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AI

Meta's massive AI compute push

Zach Mink • 6 minutes

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Good morning, AI enthusiasts. Meta spent the summer poaching top AI talent, and now it's building up the compute power to match.

Mark Zuckerberg just unveiled Meta Compute, an initiative to build tens of gigawatts of new capacity this decade and hundreds over time — making clear that infrastructure won't be what stands between Meta and the frontier.

In today’s AI rundown:

  • Zuckerberg’s massive AI infrastructure push

  • Microsoft’s ‘good neighbor’ data center initiative

  • Never lose vibe coding progress again with Git

  • AI learns from 1M species to design new medicine

  • 4 new AI tools, community workflows, and more

LATEST DEVELOPMENTS

META

🏗️ Zuckerberg’s massive AI infrastructure push

Image source: Lovart / The Rundown

The Rundown: Meta just announced Meta Compute, a new “top-level initiative” to build AI infrastructure at unprecedented scale — with plans to add tens of gigawatts of capacity this decade and hundreds of gigawatts over time.

The details:

  • Infrastructure chief Santosh Janardhan will co-lead the effort with Daniel Gross, who came over from AI safety startup SSI last year.

  • Meta has committed $600B in U.S. infrastructure spending by 2028 and recently locked in 20-year nuclear power agreements for its data centers.

  • Newly appointed president and former Trump national security official Dina Powell McCormick will handle government deals to finance and build capacity.

  • The announcement comes amid reported major layoffs to Meta’s Reality Labs and metaverse/VR divisions, with a roughly 10% cut expected this week.

Why it matters: Zuck and co. splashed some serious cash on poaching top AI talent in the summer, and now they are doubling down on the compute front as well. With the AI race increasingly becoming an infrastructure one, Meta’s initiative aims to ensure that scale won’t be the bottleneck in leveling up to the frontier.

TOGETHER WITH CONCENTRIX

🔮 Are humans in the loop still needed?

The Rundown Concentrix’s guide on the Missing Piece in AI Systems combines research-based reasoning and hands-on experience to redefine the role of human expertise in building and deploying strong AI systems.

Inside, you’ll find:

  • Analysis of the business impact of human oversight in AI systems development

  • Practical tips for improving the performance of your AI systems

  • Real-world examples of AI success in practice

Download the free guide here.

MICROSOFT

😇 Microsoft’s ‘good neighbor’ AI data center initiative

Image source: Microsoft

The Rundown: Microsoft just launched ‘Community-First AI Infrastructure’, a new plan promising that its data centers won't raise local electricity prices, will replenish more water than they use, and will invest in jobs and training for nearby residents.

The details:

  • The company says it will ask utilities to charge rates high enough to cover the full cost of powering its data centers, so residential bills aren't affected.

  • Microsoft is committed to a 40% reduction in water-use intensity by 2030, with new facilities using closed-loop cooling that doesn't tap local drinking water.

  • The tech giant also pledged to pay full property taxes without breaks, and announced new programs to train locals for data center construction jobs.

  • The announcement follows pressure from senators and comments from President Trump that tech companies need to "pay their own way" on energy.

Why it matters: AI’s infrastructure surge shows no signs of slowing down, but they’ve become divisive in communities across the country over spiking power bills and water supply concerns (some valid, others overblown). Microsoft’s pledge is a good start, but it’ll likely take more than this to turn the PR tides from the current major backlash.

AI TRAINING

💾 Never lose vibe coding progress again with Git

The Rundown: In this tutorial, you will learn how to save your vibe coding progress with Git so you never lose your work again — covering eight practical git commands and writing your first git commit.

Step-by-step:

  1. Install git from git-scm.com and verify with git --version in terminal, then open a coding project in your IDE and start a terminal instance in that folder

  2. Use git init to initialize git tracking, then git add . to snapshot all files (or git add [filename].[extension] for individual files)

  3. Save your snapshot with git commit -m 'first commit!' and view all commits with git log

  4. For new features, create a branch with git checkout -b feature-[name], then merge changes to main with git merge [branch name] 

Pro tip: Add git rules to your coding assistant: (1) Create a feature branch: git checkout -b feature-[name], (2) Commit after each logical change, (3) Ask before merging, (4) Wait for approval, (5) Never commit directly to main.

PRESENTED BY GLEAN

💡 100 ideas from leaders redefining work with AI

The Rundown: AI has moved fast — but transformation hasn’t. Too many organizations are still stuck between hype and results. This report, brought to you by Glean’s Work AI Institute, distills insights from 100+ leaders into practical, evidence-backed plays for using AI to transform work.

In this report, you will discover:

  • Five big lessons for leading through AI change

  • Nine themes around how AI is rewiring the core of how organizations function

  • Real-world AI examples from orgs. like Time, Workday, Deloitte, and more

Get the AI Transformation 100 report.

AI RESEARCH

🧬 AI learns from 1M species to design new medicine

Image source: Basecamp Research

The Rundown: UK startup Basecamp Research introduced Eden, a new family of AI models developed with Nvidia that learned from evolutionary data across 1M species to design potential new treatments for genetic diseases and drug-resistant infections.

The details:

  • Eden learned from DNA collected across 28 countries, studying how organisms evolved to solve biological problems over billions of years.

  • The AI designed a new type of gene-editing tool that can insert therapeutic DNA without cutting it, a potentially safer approach than methods like CRISPR.

  • In lab tests for diseases like muscular dystrophy and hemophilia, over 63% of the AI-designed treatments were functional.

  • Eden also created new antibiotic candidates, with 97% proving effective against dangerous 'superbugs' that don't respond to existing drugs.

Why it matters: Most people don’t think about where new medicines come from until they need one that doesn't exist. Basecamp's approach of teaching AI to learn from billions of years of evolution could help speed up treatments for genetic diseases and a growing crisis of antibiotic-resistant infections that current drugs can't address.

QUICK HITS

🛠️ Trending AI Tools

  • 🗣️ Unwrap Customer Intelligence - Get AI-driven insights from your unstructured customer feedback to build your product roadmap*

  • 🤝 Claude Cowork - Bring Claude’s agentic capabilities to everyday tasks

  • 🎥 Veo 3.1 - Google’s video AI, with upgrades to references, vertical outputs

  • 💬 Slackbot - Slack’s upgraded personal AI agent

*Sponsored Listing

📰 Everything else in AI today

Anthropic introduced Anthropic Labs, a new team focused on building prototypes of AI tools, with CPO and Instagram co-founder Mike Krieger shifting to lead the division.

Google updated its open-source MedGemma medical AI with abilities for interpreting scans like CT and MRIs, also releasing an open MedASR speech-to-text tool.

Claude Code creator Boris Cherny revealed that Anthropic’s new Claude Cowork feature was entirely built using the agentic coding tool in just 1.5 weeks.

U.S. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth said the Pentagon is adding xAI’s Grok into military networks by the end of the month to accelerate AI use across the department.

Japanese lab Sakana AI announced that its ALE-Agent for coding took first place in the AtCoder Heuristic Contest, the first time an AI has won the event.

McKinsey CEO Bob Sternfels said the consulting giant counts 25k AI agents among its 60k “person” workforce, with plans to pair every consultant with at least one agent.

COMMUNITY

🤝 Community AI workflows

Every newsletter, we showcase how a reader is using AI to work smarter, save time, or make life easier.

Today’s workflow comes from reader David G. in Lakewood Ranch, FL:

"AI is all over my workday. It is my WordPress assistant, which solves minor issues and lets me tackle tasks beyond my technical reach. It helps me every time I enter a new, unfamiliar dashboard, answers multiple technical questions during my workday, and supports our marketing and strategy.

