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ADVANCEMENTS IN SELF-DRIVING CARS

Self-driving cars will change quite a lot wherever the technology is allowed to proceed.

CHATGPT HEALTH

OpenAI has introduced ChatGPT Health, a new feature designed to assist users with health and wellness by securely integrating their medical information into a personalized ChatGPT experience.

OPENAI EARMARKS $50 BILLION FOR EMPLOYEE STOCK GRANT POOL

OpenAI set aside an employee stock grant pool equivalent to 10% of the company last fall, when it was valued at $500 billion. The startup has already given $80 billion in vested equity. It is in preliminary talks with some investors about raising funds at a valuation of around $750 billion.

ANTHROPIC RAISING $10 BILLION AT $350 BILLION VALUE

Anthropic plans to raise $10 billion at a valuation of $350 billion. The funding round is expected to close in the coming weeks, and the total amount of the deal could change. AI companies collected a record $222 billion in funding last year. This year is slated to be a big year for public offerings.

8 PLOTS THAT EXPLAIN THE STATE OF OPEN MODELS

Chinese companies are making strong, open AI models that are applying increasing pressure on the US AI economy. Dethroning Qwen in adoption in 2026 looks impossible, but there are areas of opportunity. The US could very well have the smartest open models again in 2026, even if they're used far less across the ecosystem. This post contains 8 plots that show the impact of Qwen, DeepSeek, Llama, GPT-OSS, Nemotron, and other new entrants to the ecosystem.

CONTEXT IS THE NEXT DATA PLATFORM—AND WHY CONTEXT GRAPHS ARE KEY TO UNDERSTANDING PROCESSES

Context graphs shed light on how work really gets done in the enterprise. AI agents are a major unlock with automation, but only if their reasoning is grounded in the right enterprise context. It's not enough to just understand the enterprise data, systems also need relationship knowledge. Context graphs enable agents to learn and automate distributed work by capturing processes and learning intent over time.

RECURSIVE LANGUAGE MODELS AND CONTEXT FOLDING

Recursive Language Model (RLM) is a flexible solution to long-context limitations in LLM agents. RLMs avoid summarization by delegating memory management to scripts and sub-models.

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FINEPDFS: LIBERATING 3T OF THE FINEST TOKENS FROM PDFS

PDFs have been largely ignored by the open source AI community, despite being a source of high-quality data for pretraining. Hugging Face has created a new pretraining dataset of more than 3T tokens spanning over 1,000 languages extracted from PDFs. This post details how the dataset was created.

OPEN GAMING FOUNDATION MODEL

NitroGen is a generalist gaming agent trained on internet gameplay videos capable of predicting controller actions from pixels and adapting to unseen games through post-training.

VISUAL WEB AGENTS

WebGym is a large-scale environment with nearly 300,000 real-world web tasks for training visual agents. It has a high-throughput RL system that boosts training speed and a fine-tuned Qwen-3-VL that outperforms GPT-4o and GPT-5-Thinking on unseen web navigation tasks.

CONSUMER AI PREDICTIONS

Screenless and always-on AI devices will fail, while mini-apps enable UGC personal software and a US consumer super-app. By 2030, consumer AI will split into a reliable task assistant and an AI companion, performance marketing will collapse, and AI-generated virtual creators will explode. The biggest win will go to whoever solves AI discovery beyond chat and search.

BRENDAN FOODY ON TEACHING AI AND THE FUTURE OF KNOWLEDGE WORK

Brendan Foody, the youngest unicorn founder and CEO of Mercor, is transforming AI training by hiring experts like poets and economists to create evaluation frameworks for frontier models. Mercor pays top talent to teach AI models that are rapidly improving in economically valuable tasks.

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GOOGLE SUPPORTS GEMINI-POWERED AUDIO LESSONS

Google now lets educators create podcast-style audio lessons using Gemini in Google Classroom.

AI WILL COMPROMISE YOUR CYBERSECURITY POSTURE

The breakneck speed at which AI tools are being integrated into existing systems and workflows without proper threat modeling, testing, and security analysis is dangerous.

