Search the archive

OWL LABS' 9TH ANNUAL STATE OF HYBRID WORK REPORT

56% OF CEOS SEE NO AI IMPACT, BUT MARKETING IS THE EXCEPTION

Most CEOs still see limited financial returns from AI. 56% report no impact on revenue or costs. Only 30% see revenue gains, and 26% see cost reductions. A clear internal gap is forming. 43% of C-suite leaders say AI saves them 8+ hours a week, compared with just 5% of workers. Meanwhile, 40% of employees report no time savings at all. As budgets shift from experimentation to accountability, pressure is rising for AI to prove real value. Marketing stands apart. AI is already shaping brand visibility and directing much of media spend, making it one of the few clear near-term enterprise wins.

5 WAYS TO BE CUSTOMER-FRIENDLY WITH PRICING

Remove friction in pricing access and limits. Meet customers where they already communicate. Remove pricing objections through public price-matching. Add flexible payment options and raise usage caps to levels. Make Enterprise pricing clearer by showing a “starts at” price.

HOW TO ACE B2B BRAND STORYTELLING THROUGH THOUGHT LEADERSHIP

B2B brand storytelling works when you center people, not products. Treat customers as the hero and show how your solution helps solve real problems. Build credibility through thought leadership and empower employees to share authentic stories. Share value directly in feeds with zero-click content, lean into relatable and entertaining posts, and expand reach through partnerships with credible external voices.

BUILD A REPEATABLE LINKEDIN POST TO NEWSLETTER WORKFLOW (WEBINAR)

The panelists will walk through how to choose newsletter topics by analyzing LinkedIn data and in turn use LinkedIn posts to grow your newsletter subscribers. This idea is to build one system where each feeds the other. The free event will take place on January 28 at 9:30 AM PT.

WHATSAPP VS. SMS: WHAT GLOBAL BRANDS REALLY NEED TO KNOW

Choosing between WhatsApp and SMS should start with regional user behavior, not pricing. SMS performs best in North America, while WhatsApp drives stronger engagement across much of Europe and Latin America, where it is the default messaging app. Cost only becomes relevant after channel fit, shaping how frequently brands send messages and which moments truly justify mobile interruptions.

HOW SEOS ARE USING COMMON CRAWL'S WEB GRAPH DATA FOR AI RANKING SIGNALS

AI visibility is increasingly tied to how often a site appears in Common Crawl data, and that frequency is influenced by link-based authority metrics like Harmonic Centrality (HC) and PageRank. Common Crawl uses HC to determine crawl priority, and sites with higher HC scores are crawled more frequently. More frequent crawling means more appearances in monthly archives, which means greater representation in AI training data. Research also shows that traditional Google rank still matters. Position 1 pages have a 46-48% chance of AI citation versus about 19-20% at position 10.

IT'S TIME TO START YOUR CONTENT CREATOR ERA

Building and growing a personal audience is becoming a major advantage for hiring and company growth. Creator skills translate directly to marketing and distribution, and an existing audience acts as a built-in trust signal and channel. Startups increasingly treat employee social followings as assets, while employees who publish consistently can stand out in hiring. The practical path is to focus on one platform, speak in your own voice, stay in a clear niche, engage heavily in comments, and commit to the long term.

APPLE IS REPORTEDLY TURNING SIRI INTO A FULL AI CHATBOT

Apple is redesigning Siri into a conversational, text-and-voice AI.

MARKETING LESSONS FROM THE CMO OF G2, SALESLOFT & DRATA (52 MINUTE VIDEO)

An interview with Sydney Sloan on what the 2026 marketing playbook actually looks like.

→ Watch the tutorial

→ Learn more

→ Get started

TIKTOK FORMS US JOINT VENTURE, NAMES ADAM PRESSER CEO

TikTok has formed a joint venture to keep its platform operating in the US. Adam Presser, who has worked at TikTok for almost four years and was previously a senior executive at Warner Bros., will be the CEO of TikTok USDS Joint Venture. TikTok CEO Shou Chew will be a director. The joint venture will operate under defined safeguards that protect national security.

CAPITAL ONE STRIKES $5.15 BILLION DEAL FOR FINTECH BREX

Capital One Financial has agreed to buy Brex for $5.15 billion in cash and stock. Brex launched in 2017 to cater to startups that ran into difficulties getting corporate cards from traditional players. It is one of the youngest US startups to join the billion-dollar valuation club. Capital One expects to close the deal in the second quarter.