Away from work, it also helps manage diabetes by guiding me on the best eating practices and, with a picture, estimating carb counts. I'm hooked!"

How do you use AI? Tell us here.

🎓 Highlights: News, Guides & Events

See you soon,

Rowan, Joey, Zach, Shubham, and Jennifer — the humans behind The Rundown

Tech

A moon hotel is taking reservations

Jennifer Mossalgue • 5 minutes

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Good morning, tech enthusiasts. A 22-year-old Berkeley-trained engineer says he wants to build a luxury hotel on the moon — and he’s taking six-figure deposits from anyone willing to book a room.

His startup, called GRU Space, has already raised money from Y Combinator. It’s audacious even by Silicon Valley standards, but for a certain class of techno-optimist, the moon is starting to look less like a celestial body and more like a lifestyle upgrade.

In today’s tech rundown:

  • This moon hotel is taking reservations

  • Google’s founders are leaving California

  • Trump wants Big Tech to eat AI’s power bills

  • How much Tim Cook made last year

  • Quick hits on other tech news

LATEST DEVELOPMENTS

SPACE TECH

🌝 This moon hotel is taking reservations

Image source: GRU / YouTube

The Rundown: A YC-backed startup called GRU Space says it wants to build the first lunar hotel, taking deposits of $250K–$1M from wealthy true believers who are willing to reserve a bed on the moon years before the infrastructure exists.

The details:

  • The tiny startup plans to launch its first hotel, an inflatable structure, in 2032, giving SpaceX travelers an option off the Starship, Ars Technica reports.

  • The first tech demo is a 10kg payload slated for a commercial lunar lander in 2029, meant to prove out inflatable structures and on-site manufacturing.

  • Founder Skyler Chan, a 22-year-old UC Berkeley engineer, previously interned at Tesla and worked on a NASA-funded 3D printer flown to space.

  • GRU pitches itself as an infrastructure company that will mine outer space to support long-term human settlements.

Why it matters: Chan says the first hotel would be launched in 2032 and capable of supporting up to four guests, with the next iterations, built from moon bricks, taking on the style of San Francisco’s Palace of the Fine Arts. It’s an audacious vision bordering on absurd, but it has already received Y Combinator’s validation.

GOOGLE

🧳 Google’s founders are leaving California

Image source: Wikimedia Commons

The Rundown: Google co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin are quickly severing many of their remaining financial ties to California just as the state weighs a one-time 5% wealth tax on billionaires.

The details:

  • In December, Brin-linked entities dissolved or shifted 15 California LLCs to Nevada, covering assets such as his superyacht and a private jet terminal.

  • Page has likewise moved or wound down dozens of entities and is positioning himself in lower-tax states.

  • The proposed wealth tax would apply retroactively to anyone living in California as of January 1 and could affect roughly 200 ultrawealthy residents.

  • The plan has split Silicon Valley: LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman opposes the levy, while Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang says he is “perfectly fine” paying it.

Why it matters: When two tech legends worth $300B each start shuffling superyachts out of state, California has reason to worry. The state pulls roughly 40% its income tax revenue from the top 1% of earners. But apparently, most of the ultrawealthy stayed put past the January 1 deadline, so the rumored mass exodus hasn’t happened yet.

DATA CENTERS

⚡️ Trump wants Big Tech to eat AI’s power bills

Image source: Ideogram / The Rundown

The Rundown: President Donald Trump says he'll force Microsoft and other tech giants to cover the soaring electricity costs of their AI data centers instead of letting those power bills hit voters’ wallets.

The details:

  • Trump said Americans should never pay higher electricity bills “because of data centers” and vowed to announce new measures in the coming weeks.

  • He singled out Microsoft as the first company expected to implement “major changes” to ensure consumers don’t “pick up the tab” for its AI network.

  • Analysts estimate U.S. data centers could nearly triple their share of national electricity use to around 12% by 2028.

  • A recent PJM grid auction attributed roughly $23B in capacity costs to data centers from 2025 to 2028 — about half the total.

Why it matters: AI data centers are driving power demand so quickly that Washington now treats electricity prices as a political flashpoint, with Trump leaning on Big Tech not to pass rising costs to voters. Yet he previously fast‑tracked data‑center hookups, leaving him both hyping the AI buildout and scrambling to contain its backlash.​

APPLE

🍎 How much Tim Cook made last year 

Image source: Ideogram / The Rundown

The Rundown: Apple’s latest proxy filing shows that CEO Tim Cook was paid about $74.3M in 2025, a hair below his 2024 package and still overwhelmingly tied to stock awards and performance bonuses rather than salary.

The details:

  • Breakdown: $3M salary, about $57.5M in stock awards, $12M in performance-based cash, and roughly $1.76M in other compensation.

  • “Other” compensation includes 401(k) contributions, life insurance, vacation cash-out, security, and personal air travel costs.

  • Apple spent around $887,870 on Cook’s personal security and about $789,991 on private air travel in 2025 alone.

  • Senior execs like Sabih Khan, Deirdre O’Brien, and Kate Adams each made about $27M, while new CFO Kevan Parekh received roughly $22.5M.

Why it matters: Cook’s pay package puts him near the top of the U.S. CEO ranks, alongside Microsoft’s Satya Nadella, whose compensation recently hit about $96.5M — but well below the most extreme outliers, which keeps Apple in the broader debate over whether executive pay is tethered to performance or simply market power.

QUICK HITS

📰 Everything else in tech today

Paramount Skydance sued Warner Bros. Discovery in Delaware court to force more disclosure about WBD’s planned sale of its studio and streaming assets to Netflix.

Meta reportedly plans to cut about 10% of jobs in its 15K-person Reality Labs, shifting investments from metaverse and VR projects into AI-powered wearables.

Disney+ is adding a TikTok-style vertical feed of clips from its content library to boost daily engagement and compete with short-form platforms for users’ attention.

Alphabet, Google’s parent company, became the latest tech giant to surpass a $4T market valuation, as investor AI optimism drives the stock to record highs.

The FCC authorized SpaceX to launch and operate another 7.5K Starlink satellites, bringing its approved Gen2 constellation to 15K spacecraft.

Netflix dominated the 83rd Golden Globes with seven awards, including four for breakout limited series “Adolescence” and two for animated hit “KPop Demon Hunters.”

Meta shut down nearly 550K Australian accounts belonging to under‑16s across Instagram, Facebook, and Threads to comply with the country’s new social media ban.

Apple led the 2025 global smartphone market with a 20% shipment share, narrowly beating Samsung and Xiaomi, per Counterpoint data.

Uber faces a Phoenix trial over a woman’s sexual-assault claim against a driver, a case that could expose serious holes in the company’s safety practices.​

The EU is exploring a minimum-price scheme for Chinese EVs as an alternative to tariffs, aiming to curb state subsidies without completely choking off imports.

Tesla reportedly just started producing a new solar panel at its Buffalo Gigafactory, a sign its struggling solar business might not be completely dead yet.

COMMUNITY

🎓 Highlights: News, Guides & Events

See you soon,

Rowan, Joey, Zach, Shubham, and Jennifer — The Rundown’s editorial team

Robotics

Walmart expands drone empire

Jennifer Mossalgue • 5 minutes

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Good morning, robotics enthusiasts. Walmart’s parking lots are quietly turning into airfields. Wing is strapping 150 drone launchpads onto hundreds of big-box stores, laying the groundwork for a nationwide aerial delivery network that could reshape how everyday goods move through U.S. cities and suburbs.

