DTNS January in Review

0:03This is the Daily Tech News Month in Review for January 2026. We're going to look back on what the big stories of the month were and try to help understand why. Why? Why were they the big stories, Jen? Well, this month, Apple turns to Google for AI. TikTok splits off in the U.S. And I'm pretty sure something called CES was this month. Was that this month? Who knows? That was still January? Forever January. I'm Tom Merritt. I'm Jen Cutter. Let's look back on some of the biggest stories of January 2026. Now, one thing we've been doing on this, which I found interesting, is popping around from different LLMs.

0:49So ChatGPT, Gemini, etc. to find out what it thinks the big stories of the month are. Here's the prompt that I gave to Anthropics Claude this month. I'm putting together a monthly wrap-up of the biggest tech stories from January, limiting things to stories that broke since January 1st. Sum up what you think the top tech stories of January were. It gave, as these LLMs we're finding tend to do, pretty broad categories. AI infrastructure intensifies. So a lot of announcements of people investing money into building infrastructure. CES. So it did remember that CES was in January. Tesla's recent pivot to robotics, where Tesla announced that it would stop making the Model S and Model X and instead used some of the capacity for that in the Fremont factory to build Optimus robots.

1:47Tech earnings, which is like really like, yeah, sure, one out of every three months is going to have tech earnings. Regulatory pressure. I feel like that's every month. chip supply chain tensions so ram and stuff that's an ongoing story but it certainly didn't go away uh and then cyber security incidents which is also like yeah no uh what there there were definitely uh security things happening every month of every year that's a that's a day ending in why yeah kind of thing so i don't know claude did okay with this but it still isn't finding what i consider big stories it's identifying a lot of trends what what did you think oh like yeah we did ask for stories instead of trends but part of me always wonders like is it does claude answer like base exactly on your thing or is it going like oh well everybody else has asked for trends so we're going to give you trends with links to some specific story yeah it's definitely doing a uh thinking thing when i when i ran it it did the you know they asked for these kinds of stories but that what does that mean and you know it's it's giving me a little of its internal monologue so yeah i think you're right especially because i don't pay for claude so it's not using any kind of memory about me or anything else so it kind of has to pull from other places i will say that uh claude's writing has improved from the last time i looked at things these are proper set like you know how there's like the ai cadence or it's this this and this and this although uh this is like totally normal almost human sentences yeah i feel like claude does have a reputation for being a little better at writing than than the other ones that the more creative stuff there so uh here are some things that did not include that we considered but we did we don't have in our big stories clodbot i'm not shocked that clod didn't include clodbot but clodbot is huge it's now called moltbot because anthropic uh complained about it being called clodbot it was spelled c-a-l-a-w you.

3:43It's that customizable DIY agent that either someone is going to tell you is the best thing that has ever happened to them or how it stole all their cryptocurrency because they didn't have it configured properly. Your mileage may vary. Also, Gemini Personal Intelligence. So plugging into all of your Google services to improve Gemini's responses. YouTube CEO Neil Moen writing a letter about AI and creators got a lot of attention. Yahoo Scout, which is Yahoo putting some LLM magic into its search engine. Meta adding new paid features, which anytime Meta charges for something, everyone's like, see, I told you they were going to charge for Facebook.

4:23Amazon laying off 16 ,000 people and closing the Amazon Fresh and Amazon Go stores. And new Apple AirTags. Those are all bigger stories this month, but didn't quite make the biggest stories for us. So what was the biggest story? Well, let's start with CES. Now, it is January 30th as we're recording this. The last day of CES was what? I need to pull out my calendar and look. The last day of CES was technically January 9th. What do you remember from CES a mere 21 days ago, Jen? I remember people complaining about the walk. Yes. That could be any CES, but yes, definitely true. I remember people were surprised at the amount of car tech.

5:17Yes, a lot of car tech. Also fairly consistently true at CES, but maybe there was more than usual. Robots? Robots ring a bell? Robots ring a bell. I feel like robots are, again, a perennial topic. And it's always the, okay, so these robots are here. And then in five years, we can curl back to say, oh my God, they released it. This year, LG and SwitchBot were showing them folding laundry. That's what they'll be doing for you in five years. But they really were. They were really folding laundry and doing kitchen stuff and all of that. And that is a thing that people want. Like, yeah, I want someone to fold my laundry so I can do more fun things.