BUILDING THREAT MODELS WITH MCP AND AI AGENTS

AI agents and MCP servers enhance threat modeling by automating the synthesis of organizational context, enabling security teams to map threats, identify detection gaps, and target high-priority threats efficiently.

MORGAN STANLEY FILES FOR BITCOIN AND SOLANA ETFS

Morgan Stanley filed with the SEC for a spot Bitcoin ETF and Solana trust – a strategic shift from distributing third-party crypto products to creating in-house vehicles as institutional demand accelerates. Spot Bitcoin ETFs have grown to $123 billion in total net assets (6.57% of BTC's market cap) with $1.1 billion in net inflows year-to-date, while Solana trusts have surpassed $1 billion in assets following nearly $800 million in cumulative inflows. The ETF business economics are lucrative – BlackRock's Bitcoin ETFs became the firm's top revenue source in November with nearly $100 billion in allocations – and Morgan Stanley's ability to vertically integrate these products through its massive wealth management arm, which opened crypto access to clients in October, keeps management fees in-house rather than paying competitors.

ETHEREUM NETWORK USAGE HITS RECORD HIGH

Ethereum's 7-day average of daily transactions reached a record 2.023 million on January 4, driven primarily by accelerating real-world asset tokenization adoption, yet prediction market data reveal traders assign higher odds to gold hitting $5,000 than Ethereum reaching $4,000. Despite the network usage milestone, ETH is trading at $3,240, with analysts attributing the sentiment disconnect to short-term macro uncertainty and liquidity conditions outweighing on-chain fundamentals in price discovery. Analysts argue this represents a temporary divergence, noting that Ethereum's long-term investment case remains anchored in its DeFi and tokenized asset dominance and suggests that increasing ETH absorption into RWAs and DeFi protocols will tighten effective supply and support more durable price appreciation. Prediction markets show 58% odds for ETH hitting $4,000 versus falling to $2,500, up from 43% at the start of the year, indicating some improving sentiment despite the current lag behind gold.

G*BOY: THE FASTEST-GROWING IP IN CRYPTO

G*BOY's "Animate” is a tool that allows community members to convert static images into high-fidelity videos in seconds. It builds on the project's AI toolkit, which has already generated over 130,000 character-consistent assets, with the community now producing 90% of the brand's visual output. Web3 IP is broken because projects treat supporters as passive consumers rather than empowering them with the same creation tools as core teams. G*BOY is positioned as a community-proliferated franchise where token holders own stake in a democratized IP that can compete with billion-dollar media companies for attention on platforms like X and TikTok. The launch bets on video's dominance in the attention economy while embracing community taste rather than fearing supporters will "mess up" the IP as traditional brands do.

XRPL'S MPT MAKES TOKENIZATION PRODUCTION-READY

The XRPL Multi-Purpose Token (MPT) standard embeds institutional controls at the protocol layer (rich metadata, issuer-defined permissions, KYC/AML authorizations, transfer restrictions, freezing, and clawbacks) to deliver deterministic settlement, low fees, and fast finality. This enables compliant stablecoins, tokenized MMFs, RWAs, escrowed collateral, and closed-loop loyalty systems as production-grade financial infrastructure rather than experimental smart-contract pilots.

PRIVACY MATTERS. BREAK FREE WITH MIDNIGHT

ETHEREUM'S INSTITUTIONAL MOMENT HEADS INTO 2026

Ethereum has exited the experimentation phase and is becoming the default blockchain for institutional tokenization, stablecoins, and custom Layer 2 deployments, driven by regulatory clarity, proven uptime, and deep liquidity. Major banks and asset managers, including JPMorgan, BlackRock, Fidelity, and BNY Mellon, are already issuing tokenized funds and financial products on Ethereum, while stablecoins and L2s position it as core financial infrastructure. Looking ahead to 2026, tokenized assets, stablecoins, and ETH's price are forecasted to grow 5x as Ethereum solidifies its role as “digital oil” and an institutional-grade treasury asset.