With new FAA approvals and heavy automation, flying snacks might be ready to go mainstream.

In today’s robotics rundown:

  • Walmart adds drone delivery to 150 stores

  • A 17-ft. robot makes human embryos

  • Humanoids battle it out at CES

  • This AI robot is actually a Tamagotchi

  • Quick hits on other robotics news

LATEST DEVELOPMENTS

WALMART

🛍️ Walmart adds drone delivery to 150 stores

Image source: Wing

The Rundown: Wing is bolting 150 launchpads onto Walmart stores as part of a race to build a 270-site drone network blanketing the U.S. by 2027 — creating what the company calls the world’s largest commercial drone-delivery operation.

The details:

  • The network will target coverage for over 40M Americans, expanding from Dallas–Fort Worth pilots into LA, Miami, Cincinnati, and smaller metros.

  • Customers will be able to order thousands of Walmart items for delivery “in roughly 30 minutes” via Wing’s app or Walmart’s platform.

  • Wing’s aircraft fly autonomously under a centralized fleet management system, coordinating dozens of drones at once and lowering packages on a tether.

  • Wing now completes thousands of weekly deliveries with an average fulfillment time under 19 minutes and flight times averaging 3 minutes and 43 seconds.

Why it matters: FAA approval for beyond-visual-line-of-sight flights has unlocked Wing’s expansion. For Walmart, wiring drone infrastructure into its 4K-plus stores transforms big-box parking lots into an anti-Amazon aerial grid — one that can drop Advil and Doritos straight into suburban backyards without touching a delivery van.

IVF ROBOTICS

👶🏼 A 17-ft. robot makes human embryos

Image source: Conceivable

The Rundown: A 17-foot AI-powered robot in a Mexico City fertility clinic is now making human embryos that have already resulted in 19 babies, raising the question of whether machines are better at IVF than people, Bloomberg reports.

The details:

  • Conceivable’s Aura handles over 200 microscopic steps — from pipetting sperm to injecting it into eggs — with minimal human intervention.

  • The company is offering free robotic IVF to couples in clinical trials at a Mexico City fertility clinic.

  • Conceivable raised $50M last year; rival Overture Life has also deployed automated systems that have produced babies.

  • The 17-foot machine addresses IVF’s core bottlenecks: high costs, inconsistent outcomes, and a global shortage of trained embryologists.

Why it matters: End-to-end automation could transform fertility treatment from a labor-intensive service into an industrialized process, making it accessible to far more people. But delegating embryo creation to machines is already triggering regulatory and ethical scrutiny about who — or what — should control human reproduction.

CES

🥊 Humanoids battle it out at CES 

Image source: Unitree / YouTube

The Rundown: Ultimate Fighting Robot staged live bouts between child-sized Unitree humanoids at CES, complete with human pilots, motion controllers, and a ringside referee — positioning it as a legitimate combat-sports franchise in the making.

The details:

  • Founders Vitaly and Xenia Bulatov are selling UFB as “the sport of the future,” betting fans will connect to robot backstories the way they do MMA fighters.

  • Pilots control the robots ringside using cameras and motion-sensing Nintendo-style controllers while a referee monitors for fouls and knockdowns.

  • Robots resembled blindfolded boxers at times, reportedly triggering laughter with wild misses and cheers when blows landed.

  • Each bout doubles as a data-collection operation — UFB is mining motion data from every match to refine humanoid control systems and movement models.

Why it matters: UFB is stress-testing control interfaces and balance algorithms that robotics companies are racing to perfect, turning Vegas spectacle into practical R&D. Previous sold-out events in San Francisco suggest the format has traction among tech professionals at least, but its widespread entertainment value is still an open question.

ROBOPETS

🥺 This AI robot is actually a Tamagotchi

Image source: Takway

The Rundown: Remember Tamagotchi? It’s back, and it’s way smarter. Takway’s Sweekar, unveiled at CES, is a palm-sized AI robot that learns your voice, remembers conversations, and evolves a personality of its own, with intelligence baked in.

The details:

  • You keep it “happy” by feeding and playing with it, and its mood and expressions change in response to how much attention you give it.

  • The pet moves through four life stages — egg, baby, teen, and adult — becoming less needy over time and eventually able to entertain itself.

  • An adult Sweekar can’t die from neglect; it will keep itself alive and later tell you stories about what it “did” while you were away.

  • Takway plans to launch Sweekar on Kickstarter later this year with a projected price of around $100–$150.

Why it matters: Takway is positioning it as the first step toward becoming the “Nintendo of the AI robot era.” The original Tamagotchi sold over 80M units worldwide by tapping into our impulse to nurture something small and needy — now that impulse comes with machine learning and actual memory.

QUICK HITS

📰 Everything else in robotics today

Musk’s xAI is burning billions of dollars but is pitching investors on a plan to make its Grok models the “brain” for Optimus, becoming the software layer that powers the bot.

Hyundai and Boston Dynamics’ Atlas humanoid, which debuted at CES last week, was named “Best Robot” in CNET Group’s Official Best of CES 2026 award.

HD Hyundai Robotics, South Korea’s largest industrial robot maker, hired UBS, Korea Investment & Securities, and KB Securities to lead a planned Seoul IPO.

X Square Robot raised about $140M in a round backed by ByteDance, Alibaba, and Meituan, making it one of China’s best-funded general-purpose robotics startups.

Tuya Smart unveiled Aura, an AI-powered mobile pet companion robot that roams the home to monitor animals’ emotions, play with them, and capture photos and videos.

CMR’s Versius robot just won EU and UK safety marks for pediatric abdominal surgery, while India’s SS Innovations brings smaller tools to its SSi Mantra system.

Brolan debuted ClearX at CES, a robot that washes, dries, and optionally sanitizes shoes using sensor‑guided micro‑bubble cleaning instead of harsh detergents.​

Zero Zero Robotics unveiled HOVERAir AQUA, a fully waterproof, floating self-flying camera drone that uses AI tracking to film 4K/100 fps watersports footage hands‑free.

E-commerce logistics company Radial says its Kentucky warehouse has used Locus’s robots to pick more than 25M million items so far.

COMMUNITY

🎓 Highlights: News, Guides & Events

See you soon,

Rowan, Joey, Zach, Shubham, and Jennifer — The Rundown’s editorial team

AI

Apple, Google go official for Siri revamp

Zach Mink • 6 minutes

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Good morning, AI enthusiasts. The Siri AI saga finally has an answer — and it's Google.

Apple just officially confirmed a multi-year deal, making Gemini the backbone of its AI strategy and handing a major win to one rival while suddenly making its high-profile ChatGPT partnership feel like an afterthought.

In today’s AI rundown:

  • Apple, Google go official for Siri’s revamp

  • Anthropic’s 'Cowork' for non-coding tasks

  • Exploring Perplexity’s Comet browser

  • Microsoft details growing AI adoption gap

  • 4 new AI tools, community workflows, and more

LATEST DEVELOPMENTS

GOOGLE & APPLE

📱 Apple, Google go official for Siri’s revamp

Image source: Nano Banana Pro / The Rundown

The Rundown: Apple and Google just officially announced a multi-year partnership that will use Gemini to power both Apple’s foundational AI models and the long-awaited Siri upgrade expected later this year.

The details:

  • The two tech giants published a joint statement confirming the deal, with Apple saying Gemini “provides the most capable foundation” for its AI.

  • Bloomberg first reported the potential deal in November, saying Apple was committing roughly $1B annually to license Google’s technology.

  • Apple told CNBC that its ChatGPT deal is still intact, while also confirming that its AI features will continue to run on-device and via Private Cloud Compute.