5:52Please, please be real. Micro RGB TVs. i i like it i i do i do like it it's like well okay like well great to like the switch to has such a great screen i don't care but like okay what if i bring a different console and one that i think to it one that i think that stuck around to the point that we kind of forget that these announcements were at ces is uh intel panther lake which has come out to great rave reviews uh nvidia's vera rubin which is their new data center chip uh and amd uh launching a bunch of new Ryzen chips there as well. So that's sort of been pervasive throughout the month. Yeah.

6:32And to the point where I think people are impressed enough by Panther Lake that they're not thinking about it as a CES announcement. A lot of assistive tech at CES. I feel like that starts to fade into the background real fast if you're not involved with that industry or you're not using it. A lot of smart glasses. I remember seeing a ton of smart glasses there. Yeah. Well, because we've been covering both assistive tech and smart glasses for so long. I can't think of it as a CES thing because a lot of these announcements also came out like right before or they had their announcements on the first day.

7:05And I'm thinking like, because smart glasses are everywhere and because none of the new stuff is an oh my God tier kind of thing, it just gets shoved into my brain bucket of, yeah, no, more smart glasses, just same old smart glasses doing their thing. It would be a fun game to take all the smart glass announcements of the past three months and try to play which of those were at CES and which weren't. Oh, I would get a failing grade on that. Well, because Xreal had a big announcement at CES and also had announcements before CES. And I'd be hard pressed off the top of my head without looking to tell you which one was which.

7:41Yeah, well, everyone's always trying to find like, okay, what day, what time can we get in and get all of the media focus before everything hits at once? But then everything still hits at once because everyone does the pre-show announcements at about the same time. I feel like that's almost an advantage for CES, though, is that it's first thing out of the gate, first thing of the year, and then so much happens after everybody gets back to work that you sort of forget about CES. And that may sound bad, like, well, that's bad that you forget about CES, but you're not constantly sitting there like, okay, well, where's all that stuff?

8:18Where's my laundry folding robot? Right. And then the next time CES rolls around, you're like, oh, right. The place with the laundry folding robot. What is it doing this year? Is it going to cook my dinner? Yeah. Well, I think you always kind of look forward to CES because you always hope like, OK, what is going to be the show breaking thing? What is going to be the new cool thing that we didn't see coming? And I don't quite feel that we hit that yet. Well, I think the trick with CES, I kind of started to figure this out over the past couple years is no given CES will tell you what the big thing is.

8:49But if you look back over five or even 10 of them, then you'll start to see, ah, this trend has been coalescing for a while and is coming to fruition. And at any given CES, they're going to be like, yeah, they had that last year, but you can start to see like, yeah, but now it's finally real. Like foldable screens are a great example that we had them in 2020, uh, in January, 2020, and it took a few years. Now foldable screens are like, yeah, of course, foldable screens. Nobody's questioning foldable screens. It's how are you going to use them? What devices are you putting into them? What's the form factor?

9:23Well, I have a concrete example of that. The last time I covered CES in person, I don't know, 10 years ago, it was a company called Body Media Fit. They hooked me up with this gigantic armband. It was thick. It was huge. But it was the only fitness tech at the time that could actually track hockey stuff. So they gave me that for two years and I tested it for two years and it was fantastic. It did sleep tracking better than the other medical devices on offer at the time. They eventually got bought by like Fitbit Google. So their tech eventually got integrated, but they were like a huge leap forward for them in terms of more accurate tracking of sleep and various fitness activities because like early fitness trackers great at running had running down pretty much out of the gate running and cycling recovered but other sports uh it took other companies to focus on those things and get there yeah and and that's a great example of like it seems obvious now right and at the time when you first got that device it was like well this isn't changing anything right now but it definitely contributed to it yeah uh well that is only our first topic, folks.