AAVE V4: A FAIRER LENDING MODEL WITH RISK PREMIUM

Aave V4 overhauls lending by adding a “Risk Premium” that prices borrowing costs based on the quality of a user's collateral, fixing a long-standing issue where risky and safe borrowers paid the same rates in shared liquidity pools. The protocol assigns risk scores to collateral, computes a position-level risk premium using only the collateral actually needed to back the debt, and accrues that extra cost gradually through interest rather than upfront fees. This design makes borrowing fairer, improves capital efficiency in Aave's new unified liquidity architecture, and aligns interest rates more closely with the real risk each position introduces to the system.

CIRCLE'S USDC OUTPACES GROWTH OF TETHER'S USDT

Circle's USDC stablecoin grew 73% to $75.12 billion in 2025, significantly outpacing Tether's USDT growth of 36% to $186.6 billion for the second consecutive year, driven by increasing institutional demand for regulated digital dollars following the passage of the GENUIS Act. USDC's regulatory compliance – including state money transmission licenses, New York virtual currency licensing, and MiCA framework adherence in Europe – has made it the preferred choice for institutions like Visa, Mastercard, and BlackRock, while USDT remains unregulated in the US and Europe. Despite USDC's faster growth trajectory, the two stablecoins still command over 80% of the $312 billion total stablecoin market, with Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent projecting the sector could reach $3.7 trillion by decade's end. JPMorgan analysts noted that USDC's transparent reserve management and regular audits make it more trustworthy among institutional investors and regulated entities compared to competitors.

STABLECOIN “INTERCHANGE” IS A CATEGORY ERROR

GRAYSCALE ETH STAKING ETF MAKES FIRST DISTRIBUTION

Grayscale Ethereum Staking ETF (ETHE) became the first ‘33 Act spot crypto ETF to distribute staking rewards to shareholders, covering rewards from October 6 to December 31.

SENATOR LUMMIS QUESTIONS DOJ BITCOIN LIQUIDATION

MSCI KEEPS BITCOIN & CRYPTO TREASURY COMPANIES IN INDEXES

MSCI decided not to exclude Bitcoin and crypto treasury companies from its indexes, allowing firms like MicroStrategy to remain in major investment benchmarks.

TOKENIZED T-BILLS ARE BECOMING CORE DEFI INFRASTRUCTURE

The market cap of tokenized US T-Bill funds has reached $7.5B, up 50x since 2024, driven by yield-bearing, onchain money market funds backed by US Treasuries that offer stability and real returns.

LEAKER SUGGESTS FUTURE IPHONES COULD GET MULTISPECTRAL CAMERAS

A reliable leaker claims Apple is exploring multispectral camera sensors, a technology that captures infrared and ultraviolet light alongside visible colors to potentially improve color accuracy and low-light performance, for future iPhones. However, similar implementations in Huawei phones delivered underwhelming results, and given Apple's early, non-committal interest, it's unlikely the feature will reach consumer iPhones anytime soon.

APPLE DESIGNER BEHIND IPHONE AIR IS JOINING THE AI STARTUP HARK

Abidur Chowdhury, a former Apple designer who worked on the iPhone Air, is joining AI startup Hark as head of design. Hark, founded and self-funded with $100 million by Brett Adcock (who also runs robotics startup Figure AI), has recruited 30 engineers from companies like Google, Meta, and Amazon, aiming to reach 100 employees by mid-2026. The startup is developing AI models with its first release planned for summer 2026.

LEGO SMART BRICKS INTRODUCE A NEW WAY TO BUILD — AND THEY DON'T REQUIRE SCREENS

The Lego Smart Play system introduces interactive Smart Bricks, Tags, and Minifigures that respond with lights, sounds, and motion sensing without requiring screens. Powered by a tiny custom chip and a secure Bluetooth-based network, the system allows pieces to recognize nearby tags and each other, enabling more dynamic, responsive play. Lego's first Smart Play sets, revealed at CES 2026 and themed around Star Wars, will launch on March 1 with animated builds like Luke's X-wing and a larger throne room duel set.