  • The announcement briefly pushed Google's market cap above $4T for the first time, now trailing only Nvidia, Microsoft, and Apple itself.

Why it matters: After a year of rumblings over Siri’s direction, Apple is finally (officially) picking a lane — and one that is outsourcing Siri’s AI struggles to a major competitor. The deal is validation for Google’s massive Gemini rise, and also makes the arrangements with OpenAI a bit awkward, with its biggest rival powering Siri’s brain.

TOGETHER WITH YOU.COM

📶 Stop Guessing and prove AI ROI

The Rundown: AI spend is rising, but are you measuring return on investment? This guide from You.com gives leaders a step-by-step framework to measure, model, and maximize AI impact.

What you’ll get:

  • A practical framework for measuring and proving AI’s business value

  • Four essential ways to calculate ROI, plus when and how to use each metric

  • A You.com-tested LLM prompt for building your own interactive ROI calculator

Turn “we think” into “we know.” Download the AI ROI Guide.

ANTHROPIC

🚀 Anthropic’s 'Cowork' for non-coding tasks

Image source: Anthropic

The Rundown: Anthropic just released Cowork, a new macOS tool that brings Claude Code's agentic capabilities to everyday tasks like organizing files, building reports, and managing expenses.

The details:

  • The tool operates within a designated folder on your Mac, where Claude can autonomously organize, modify, and generate documents on a user’s behalf.

  • Third-party integrations with services like Asana and Notion are built in, along with optional browser control through the Chrome extension.

  • Users can assign several jobs at once and check back later — a workflow Anthropic compares to delegating to a colleague rather than a bot.

  • Cowork launches in research preview, available initially to Max tier users and exclusive to the platform’s macOS app for now.

Why it matters: Claude Code has become one of Anthropic's breakout products, with users pushing it far beyond just coding — but the name/interface still might be intimidating to non-developers. Cowork brings the same approach to everyone, allowing a more general user base to leverage Claude’s strong agentic capabilities.

AI TRAINING

🌐 Exploring Perplexity’s Comet browser

The Rundown: In this tutorial, you will learn the basics of Comet, Perplexity's new AI browser — covering what you can do with free vs. paid plans and previewing useful workflows like trip planning and AI-assisted shopping.

Step-by-step:

  1. Install the Comet desktop app here, then explore the sidebar for main browsing options — click Spaces → Templates → Trip Planner Pro

  2. Enter a prompt like "Plan me a trip from [starting city] to [destination city] on [dates]" — Perplexity will ask follow-ups or start researching/planning the trip

  3. Open a new tab, navigate to Amazon.com, then open Assistant with ⌥ + a or clicking the top right corner

  4. Prompt: "Find a computer mouse with 5k+ reviews averaging above 4.5 stars for under $60 and add it to my cart" — Perplexity then takes over your tab

Pro tip: To get the most out of Comet, set up Assistant, Connectors, and Purchases.

PRESENTED BY UNWRAP

⚡ Powerful insights for powerful brands

The Rundown: Unwrap aggregates all your customer feedback (surveys, reviews, support tickets, social, sales calls, etc.) into a single AI-powered view, helping product and CX teams at Southwest Airlines, Stripe, lululemon, and DoorDash cut through thousands of data points to ensure no customer voice gets lost.

With Unwrap, you get:

  • All customer feedback auto-categorized into a single view

  • Natural language queries to explore feedback instantly

  • Real-time alerts, custom reporting, and clear sentiment tracking

Grab time directly with the team to talk through how you can automate customer feedback analysis.

AI RESEARCH

📊 Microsoft details growing AI adoption gap

Image source: Microsoft AI Economy Institute

The Rundown: Microsoft's AI Economy Institute released a new report showing global AI adoption reached 16.3% in late 2025, while also revealing a widening gap between wealthy and developing economies and quiet growth of DeepSeek model use.

The details:

  • The UAE leads at 64% adoption for the working-age population, while the U.S. dropped to 24th despite topping both global AI models and infrastructure.

  • The “Global North” developed nations adopted AI at nearly double the rate of developing economies, expanding to a 10.6% higher adoption rate.

  • DeepSeek gained major traction in underserved markets, with 2-4x higher usage in Africa, aided by Huawei partnerships and its free, open-source model.

Why it matters: It is pretty wild to see the U.S. at 24th despite its standing in both model development and AI infra buildout, but innovation and country-wide adoption are two very different challenges. The quiet rise of DeepSeek across underserved areas is also notable, with accessibility just as big a factor as capability for global adoption.

QUICK HITS

🛠️ Trending AI Tools

  • 🤝 Claude Cowork - Bring Claude’s agentic capabilities to everyday tasks

  • 🩺 ChatGPT Health - OpenAI’s new experience for private health convos

  • 📝 Manus Minutes - Turn in-person discussions into structured notes

  • 🏷️ Copilot Checkout - Complete purchases directly within Microsoft Copilot

📰 Everything else in AI today

OpenAI announced the acquisition of health data startup Torch, paying $100M in equity and acquiring the company’s four employees.

Anthropic launched Claude for Healthcare, expanding its AI assistant’s medical capabilities with HIPAA-compliant tools for orgs and connectors for medical platforms.

Nvidia and Eli Lilly are committing $1B for a joint co-innovation AI lab based in San Francisco, aiming to accelerate drug discovery and medical breakthroughs.

Manus rolled out Meeting Minutes, a new recording feature that captures in-person conversations and generates actionable summaries for creating follow-up work.

Axiom announced that its AxiomProver model hit a perfect score on the 2025 Putnam exam, hailed as the “world’s hardest college-level math test”.

COMMUNITY

🤝 Community AI workflows

Every newsletter, we showcase how a reader is using AI to work smarter, save time, or make life easier.

Today’s workflow comes from reader Van R. in Eunice, LA:

"As a Parish Administrator, I oversee infrastructure projects ranging from airports to drainage to debris removal. These projects require us to review Request for Qualifications from engineering firms, and some packets run hundreds of pages long.

I use Claude to pre-screen these proposals, scanning each submission against our criteria... The report scores each proposal, IDs areas of strength and concern, and lists references — giving us a solid foundation for our manual review when selecting a firm.”

How do you use AI? Tell us here.

🎓 Highlights: News, Guides & Events

See you soon,

Rowan, Joey, Zach, Shubham, and Jennifer — the humans behind The Rundown

AI

Anthropic blocks xAI's Claude access

Zach Mink • 6 minutes

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Good morning, AI enthusiasts. Nothing says “your AI model is excellent” quite like a competitor secretly using it for their own development.

Anthropic just cut off xAI's Claude access after discovering Musk's lab was using the rival models for its own development — both a testament to Claude's coding dominance and a reminder that the AI wars are getting increasingly territorial.

P.S. We’re sorry today’s newsletter is later than usual — we had a brief technical issue over the weekend, but everything is back to normal now. Thanks for your patience!

In today’s AI rundown:

  • Anthropic blocks xAI from using Claude

  • The Rundown Roundtable: Our AI use cases

  • Find dozens of free AI tools with Google Labs

  • Google’s new open standard for AI shopping

  • 4 new AI tools, community workflows, and more

LATEST DEVELOPMENTS

ANTHROPIC & XAI

🚫 Anthropic blocks xAI from using Claude

Image source: Nano Banana Pro / The Rundown

The Rundown: Anthropic reportedly cut off xAI's access to Claude models last week after discovering Elon Musk's AI lab had been using the rival system through Cursor to speed up internal development, according to tech journalist Kylie Robison.