10:36Hang on, there's more. All right, obviously, we have got to talk about this because Apple made that big announcement. They have chosen Gemini to power Siri and may be developing a wearable smart pin. Now, I'm less excited about the pin that I am more curious about the Gemini and Siri integration and Gemini integration kind of all over. Gemini integration is, I'm going to say it, a story for January 2026. Yes, it definitely is. It's funny how, you know, this broke January 12th, so kind of in the middle of the month. And already by the end of the month, people have sort of just internalized, well, Apple uses Gemini for Siri, and it doesn't yet.

11:23I think the next update, I think the current beta or the beta that's about else to come out is the first one that will have Siri delivering all the things they promised in 2024. And I'm not even sure how much Gemini is powering that. I think it's powering some of it. But it's the Gemini that's going to come out in the next version of iOS or the Siri that's going to come out in the next version of iOS that will have all the things they couldn't have done without Gemini. Yeah, well, they've definitely got to make good on the promises because I remember those commercials being like, hey, and we're going to do all this really, really cool stuff eventually.

11:59Wait for it. You'll hear about it. Yeah, real soon. Not now. Did we say now? Not now, but soon. Well, we're finally going to get that. It was fine print, but big enough fine print. So you knew that it was coming. You weren't buying it, expecting it to be ready out of the box. Now, I didn't buy the top tier phone, so I won't be able to use all of it, apparently, but I'll be able to run some of it. Yeah. So we'll see whether to just tell it like, Hey, I want to brighten my screen and have it do that would be what I want. That was the, what kind of thing they were promising. And I want that. I want to be able to just not have to go find a setting.

12:36Just tell it what I want it to do. Yeah. Like this is the thing that will, I will actually turn this on because I tend to like run without Siri or anything on my phones, but I will turn this on to test it to see if this is enough to make me keep it on or whether i'm just testing this for work and then i feel like that's an advance from when this story broke oh no you because we had talked about uh like hey is this enough to get you to switch and and i was like i don't know i don't know what to really do yet to get you to try it to be honest so i think i've got to approach this stuff with an open mind yeah and also because i know everyone in my family is going to ask me about it.

13:13So I might as well. You need to know how it works too. Yeah, that's a good point. I think the next update will be okay. It will not be, it'll not, it's not going to knock your socks off, but it might provide a couple of useful things like adjusting settings, for example, that that'll make it worth your while. I do think that they finally will have a usable enough version of an LLM as their foundation. I think a lot of people are thinking like, oh, because they're using Gemini, it'll just be the same thing you can get on Android. And so they'll be behind. But that's not the way to look at it. The way to look at it is Apple is using AWS to power parts of iCloud.

13:56Do you know that? Do you know which parts are powered by Apple's own data centers and which are AWS? No, you don't. You don't care. All you know is iCloud doesn't suck anymore. It's now a decent service, unlike back 15 years ago. So and I think that's what's going to happen with Gemini is most people won't even know or if they knew they won't remember that Gemini is behind it. They'll just be like, oh, Siri actually can answer stuff now. This is great. Yeah, well, I have pretty high expectations from this because of the partnership. Like this should know everything that everyone has ever asked Siri, which means like they should be ready for the certain types of questions that they couldn't answer before.

14:35So it should be I am expecting it to be pretty good out of the gate. Obviously, Apple fans will let them know. Sure. Yeah. And that's really important to remember is this is not just taking Gemini and changing the name to Siri and putting it on the iPhone. This is powering Apple's Siri interface. So they are still going to be using some of their own front level stuff. Some of their own foundational models will even contribute to it, apparently. So it will have their own Apple spin and their own Apple data and the ability to train off of your personal data in a way that Apple won't know what it is.

15:10So there's a lot that's going to go into this. I'm very curious how they explain it at WWDC. That's going to be very telling about what it can and can't do. All right. Do you have another point on that? Do you have a sentence or two on the wearable smart pin? Yeah. Yeah, I feel like that is one of those journalism things where Apple let it leak because they know that OpenAI is out there telling everybody that they're going to make these amazing things. And they've got Johnny Ive and Apple's a little embarrassed that Johnny Ive went to OpenAI. We're going to see more of that kind of stuff. I don't know that I want a wearable smart pin.

15:51But again, maybe I don't know until somebody makes the one that's useful. And that could be OpenAI or Apple. So I like that they are leaking this out because it means they're feeling the heat. And I like that there's competition because that means we as consumers will end up getting a better product. All right. I still don't know what it's going to be good for. But, you know, that's not a reason for them not to try. Okay, that's two of the three or four if you're a patron. So hold, please, for the next one.