TESLA LAUNCHES PUBLIC ROBOTAXI RIDES IN AUSTIN WITH NO SAFETY MONITOR

Tesla Robotaxi riders in Austin, Texas, are now able to hail a Model Y Robotaxi without anyone in the vehicle. The company has removed the human Safety Monitors that have been present in its robotaxis since launch last June. The change has not rolled out to the entire fleet yet. Videos of riders experiencing the driverless service are available in the article.

TESLA WILL SELL HUMANOID ROBOTS BY END OF 2027

Elon Musk says he expects Tesla to begin selling humanoid robots to the public by the end of 2027. Tesla's Optimus robots are already performing simple tasks in the company's factories. There are still profound technological challenges remaining for humanoid robots, including basic issues like hand function. Musk has warned that initial production for Optimus and the Cybercab will be agonizingly slow, but eventually will end up being insanely fast.

BUILD AN AGENT INTO ANY APP WITH THE GITHUB COPILOT SDK

GitHub Copilot SDK allows developers to embed the same agentic core that powers GitHub Copilot CLI into any application. It provides programmatic access to the same production-tested execution loop, so developers don't have to manage context across turns, orchestrate tools and commands, route between models, integrate MCP servers, or think through permissions, safety boundaries, and failure modes. The SDK also provides support for multiple AI models, custom tool definitions, GitHub authentication, and real-time streaming. It is now available in technical preview.

EXPOSING SAAS FUNCTIONALITY TO AGENTS IN LIEU OF MCP

There is a lot of power in composing CLIs. With some creativity, it's possible for an individual to maintain CLIs instead of an MCP server. This post discusses how to expose SaaS functionality to agents without MCP. It provides examples of how to do so by giving an agent access to Google Docs and to Google Groups.

AN INTERVIEW WITH NETFLIX CO-CEO GREG PETERS ABOUT ENGAGEMENT AND WARNER BROS.

Netflix is facing increasing skepticism from Wall Street due to its intention to acquire Warner Bros. The decision is a stark departure from Netflix's build-not-buy philosophy. This article contains an interview with Netflix co-CEO Greg Peters where he discusses why engagement is an important metric and how live events play into that, the Warner Bros. acquisition, why Peters is convinced it is a home run, and the company's arguments as to why regulators should allow the acquisition. The interview is available as a podcast.

MY TIME AT AMAZON, PART I

Becca Selah joined Amazon in April of 2019, six months after becoming a mother. This post takes a look at her time at the company. It covers Amazon's levels, work/life balance, vacations, vesting, and more. Selah left a year and two days into her tenure with an unceremonious exit.

FULLY REMOTE)

As the first engineer on TLDR's new Applied AI team, you'll build AI agents and composable Claude Skills to let non-technical teammates create their own AI workflows. Learn more [16].

APPLE EXPANDS HARDWARE CHIEF'S ROLE IN LATEST SIGN OF CEO CANDIDACY

Apple's hardware chief John Ternus' role now includes design work, a role that has long been entrusted to a senior leader.

THE AI START-UP SOAP OPERA RIVETING SILICON VALLEY

Barret Zoph's firing from Mira Murati's Thinking Machines Lab has resulted in several employees leaving for OpenAI and other companies.

STATE OF MARKETS

a16z's State of Markets slide deck shares what the firm sees in the private and public markets, what it thinks the state of AI looks like, and why today's winners are just built different.

EPIC AND GOOGLE HAVE A SECRET $800 MILLION UNREAL ENGINE AND SERVICES DEAL

Epic helped Google market Android, and in return, Google helped market Fortnite.

MICROSOFT IS USING CLAUDE CODE INTERNALLY WHILE SELLING YOU COPILOT

Microsoft's Windows, Teams, M365, and other divisions have been told to install Claude Code for internal testing alongside Copilot.

AMAZON PLANS THOUSANDS MORE CORPORATE JOB CUTS NEXT WEEK

The job cuts are part of the company's broader goal of cutting about 10% of its corporate workforce.

automatic guardrails

* Discover risks, orchestrate agents, and monitor threats in one place

WE'RE TURNING TODOS INTO TASKS IN CLAUDE CODE

Anthropic has upgraded Todos in Claude Code to Tasks, a new primitive that helps Claude Code track and complete more complicated projects and collaborate on them across multiple sessions or subagents. Claude can create Tasks with dependencies on each other that are stored in the metadata, mirroring how projects work. Tasks are stored in the file system so that multiple subagents or sessions can collaborate on them. Updates are broadcasted to all sessions currently working on the same Task List when one session updates a Task.