The details:

  • xAI cofounder Tony Wu confirmed the block in a Wednesday internal memo, telling staff their Claude access via Cursor was no longer working.

  • Anthropic's terms explicitly ban customers from leveraging its models to build or train competing AI systems, a policy xAI apparently violated.

  • Wu reportedly framed the setback as motivation, saying xAI will take “a hit on productivity” but will accelerate work on its own coding tools.

  • The move mirrors past enforcement actions, with Anthropic previously revoking OpenAI's API access and limiting Windsurf over competitive concerns.

Why it matters: xAI’s internal Claude usage is a testament to the big moment Opus and Claude Code are currently having in the industry’s coding scene. It’s also unsurprising to see things getting territorial — and with coding assistants now essential for AI development itself, rival model use will continue to be a messy battleground.

TOGETHER WITH CONCIERGE

👋 Your brand's AI answer engine

The Rundown: Today’s buyers use AI every day to answer their questions, and have no patience for a scavenger hunt on your website. Concierge is a custom Perplexity-style answer engine, trained on your company’s content, that lives on your website and delivers accurate, personalized responses to ultra-specific questions.

Modern brands use Concierge to:

  • Handle any buyer question (no matter how technical) with advanced RAG on your content & media

  • Control and visibility over every conversation, with guardrails and sentiment analysis

  • Build trust with website visitors before they are willing to commit to a demo

Use Concierge to turn every question into an opportunity.

THE RUNDOWN ROUNDTABLE

💡The Rundown Roundtable: Our AI use cases

Image source: Ideogram / The Rundown

The Rundown: The Rundown Roundtable is a weekly feature in which we poll members of The Rundown staff about how we use AI in our work and daily lives.

Zach, AI Writer: Nano Banana Pro has been a step change both for staying true to prompts and also being able to take its own creative liberties. The ability to talk through prompt brainstorming, image edits, and even providing context directly from our newsletter has made for some highly personalized new creative paths.

Jason, Developer: I have been using Grok in my Tesla, and it is a fun way to navigate and find new places to try around me. You can ask it to map multiple locations now, and ask it things like “after my first destination, I want to get coffee from a local place, not a chain”. It’s given some unique, interesting options I never would’ve explored otherwise.

Joey, Head of Partnerships: My father works in the construction industry and is only able to write in Chinese; however, all of his clients require quotations in English. I taught him how to use ChatGPT’s voice and image for translating from Chinese to English, and for drafting professional construction quotations directly through the platform.

AI TRAINING

🛠️ Find dozens of free AI tools with Google Labs

The Rundown: In this tutorial, you will learn how to use Google Labs’ free AI tools to build marketing content for your business. There are dozens of overlooked tools to help tackle whatever your use case is, but we’ve pulled our favorite three for you to try.

Step-by-step:

  1. Navigate to labs.google/experiments to see a full list of tools.

  2. First is Pomelli. Copy your brand’s website URL and paste it into Pomelli. After ~5 minutes and you’ll get bespoke ad campaigns with image and video assets.

  3. Next, use Flow. Create start and end frames via Create Image, add them to Frames to Video with a prompt, then stitch clips using the scene builder.

  4. Finally, go to ImageFX for image iteration. Use the suggested styles to polish up your prompting skills and try locking the “seed” to keep outputs consistent.

Pro tip: Click the dropdown beside ImageFX and select MusicFX for generating music.

PRESENTED BY MONGODB

🚀 The AI-ready database

The Rundown: MongoDB Atlas is the developer-friendly database used to build and scale gen AI and LLM-powered apps, without needing a separate vector database.

What makes Atlas ideal for AI:

  • Native vector search that eliminates costly multi-system architectures

  • 125+ cloud regions across AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud

  • A developer-friendly backend built for AI/ML apps and recommendation engines

Start building today.

GOOGLE & AI RETAIL

🛍️ Google’s new open standard for AI shopping

Image source: Google

The Rundown: Google just introduced the Universal Commerce Protocol, a new open-source framework designed to let AI agents handle the entire shopping journey — built alongside major retailers like Shopify, Walmart, Target, and Etsy.

The details:

  • UCP creates shared infrastructure for AI systems to manage product discovery, checkout, and post-purchase support across different platforms and agents.

  • Google is adding native checkout to AI Mode in Search and the Gemini app, letting users complete purchases mid-conversation via Google Pay.

  • A new Business Agent puts branded assistants directly in Search, with the ability to personalize interactions, provide offers, and access customer insights.

  • Over 20 companies endorsed UCP at launch, including Visa, Mastercard, Stripe, Macy's, Best Buy, and American Express.

Why it matters: Google's UCP joins a growing stack of AI commerce protocols, but they're all designed to be interoperable rather than competing head-to-head. The real shift will happen behind the scenes for users, while brands being optimized for agentic shopping will likely be as important as websites in the early days of e-commerce.

QUICK HITS

🛠️ Trending AI Tools

  • ☎️ Bland AI - Automate your businesses phone calls with AI*

  • 🎨 Midjourney - Niji V7 model with improved anime, text rendering, & more

  • 💬 Scribe v2 - ElevenLabs’ new SOTA transcription model

  • 🏆 NousCoder-14B - Nous Research’s olympiad programming model

*Sponsored Listing

📰 Everything else in AI today

OpenAI’s GPT-5.2 Pro solved three Erdos problems using Harmonic’s Aristotle, with mathematician Tererence Tao and others breaking new ground on the unsolved proofs.

Epoch AI released new data finding that global AI compute capacity is doubling every 7 months, with Nvidia chips accounting for over 60% of production since 2022.

Alibaba’s Qwen head Justin Lin said Chinese AI companies have a sub 20% chance of overtaking frontier models in 3-5 years, citing resource gaps against U.S. rivals.

ElevenLabs launched Scribe v2, a new SOTA transcription model that the company claims achieves the lowest error rate on industry benchmarks.

Meta announced nuclear energy deals with Vistra, TerraPower, and Oklo for up to 6.6 GW by 2035, making it one of the largest corporate nuclear purchasers in U.S. history.

OpenAI launched ChatGPT for Healthcare, a new HIPAA-compliant platform now rolling out to major hospitals for clinical and administrative workflows.

COMMUNITY

🤝 Community AI workflows

Every newsletter, we showcase how a reader is using AI to work smarter, save time, or make life easier.

Today’s workflow comes from reader Elaine X. in Toronto, Canada:

"Recently, scam emails in my Gmail inbox increased — hard to block and never-ending to delete. Instead of constantly cleaning my inbox, I used Gemini to guide me step by step in building an automated workflow in n8n.

Every new email now triggers the workflow, where Gemini analyzes the content using a strict prompt to identify scams and advertorial-style emails. Messages flagged as spam are filtered out before reaching my inbox."

How do you use AI? Tell us here.

🎓 Highlights: News, Guides & Events

See you soon,

Rowan, Joey, Zach, Shubham, and Jennifer — the humans behind The Rundown

AI

Gmail's Gemini glow-up

Zach Mink • 6 minutes

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Good morning, AI enthusiasts. Google's taken a slower, measured approach to weaving Gemini into its flagship products, but the pace is now picking up.

Gmail just landed a wave of new features, including AI Mode for search, a proactive AI inbox, and more — a signal that the deeper integrations into Google's massive product ecosystem may finally be accelerating.

Reminder: Our first live workshop of 2026 is today at 4 PM EST! Join part 1 of our AI Foundations Bootcamp and learn how to diagnose common failure patterns with AI usage and gain practical frameworks to get better outputs. RSVP here.