16:24You didn't think we could get through the month of January without talking about the spinoff of TikTok USDS from the rest of TikTok. Won't go too much into the details on this because we did a good job of telling you the details on the main show. But the thing I try to remind people is not all of this is new. uh people are like well now that it's on oracle servers xxx and it was on oracle servers before the the things that are new is that usds is now spun off as a an actual separate company usds existed it was just still part of tiktok us usds was running all of your personal data off oracle servers that was all true the algorithm even ran off oracle servers in the u.s it was just still administered by TikTok instead of USDS.

17:19There's a whole story about how China was able to affect the algorithm because they were the ones who were giving the algorithm to USDS, and the USDS employees had to talk to the people back in Beijing sometimes in order to make it work, et cetera. Anyway, that's different now. The algorithm is retrained on US data. and all of the stories of tiktok not working i think some of them have to do with an actual data center power outage but i don't think all of them do i think most of them have to do with the fact that it's a whole different situation when you actually cut off the algorithm from the rest of tiktok and retrain it and then try to run it in a seamless way that is a really hard thing to do and uh you know what happens a lot of weird unanticipated side effects that make people go hey my algorithm definitely changed this is weird and i think that's what we're seeing yeah obviously the uh anything uh with the political bent was taking up a lot of the atmosphere but i also have friends in the u.s who are trying to upload dog grooming videos and yeah those didn't work and like that happens to be on reels a lot if i try to upload certain videos it's like oh i don't know and i'm like it's a dog yeah no it's just it's just random uploads not working doesn't mean they're looking at your yeah eileen was having problems getting captioning to work on TikTok, but it would work on CapCut.

18:41And it's like, so clearly USDS, which runs both of them now for her, isn't blocking her captions. It just was a bug. It was a bug on TikTok. Have you noticed any difference? I don't know how often you scroll TikTok these days, but have you noticed anything? I don't use TikTok enough to have a really like solid recommendations algorithm. So I can't really tell if it's like just because it's always trying to convince me to stay and I'm not a very good TikTok person. I sporadically use it. I generally open it when Eileen tells me she needs me to look at something or Amos sends me a direct message or something.

19:17So I haven't noticed anything crazily different. It's some random stuff in there, but I guess what I'm trying to say is it's always got some random stuff in there because it's always trying to see what I like. So for me, I guess I did notice a lot of the same kinds of videos were coming in a row, they weren't wrong videos, but I'm like, oh, usually I have more variety than that. Okay. Yeah. Well, as everyone knows, I'm in Canada, so we still have the worldwide version of the app. And unlike that one day where there were no Americans and it was all of the Commonwealth, and that was really funny, I don't think I've noticed any kind of difference.

19:55I still see the same Americans that I see. I still see the rest of my international feed. I haven't noticed anything at all. I think that is a really important data point that people aren't talking about enough, is that if there were a lot more chicanery going on, you would see Americans disappearing from the rest of TikTok. And if you're not noticing anything, if you're like, no, same people I always see, then that tells me that the problems US TikTok users are having are directly related to having to get their data from TikTok USDS instead of the rest of TikTok. Yeah, what I would love to hear, if any of you out there deal with like TikTok shopping stuff, I would love to hear if anything has changed for you internationally or within the US, whether you still access the same things, whether all the clicking stuff still works.

20:47Because I am not on that side of TikTok at all, I really want to know if there's any changing. So feedback at dailytechnewshow.com. Do let us know. The only data point I'll add on that is Eileen does pay attention to the TikTok shop stuff. And she said, that's the one part that seems to be working. And guess what? TikTok commerce still run by TikTok, not by TikTok USDS. So I don't know what that tells you. But yes, please give us more data points on that. Like Jen said, feedback at dailytechnewshow.com. All right, folks. Thanks to you for being along for Daily Tech News Show. You keep us in business.

21:23you can become a patron at patreon.com slash DTNS. And if you are a patron, stick around. We got one more story for you about Sony pulling out of televisions, kind of, but not really. So stay with us for that.

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