STOP APPLYING TO THE WRONG UX JOBS: A RESEARCH SYSTEM THAT ACTUALLY WORKS

Most UX designers fail at job hunting because they apply to mismatched roles using a "spray and pray" approach that no longer works in today's competitive market. This article presents a five-phase research system: audit readiness through tool fluency and portfolio quality, target specific industries with tailored resumes, research companies beyond job descriptions, strategically network, and treat rejection as diagnostic data rather than personal judgment. By filtering opportunities rigorously and iterating on feedback, designers can turn their job search from a numbers game into a precise matching system that increases hiring success.

UX AND PRODUCT DESIGNER'S CAREER PATHS

Annual retrospectives and self-assessment tools help UX and product designers clarify career goals beyond traditional management tracks. The Mirror Model and career matrices identify strategic opportunities, including sideways moves into specialized roles like AI experience design or design-engineering translation. Designers should proactively shape positions that amplify their strengths rather than fitting predefined roles, focusing on human-centered work that AI cannot replace.

WHAT YOUR UX CAREER'S FINGERPRINT REVEALS ABOUT REAL VALUE IN AN AI-DRIVEN MARKET

As AI accelerates design execution, the real value of UX work increasingly lies in human judgment and sensemaking: the upstream effort of framing problems, reconciling constraints, and stabilising direction before screens ever appear. This often-invisible work, rarely named in job descriptions, is what enables coherent execution, reduces costly reversals, and becomes even more critical as AI makes output cheap but poor decisions more expensive.

CURATED MOTION DESIGN PORTFOLIOS

Step inside the portfolios of the world's finest motion designers, explore their craft, and find the spark that shapes your next big idea.

100+ AI DIRECTORIES IN ONE PLACE

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ALL-IN-ONE AI CREATIVE TOOL

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HOW TO REDUCE FRICTION IN REMOTE USABILITY STUDIES THROUGH BETTER ASSET COLLECTION

Remote usability testing frequently fails due to disorganized asset preparation—scattered links, incomplete instructions, and mismatched materials—rather than flawed design or complex tasks. Intentional asset collection, including centralized storage, clear instructions, standardized moderator preparation, and pilot testing, eliminates friction and strengthens data quality. Key strategies involve creating a single source of truth, writing unambiguous participant instructions, anticipating technical variability, and selecting tools that support rather than complicate workflows.

YOUNGER PEOPLE WANT GOOD DESIGN IN EVERY DRAWER

Younger generations expect everyday homeware to deliver flawless performance, express personality, and adapt to their fluid, budget-conscious lifestyles shaped by hybrid work and frequent moves. Well-designed objects provide emotional support and self-expression, transforming homes into curated spaces that serve as both sanctuary and social backdrop. Brands must create durable, adaptable products with emotional clarity that ground people through life's constant changes rather than just looking attractive on shelves.

DELL, HP, AND LENOVO HEADED IN THE OPPOSITE DIRECTION TO APPLE WITH NEW LAPTOP DESIGNS

Apple is expected to unveil a thinner, redesigned MacBook Pro later this year, continuing its long-standing push for sleekness despite past trade-offs like lost ports, limited upgradability, and the failed butterfly keyboard. In contrast, PC makers such as Dell, HP, and Lenovo are moving toward thicker, more repairable laptops that prioritise longevity and user-replaceable components over extreme thinness.

WHY GEN Z ARTISTS ARE REDISCOVERING ANATOMY, GESTURE, AND PLEIN AIR PAINTING IN 2026

Gen Z artists are increasingly choosing traditional techniques like charcoal drawing, plein air painting, and anatomy studies over purely digital methods.

AIDIA STUDIO'S MESMERISING FORMS BLEND BIOPHILIA AND LOCAL CRAFT

Aidia Studio, founded in 2018 by Mexican-Polish couple Rolando Rodríguez-Leal and Natalia Wrzask, creates architecture that merges computational design with biophilic elements and sustainable solutions.

THIS ARTIST FOUND HIS CALLING BY TAKING INSPIRATION FROM RETRO VIDEO GAME COVERS

Aleksa Stajsic is a Serbian artist who transitioned from studying architecture and working as a barber into illustration, drawing inspiration from childhood video game cover art alongside art history and contemporary influences.

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