In today’s AI rundown:

  • Gmail gets Gemini-powered AI features

  • Microsoft turns Copilot into a checkout counter

  • Use Gemini 3 to build powerful simulations

  • Major Chinese AI lab goes public

  • 4 new AI tools, community workflows, and more

LATEST DEVELOPMENTS

GOOGLE

📧 Gmail gets Gemini-powered AI features

Image source: Google

The Rundown: Google just introduced a wave of new Gemini AI upgrades to Gmail, enabling users to ask natural language questions about their inbox, get automatic summaries, and take more proactive actions across the platform.

The details:

  • An integrated AI Overviews feature lets users search the inbox through natural language instead of hunting through keywords or opening dozens of emails.

  • A new ‘AI Inbox’ acts as a personal assistant, surfacing the most important messages and crafting to-do lists and reminders.

  • Other additions include a Grammarly-style proofreader (Pro / Ultra only), expanded Help Me Write access, and Suggested Replies for quick responses.

Why it matters: Google has been sprinkling AI into Gmail for years, but this is the most aggressive push yet. It’s been relatively slow in intertwining Gemini with its highly used products and platforms, but 2026 (like Rowan predicted in our Monday Roundtable) could be the year the integrations ramp up and actually become a major advantage.

TOGETHER WITH NORTON NEO

💪 Trust-first AI, built into your browser

The Rundown Agentic workflows are everywhere, but real trust is still rare. Norton Neo is the world’s first AI-native browser designed from the ground up for safety, speed, and clarity – bringing AI directly into how you browse, search, and work without forcing you to prompt, manage, or babysit it.

Key Features:

  • Privacy and security are built into its DNA.

  • Tabs organize themselves intelligently.

  • A personal memory adapts to how you work over time.

Try Norton Neo and experience the future of browsing.

MICROSOFT

🛒 Microsoft turns Copilot into a checkout counter

Image source: Microsoft

The Rundown: Microsoft just launched Copilot Checkout, a new feature that lets U.S. shoppers complete purchases directly inside the AI assistant without ever leaving the chat window — with major sellers and retailers already integrated into the platform.

The details:

  • Users can navigate the entire shopping experience, from search to payment, within the chat, with retailers maintaining full control over transactions.

  • Payment is integrated with PayPal, Shopify, and Stripe, with retailers like Urban Outfitters, Anthropologie, Etsy, and Shopify stores live at launch.

  • Microsoft said users were 2x more likely to purchase via Copilot over normal search, with sessions seeing 53% more purchases within 30 minutes.

  • Microsoft also released new retail AI agents for tasks like operations, product management, branding, and creating personalized shopping experiences.

Why it matters: AI commerce is exploding and completely reshaping how people buy things online. With a 7x surge in AI-driven retail traffic this holiday season alone, the checkout experience is migrating from browsers and apps directly into AI chats — and every major assistant will likely follow as conversational shopping becomes the default.

AI TRAINING

🎉 Use Gemini 3 to build powerful simulations

The Rundown: In this tutorial, you will learn how to use Gemini 3 to create interactive simulations, educational visualizations, and functional tools in one shot, leveraging its benchmark-shattering capabilities for visual learning and rapid prototyping.

Step-by-step:

  1. Go to the Gemini homepage and select "Gemini 3 Pro" for reasoning, or "DeepThink" for advanced performance (confirm availability in your region)

  2. Enter your prompt in the chat box — example: "Build a 3D simulation of a quantum computer"

  3. Review the immersive simulation output and click "Explain" to activate the AI tutor for summarized learning, then view or share the code

  4. Experiment with different projects like games, content schedulers, or data dashboards; try again if the sim is not functional and visually appealing

Pro tip: Try comparing solutions across scenarios to understand the underlying reasoning patterns. This helps build better problem-solving skills for future challenges.

PRESENTED BY FIDDLER

🧠 5 Critical Lessons for Production-Ready AI Agents

The Rundown: Fiddler AI breaks down 5 critical lessons to move AI Agents from demo to dependable production. Discover the testing strategies, architectural frameworks, and approaches for building agents that handle complex judgment calls.

In the guide, you’ll learn:

  • A New Testing Playbook using "checkpoint verification" for unpredictable AI systems

  • When to use a single vs. multi-agent design based on domain, governance, or model requirements

  • How to build agents that deliver real value through judgment, rather than rule-based tasks

Download the free guide to get the 5 field-tested lessons for building production-ready AI agents.

ZHIPU AI

🔔 Major Chinese AI lab goes public

Image source: Google Finance

The Rundown: Zhipu AI just debuted on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange after raising $558M, becoming the first major Chinese AI company to go public — and firing a shot at U.S. rivals with prices a fraction of what labs like OpenAI and Anthropic charge.

The details:

  • Share prices on day one valued the company at between $6-8B, a fraction of Anthropic's recent $350B or xAI’s reported $230B valuations.

  • Zhipu's AI assistant runs about $3/month, with its leadership saying that gap will force U.S. competitors into the same price war playing out in China.

  • The IPO comes weeks after Zhipu’s GLM-4.7 coding model release topped open rivals on benchmarks and surpassed closed systems like Sonnet 4.5.

  • Chinese rival MiniMax also goes public Friday after its own $619M raise, with analysts calling 2026 a breakout year for Chinese AI listings in Hong Kong.

Why it matters: DeepSeek rattled markets last year by nearing U.S. performance at a sliver of the cost, and now a wave of Chinese AI startups is going public with a similar playbook. Zhipu's chairman isn't shy about the strategy — flood the market with cheap, capable models until Western labs have no choice but to compete on price.

QUICK HITS

🛠️ Trending AI Tools

  • 🤖 Speechmatics – Build voice-powered products with Speechmatics’ Startup Program and get $50K to take your project to production*

  • 📫 Gmail - Google’s email inbox, now infused with Gemini 3

  • 🤖 Copilot - Microsoft’s AI assistant, with new agentic commerce capabilities

  • 🩺 ChatGPT Health - OpenAI’s new experience for private health convos

*Sponsored Listing

📰 Everything else in AI today

OpenAI is reportedly acqui-hiring the team of Convogo, an AI platform for executive coaches and leadership, marking the company’s ninth acquisition in the past year.

Artificial Analysis revamped its AI Intelligence Index, swapping out saturated benchmarks for tests focused on whether models can perform professional tasks.

Elon Musk posted that Grok Code will receive a “major upgrade” in February, which will be capable of ‘one-shotting’ many complex coding tasks.

Google and Character AI reached a settlement with the family of a Florida teen whose suicide followed months of conversations with a companion chatbot.

A federal judge denied OpenAI's motion to dismiss Elon Musk's lawsuit alleging the company misled him about its nonprofit mission, sending the case to trial in March.

COMMUNITY

🤝 Community AI workflows

Every newsletter, we showcase how a reader is using AI to work smarter, save time, or make life easier.

Today’s workflow comes from reader TheAverageGuyAI in Texas:

"I used AI to automate my holiday shopping logistics. When my son circled 47 toys in a physical catalog, I didn't waste time searching through the website to fill his cart.

I filmed a video of me turning the pages and uploaded it to AI with the prompt: "Identify every toy circled in red and make a table with prices and links." It recognized the visual cues (the red circles) throughout the video and generated a fully shoppable list with links and battery requirements in seconds, saving me hours of data entry."

How do you use AI? Tell us here.

🎓 Highlights: News, Guides & Events

See you soon,

Rowan, Joey, Zach, Shubham, and Jennifer — the humans behind The Rundown

Robotics

Hyundai to mass-produce Atlas humanoids

Jennifer Mossalgue • 5 minutes

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Good morning, robotics enthusiasts. CES 2026 has flooded Las Vegas with humanoids doing backflips and folding laundry, but Boston Dynamics’ Atlas made a different kind of entrance: with an actual production timeline.