PERSONALIZED SEARCH WITH AI MODE

Google is expanding "Personal Intelligence" in Search, enabling AI Mode to use private context from Gmail and Photos for more personalized results.

PANTERA BLOCKCHAIN LETTER :: JANUARY 2026

Macro, positioning, flows, and market structure effects were the dominant drivers last year, particularly for assets outside of Bitcoin. It was a difficult year for much of the token market, but the year also saw advanced institutional adoption, clarified product-market fit, and compressed valuations across large segments of the ecosystem. A strong fundamental backdrop following a year-long bear market for the broader token universe could present an opportunity. Forward-looking setups appear increasingly asymmetric, provided fundamentals stabilize and breadth returns.

OVERCOMING COMPUTE AND MEMORY BOTTLENECKS WITH FLASHATTENTION-4 ON NVIDIA BLACKWELL

FlashAttention is an input/output aware algorithm that computes the same mathematical result as standard attention, but more efficiently. It uses reduced memory access and near-linear memory to achieve this. These optimizations lead to faster training and inference and enable models to handle longer sequences of tokens. FlashAttention-4, the latest iteration of optimized CUDA kernels, achieves a peak performance of 1,605 TFLOPS/s.

BUILDING DEEP AGENT FRONTENDS

CopilotKit published a tutorial on building a fullstack Deep Agent app that includes resume ingestion, skill extraction, sub-agents with web search, and a streaming UI.

easy part of your startup and claim your free year

QWEN3-TTS FAMILY IS NOW OPEN SOURCED: VOICE DESIGN, CLONE, AND GENERATION!

Qwen3-TTS is a series of speech generation models that supports voice cloning, voice design, ultra-high-quality human-like speech generation, and natural language-based voice control. The models support 10 mainstream languages (Chinese, English, Japanese, Korean, German, French, Russian, Portuguese, Spanish, and Italian) along with various dialects. They exhibit strong contextual understanding, allowing them to adapt tone, rhythm, and emotional expression based on instructions and text semantics.

SMALL MODELS, BIG RESULTS: ACHIEVING SUPERIOR INTENT EXTRACTION THROUGH DECOMPOSITION

For agents to be truly helpful, the underlying models need to be able to understand what users are trying to do when they are interacting with them. Large multimodal LLMs are already good at understanding user intent, but this typically involves sending information to a server, which can be slow, costly, and carries the potential risk of exposing sensitive information. The task can be made more tractable for small models by separating user intent understanding into two stages.

D4RT: UNIFIED, FAST 4D SCENE RECONSTRUCTION & TRACKING

D4RT is a unified AI model for efficient 4D scene reconstruction and tracking that achieves up to 300x efficiency over traditional methods. Utilizing a unified encoder-decoder Transformer architecture, D4RT processes scenes dynamically by answering targeted queries about 3D space and time from 2D video inputs. This speed and scalability suit applications in robotics and augmented reality.

ROBOTICS VIDEO BENCHMARK AND DATASET

RBench is a benchmark for robotics video generation, and RoVid-X is a million-scale dataset for training embodied video models.

RENDER-OF-THOUGHT: VISUALIZING REASONING CHAINS

SALESFORCE ADOPTS CURSOR AT SCALE

Over 90% of Salesforce's 20,000 engineers now use Cursor in daily workflows, improving development speed and code quality. The shift has helped power product releases like Agentforce and signals broader industry trends in AI-assisted software engineering.

THOUGHTS ON EVALS

Raindrop's AI monitors agents by generating billions of labels monthly, detecting issues, and providing performance insights in the real world. Unlike Eval Driven Development, Raindrop focuses on monitoring after deployment, allowing real-world feedback and faster iteration. Monitoring tools are more effective for AI products due to their dynamic nature, offering comprehensive real-world performance insights that static evals can't match.

FULLY REMOTE)

As the first engineer on TLDR's new Applied AI team, you'll build AI agents and composable Claude Skills to let non-technical teammates create their own AI workflows. Learn more [20].

MOST PEOPLE'S MENTAL MODEL OF CLAUDE CODE IS THAT "IT'S JUST A TUI"

Claude Code is closer to a small game engine.

SUPPLY-CHAIN RISK OF AGENTIC AI - INFECTING INFRASTRUCTURES VIA SKILL WORMS

Skills added to AI assistants can introduce significant security risks by executing shell, network, and filesystem commands.

SECURING AGENTS IN PRODUCTION

This post examines how Palantir's AIP Agentic Runtime secures agents across the full operational life cycle.