvidia, and said the funds will expand compute and build data centers for model training. - The New York Times

Making sexy images of public figures and kids no impediment

this is cursed

Big Tech: You can’t use an Eagles riff in a guitar lesson, but sure, hallucinate a female leader or a child out of her clothes. (laughing smiley) - 512 Pixels

Fab 4? Elon Musk says Tesla will make its own fab. Everyone except TSMC, Samsung and Intel got out of leading edge fab because it was insanely capital-intensive and even making a new $20b fab every year you are hard-pressed to keep pace with the current leader. - YouTube

AI summary

Razer unveiled Project AVA at CES 2026, a 3D holographic desk companion projecting 5.5-inch avatars, initially powered by xAI's Grok with vision and audio sensing, offering scheduling, translation and spreadsheet analysis; reservations require a $20 deposit and ship H2 2026. - Dexerto

help me Obi-wan, you’re my only hope

DeepMind CTO Koray Kavukcuoglu led development of Google’s Gemini 3, released in November, which adds enhanced multimodal understanding, improved coding and agentic capabilities, integrates with tools like Antigravity, and Google plans broad product deployment. - Financial Times

don’t forget we invented transformers

How Google Got Its Groove Back and Edged Ahead of OpenAI - The Wall Street Journal

Similarweb shows that after Gemini 3's November launch, December month‑over‑month traffic rose 28.4% for Gemini and fell 5.6% (probably seasonally) for ChatGPT, with year‑over‑year estimated growth of 563.6% versus 49.5% and December visits ~1.7B and ~5.5B. - Business Insider

OpenAI is rolling out GPT-5.2-Codex-Max to some paid subscribers, a higher-performance Codex variant that improves long-task tracking, large-repo context compaction, heavy refactor handling, tool reliability, Windows workflows, and vision for screenshots and diagrams. - Bleeping Computer

OpenAI's chief economist says AI tools like ChatGPT will free households from chores and generate hidden productivity gains not captured in official statistics, meaning GDP and productivity metrics may understate AI's economic value and prompt new measurement and policy responses. - Financial Times

McKinsey CEO Bob Sternfels said AI has reshaped the firm's workforce: 40,000 human employees and 25,000 AI agents (projected to reach parity by year-end), with client-facing roles up about 25%, non-client-facing roles down about 25%, and 1.5 million hours saved. - Business Insider

Mind Your Manus, Mark, China's commerce ministry is reviewing Meta's $2 billion acquisition of Chinese-founded AI start-up Manus to determine whether the transaction violates technology export controls, a review that could delay, condition or block the deal. - Financial Times

Chinese officials not warm and fuzzy about China's AI startups selling out to US, reviewing whether Meta's deal to acquire Manus for $2 billion violated export controls over Manus's relocation from Beijing to Singapore, a probe that could complicate closing and integration of Manus's software. - TechCrunch

Meta is adding a teleprompter and virtual writing to its Ray-Ban Display glasses - The Verge

Zero-consent agent aggregation: Amazon launched experimental agentic-commerce features, including Buy for Me (covering over 500,000 purchasable products) and Rufus, that scrape third-party sites to list and buy items using stored payment/shipping details, prompting merchants' complaints and opt-out requests. - SiliconANGLE

Around Christmas, Amazon's AI tool automatically duplicated merchants' product listings and placed orders using anonymous Amazon-related email addresses, a practice stationery seller Sarah Burzio discovered after seeing unauthorized listings and purchases for her products. - Bloomberg

LMarena raised at $1.7b valuation, which is ridiculous for a poll, but the data is very valuable if they can scale and keep it honest contra Goodhart’s law. - The Information

hype is the product

With OpenAI and Qwen releasing very good open-source models that will run on an NGX Spark or a beefy MacBook Pro at 1400 ELO on LMarena, matter of time until LLMs are increasingly commoditized and local models will be a game-changer. Needs RAM/VRAM prices to come down so those machines are mainstream. - CNET

Imagine in 5 years if regular laptops have equivalent of today’s 80GB B100. Seems possible that massive data factory chips that support trillion-parameter models might only be needed for training, and inference will get very commoditized, when you have something like a local 80GB B100 in a few years. or might be new magic you can only run in a big cluster, who knows.

Boston Dynamics has begun commercial production of Atlas, secured deployment of tens of thousands of units at Hyundai facilities tied to Hyundai's U.S. manufacturing investment, plans a factory to produce about 30,000 robots per year, and allocated all 2026 output. - The Register

Atlas product features - YouTube

Robots hype/nightmare fuel is big at CES. IMHO they are very attention-grabbing, makes them great for exhibition floors, will follow a trajectory similar to robotaxis and take 10 years to achieve consumer product-market fit. - CNET

AI deepfakes and generated videos, including fabricated clips claiming Venezuelans celebrated President Maduro's capture, circulated widely and were amplified by influential accounts and platform dynamics, creating new moderation and verification challenges. - New York Magazine

I’m watching myself on YouTube saying things I would never say. This is the deepfake menace we must confront - Yanis Varoufakis - the Guardian

TikTok scams uslng Spain's Princess Leonor go viral - the Guardian

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration on Tuesday issued guidance limiting regulation of low-risk wearable devices and wellness software that only provide information and do not claim to diagnose or treat disease, FDA Commissioner Marty Makary said. - Reuters

not sure what this means for inaccurate BP monitors, apps promoting dangerous diets for anorexics

At CES 2026, exhibitors showcased top health gadgets—including Garmin's AI nutrition tracker, an AI Longevity Mirror, a sunlight laptop attachment, Withings' longevity station, and Luna Band—aimed at nutrition logging, passive biomarker monitoring and voice-led guidance. - TechRadar

AI Don Rickles gonna roast my workouts and ‘lifestyle’

Vocci AI debuts smart meeting ring at CES 2026: eight-hour recording, cloud transcription in 100+ languages, preorders Feb for April shipping - CNET

AI forecasting makes supply chains and logistics more resilient. - Nature

Eight multi-agent design patterns - InfoQ

it takes a village of idiot agents

Claude Code's creator discusses his setup - X (formerly Twitter)

Ralph Wigum uses a bash loop and the file system as persistent memory to run iterative AI coding that automates tasks such as test coverage, large-scale refactoring and documentation updates, reducing manual oversight while posing security and architectural limitations. - Geeky Gadgets

Most of my tech influencer feed is vibe-coding advice now, everybody went home for holidays and talked with their kids and devs and made personal projects - Hacker Noon

prompt on a loop considered effective

Follow the latest AI headlines via SkynetAndChill.com on Bluesky