Hyundai, which owns the robotics pioneer, says it'll churn out 30K humanoid workers annually by 2028. But is Atlas really ready for that kind of scale, or is this more humanoid hype?

In today’s robotics rundown:

  • Hyundai to build 30K Atlas bots a year by 2028

  • This robot vacuum can climb stairs

  • Self-driving tech giant goes all-in on humanoids

  • Apple’s former Face ID team targets robot vision

  • Quick hits on other robotics news

LATEST DEVELOPMENTS

HYUNDAI & BOSTON DYNAMICS

🤖 Hyundai to build 30K Atlas bots a year by 2028

Image source: Hyundai

The Rundown: At CES, Hyundai unveiled a production-ready version of Boston Dynamics’ Atlas humanoid and announced plans to manufacture 30K robot workers per year by 2028 at its sprawling plant in Georgia.

The details:

  • Hyundai is pitching this as “human-centered automation”: robots take on hard physical tasks while human workers shift to supervision and maintenance roles.

  • Atlas won’t be alone — Spot and Stretch will also be embedded across Hyundai’s software-defined factories, with NVIDIA’s AI stack handling training.

  • Labor unions are already pushing back, with Kia’s union demanding a formal review committee; Hyundai execs insist new human jobs will materialize.

  • South Korea’s Hyundai holds roughly 80% of Boston Dynamics following a 2021 acquisition that valued the U.S. robotics pioneer at $1.1B.

Why it matters: Hyundai just set one of the industry’s most concrete production targets — 30K humanoid units annually by 2028 — while rival Tesla floats ambitious goals without firm timelines and Figure deploys limited pilots. Questions loom about the fate of human workers and whether or not Atlas can handle the rigors of the job.

ROBOROCK

 🪜 This robot vacuum can climb stairs

Image source: Roborock

The Rundown: One of CES’s most crowd-pleasing demos wasn’t a humanoid doing parkour — it was Roborock’s stair-climbing robot vacuum, finally tackling the one obstacle that’s kept robot cleaners trapped on single floors for two decades.

The details:

  • The Saros Rover rolls on four powered wheels mounted to two articulated “legs” that lift and lower independently, hauling itself up steps one at a time.

  • On flat terrain, the legs fold in so the bot zips around like a conventional wheeled rover, switching gaits only when it hits vertical obstacles.

  • Cameras and sensors map stair edges and plot climbing routes designed to keep the machine from tumbling backward or getting wedged on landings.

  • Roborock has announced no price or release date, but promises the project is “in development.”

Why it matters: Roborock is pushing into legged mobility just as Roomba’s parent, iRobot, has filed for bankruptcy. The Saros Rover also keeps Roborock in the broader home-robot race alongside humanoid contenders, which promise multi-task autonomy but may be overkill for households that just want their floors vacuumed.

MOBILEYE & MENTEE

🔥 Self-driving tech giant goes all-in on humanoids

Image source: Mentee Robotics

The Rundown: Intel-backed vision chip maker Mobileye is acquiring Israeli humanoid startup Mentee Robotics for $900M, betting that the same computer vision tech that powers autonomous driving can teach warehouse robots how to work like humans.

The details:

  • The deal, announced at CES, combines $612M in cash with up to 26.2M shares of Mobileye stock, with Mentee operating as an independent unit.

  • MenteeBot learns tasks by watching humans once, training in simulation before executing autonomously — no teleoperation or motion-capture required.

  • In a demo, a MenteeBot autonomously swapped another robot’s battery after observing a human perform the task once, using onboard cameras.

  • Mobileye calls this “Mobileye 3.0,” leveraging its $24.5B automotive pipeline to fund humanoid development at scale.

Why it matters: Billionaire Amnon Shashua — who founded and chairs both companies — is essentially selling to himself, giving Mentee access to Mobileye’s resources and compute, while the self-driving chip giant bets its car perception tech can power humanoids competing with Tesla, Agility, and Figure.

LYTE

👁️ Apple’s former Face ID team targets robot vision

Image source: Lyte

The Rundown: Lyte, a new startup founded by the engineers behind Apple’s Face ID, is pitching a plug-and-play “visual cortex” for robots — a sensor stack that could finally give humanoids the spatial awareness they need to stop bumping into things, or worse.

The details:

  • Lyte has raised $107M to build LyteVision, a perception platform that fuses camera, inertial, and 4D distance-and-velocity sensors into a single system.

  • Founder Alexander Shpunt previously co-founded PrimeSense, the 3D-sensing firm behind Microsoft’s Kinect and the tech that evolved into Apple’s Face ID.

  • LyteVision is designed to give robots what Lyte calls “non-zombie” awareness, perception that produces actionable data so machines can react in real time.

  • The company is positioning its stack as a drop-in solution for an industry where most players still struggle to wire up basic sensor arrays.

Why it matters: Robotics is sprinting toward a $125B AI market by 2030, but perception remains the bottleneck. If Lyte — freshly out of stealth — can actually ship a reliable plug-and-play visual system, it could quietly become the default brain powering the robots everyone else is racing to build. Or at least, that’s the goal.

QUICK HITS

📰 Everything else in robotics today

China’s humanoid boom is on full display at CES 2026, where 21 of 38 humanoid exhibitors come from Chinese companies.

Unitree Robotics spotlighted its G1, H2, and R1 humanoids at this week’s CES, with the compact G1 reportedly stealing the show via martial arts demos.

Samsung shelved its long-hyped Ballie home robot, turning the once-promised consumer device into an internal “innovation platform” after repeated delays.

AgiBot used CES to mark its U.S. debut with the A2 humanoid, showing it as a 169cm “hospitality helper” whose demo was paired with the launch of Genie Sim 3.0.

Germany’s NEURA unveiled third-gen 4NE1, a Studio F.A. Porsche–designed humanoid with 100 kg lift, tactile “skin,” and Isaac GR00T AI.

UK startup Humanoid debuted HMND 01 Alpha at CES, a towering 2.2m wheeled humanoid built in just seven months.

Waymo is renaming its Zeekr robotaxi as “Ojai,” adding a steering wheel and design tweaks as it readies the van for launch across its U.S. and future UK robotaxi service.

A Chinese surgical robot from Shanghai MicroPort MedBot, trained on surgical videos, autonomously performed 88% of a complex biliary operation on a pig.

An AI-driven robotic bartender called AI Barmen debuted at CES 2026, serving up personalized cocktails while automating bar workflows.

Beauty tech brand Luum is bringing its AI lash-extension robot to Ulta Beauty and Nordstrom, speeding up precise lash services while keeping human artists in the loop.

Amazon acquired Indian startup Rightbot, bringing its suction-based truck- and container-unloading robots in-house to bolster the retail giant’s robotics fleet.

Tensor unveiled Robocar, an SUV-sized Level 4 “supercomputer on wheels” built on an 8,000‑TOPS NVIDIA Thor stack, aimed at future Lyft services.

COMMUNITY

🎓 Highlights: News, Guides & Events

See you soon,

Rowan, Joey, Zach, Shubham, and Jennifer — The Rundown’s editorial team

AI

ChatGPT levels up with Health

Zach Mink • 6 minutes

Read Online | Sign Up | Advertise

Good morning, AI enthusiasts. Over 40M people already ask ChatGPT medical questions every day — and now, OpenAI is making those conversations even more personal.

A new ChatGPT Health experience pulls in medical records and fitness data for tailored advice, landing right as AI-driven diagnostics, prescriptions, and FDA-approved devices are set to usher in a completely new era of personalized care.

In today’s AI rundown:

  • OpenAI’s dedicated Health experience

  • Utah’s AI renews prescriptions autonomously

  • Automate email expense tracking with Claude

  • Lenovo’s new cross-device AI assistant

  • 4 new AI tools, community workflows, and more

LATEST DEVELOPMENTS

OPENAI

🏥 OpenAI’s dedicated Health experience

Image source: OpenAI

The Rundown: OpenAI just introduced ChatGPT Health, a new private experience within the chatbot that lets users pull in their medical records and fitness app data to allow health conversations — drawing on personal context instead of generic advice.

The details:

  • The feature taps into platforms like Apple Health, MyFitnessPal, and Peloton, with a b.well integration letting users import records from healthcare providers.

  • Health chats will get their own isolated memory and stronger encryption for privacy, with OAI committing not to use those conversations to train models.

  • OAI recently released data showing that 40M+ users turn to the platform daily for health info like symptom checks, insurance queries, and more.

  • A waitlist opens today with broader web and iOS access expected soon — though pulling in actual medical records is only available to U.S. users for now.

Why it matters: OpenAI is moving on yet another overarching vertical, joining education and shopping — but the stakes in healthcare are obviously higher. With the AI prescriptions refill news (see below) and AI devices gaining FDA traction, Health drops right as the tech feels on the cusp of gaining some serious new medical powers.

TOGETHER WITH AUGMENT CODE

📶 AI-Powered Engineering at Scale

The Rundown: Augment Code’s new adoption playbook, AI-Powered Engineering at Scale, offers exclusive insights and tools to help you accelerate your AI adoption process and scale across the enterprise.

In Augment Code’s guide, you’ll explore:

  • real frameworks from CTOs who’ve scaled AI

  • ready-to-use checklists for AI transformation

  • organizational self-assessment tools

Stop experimenting and start scaling — download the playbook today.

AI & MEDICINE

💊 Utah’s AI renews prescriptions autonomously

Image source: Nano Banana Pro / The Rundown

The Rundown: Utah just became the first state to let an AI system legally approve prescription refills on its own, partnering with health-tech startup Doctronic to give patients with chronic conditions a faster path to routine medication renewals.

The details:

  • The system covers 191 drugs, including blood pressure meds, birth control, and SSRIs — with pain management, ADHD treatments, and injectables off-limits.

  • When tested against 500 urgent care cases, the AI's decisions aligned with doctors' 99% of the time, with edge cases rerouted to human doctors.

  • Doctronic will charge $4 / refill, and is fielding interest from Texas, Arizona, and Missouri — with leadership predicting a dozen states could follow in 2026.

  • The timing aligns with a broader federal push, with the FDA also announcing relaxed rules for low-risk health wearables at CES 2026.

Why it matters: As we’ve seen with ChatGPT’s massive usage numbers for healthcare, a major transition is already underway in medicine — and giving AI the ability to handle prescriptions is the first step towards crossing an impactful line from providing information to actually making medical decisions and streamlining care.

AI TRAINING

🧾 Automate email expense tracking with Claude

The Rundown: In this tutorial, you will learn how to track and label your expenses from Gmail to Google Sheets in minutes with Claude for Chrome, a simple way to use Claude as a personal assistant without complex automation chains.

Step-by-step:

  1. Install Claude in Chrome extension, then create a Google Sheet with headers: Expense Title, Company, Amount, Date, Renewal Date, and copy the link

  2. In a new Chrome tab, click Extensions → Claude to see your current tab highlighted (Claude can work in any highlighted tabs it opens)

  3. Prompt: "Go through my inbox and find subscriptions from [Month + Year]. Navigate to [SHEET], fill each row with extracted data, with total at the bottom”

  4. Let Claude run for 10-15 minutes (prompt it to continue if you have many emails)—save prompt as a shortcut by typing / → "Create shortcut"

Pro tip: Once you have a shortcut set up, you can have it run daily or weekly on a schedule to keep your expense tracking fully automated.

PRESENTED BY GITLAB

🤖 Agentic AI meets software delivery

The Rundown: GitLab Transcend is an exclusive virtual event exploring how agentic AI is transforming software delivery, with real-world stories, product demos, and a preview of GitLab's upcoming roadmap.

At the event, you'll:

  • See how teams are using AI to modernize dev workflows without sacrificing quality or security

  • Get a sneak peek at GitLab's next chapter and areas of investment

  • Share feedback and questions live with GitLab product leaders

Save your spot for February 10th.

LENOVO

🖥️ Lenovo’s new cross-device AI assistant

Image source: Lenovo

The Rundown: Lenovo just announced Qira at CES 2026, a system-level AI assistant designed to follow users between its PCs and Motorola phones for “Personal Ambient Intelligence” with context across devices.

The details:

  • Qira’s system combines Microsoft and OAI cloud models, Stability AI for image generation, and integrations for Notion and Perplexity.

  • The assistant runs in the background by default, tracking users’ work to surface relevant files and suggestions when you switch devices mid-task.

  • Day-to-day capabilities include composing messages in a user’s style, live meeting notes with translation, proactive actions, and catch-up recaps.

  • Select Lenovo PCs get Qira this quarter, with Motorola phones and a dedicated keyboard key coming later in 2026.

Why it matters: Lenovo ships more PCs globally than anyone else, which means Qira is about to be pre-installed on millions of devices. That kind of built-in distribution is the one advantage most AI companies would kill for, but it’s fair to wonder whether anyone is asking for another unique assistant in an already crowded field.

QUICK HITS

🛠️ Trending AI Tools

  • 🗣️ Unwrap Customer Intelligence - Connect your entire organization to the true voice of the customer with AI-driven insights from customer feedback*

  • 🩺 ChatGPT Health - OpenAI’s new experience for private health convos

  • 🎥 LTX-2 - Lightricks’ open-source foundation video model

  • 🗣️ Grok Voice Agent - Build voice agents that call tools and search data

*Sponsored Listing

📰 Everything else in AI today

Anthropic is reportedly raising $10B at a $350B valuation, according to the WSJ – doubling the company’s valuation from its last $13B raise in September.

China is asking tech companies to temporarily halt Nvidia H200 chip orders, according to The Information, with officials deciding on a push for domestic AI chips.

JPMorgan launched Proxy IQ, an in-house AI platform that replaces the company’s proxy shareholder voting in the U.S. across its $7T asset management division.

Dell's product head, Kevin Terwilliger, said that consumers aren't buying PCs based on AI, with the company aiming to pivot away from AI-first marketing.

Amazon is facing backlash over its AI shopping agent "Buy for Me," with retailers saying their products were scraped and listed on the platform without permission.

COMMUNITY

🤝 Community AI workflows

Every newsletter, we showcase how a reader is using AI to work smarter, save time, or make life easier.

Today’s workflow comes from reader Adlin H. in New York, NY:

"I had ACL reconstructive surgery and need to go through a rigorous 20+ week PT plan to… get back to sports activities. I received a 6-page document targeted for the PT professional with full-on medical jargon.

To better understand my custom program and track progress, I uploaded the document to ChatGPT 5.2 Thinking mode, prompting it to create a 20-week grid to help break down the plan into easy-to-digest language and weekly session tracking. Now I have a digital progress tracker in a format I can easily update from my phone and understand."

How do you use AI? Tell us here.

🎓 Highlights: News, Guides & Events

See you soon,

Rowan, Joey, Zach, Shubham, and Jennifer — the humans behind The Rundown

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