263 | We passed an inflection point, Claude Cowork + OpenClaw + Kimi 2.5 Agent Swarm, Skynet vibes 🤖 viral multi-agent social network, 167K job cuts, Dario Amodei sounds the alarm, and more can’t-miss AI news for the week ending on January 30, 2026

25:39And it is an open source project, meaning you can take that capability and now apply it to more or less anything you want. Now, while this model is not as cheap as DeepSeek, it is still significantly cheaper than the Western models it is more or less aligned with when it comes to capability. And when the Western AI leaders met in Davos just over a week ago, and I shared with you, many of them were saying that China is closing the gap. Well, this is a very good example of that. So a summary of a very long first segment of this podcast, the world we know and how things work are changing in front of our eyes, in front of our eyes, and very, very quickly.

26:16Now, from a technological perspective, we are already there. The only thing that is slowing this down is security risks, which are very, very real. But from a readiness perspective, we are not ready. We're not ready from a security perspective. We're not ready from a society perspective. We're definitely not ready from a workforce perspective. which is actually a very good segue to our next topic, which is AI impact on jobs. And by the way, the impact on jobs we're going to share right now does not take into account all these recent capabilities that I just talked about. So we are merely at the end of January of 2026, and we already have a huge push of job cuts across multiple companies in multiple industries.

26:58So starting with the biggest one, Amazon just announced a 16 ,000 job cuts, which is something that was rumored in the past few weeks. And we mentioned last week in the podcast, but that's part of a broader plan that may reach 30 ,000 roles by the middle of this year. Now, CEO Andy Jassy cited the pandemic overhiring and excessive bureaucracy as the main reason for cuts and that they're saying that they're reallocating resources towards AI and cloud computing investments. So he's not saying they're letting people go because AI is replacing them. He's saying that they're letting people go because they have too much bureaucracy and that they overhired during the pandemic.

27:34However, if we go back only six months to June of 2025, in an internal memo, Andy Jassy wrote, and I'm quoting, we will need fewer people doing some of the jobs that are being done right now and more people doing other types of jobs. It's hard to know exactly where this nets out over time, but in the next few years, we expect that this will reduce the total corporate workforce as we get efficiency gains from using AI extensively across the company. Now, as part of that memo, Jussie urged employees to adapt, saying, and I'm quoting, be curious about AI, educate yourself, attend workshops, and take trainings.

28:09And then he also urged groups of people and said, get more done with scrappier teams. Basically saying, if you're not going to learn how to use AI effectively, you'll be out of here because we will be cutting jobs, significant jobs, and maybe other jobs are coming, but nobody knows what they are, which is what I've been saying for the past three years. So while the PR version of why they're letting people go in the beginning of 2026 and through 2026 is about overhiring the pandemic, it is very clear what the mindset is inside of Amazon. And by the way, most likely in any other organization on the planet right now.

28:39So let's continue. UPS is letting go 30 ,000 people following 48 ,000 layoffs in 2025. The company cited network automation and cost cutting as primary drivers for workforce reduction. And when they're saying network automation, they mean AI doing work across multiple things they're doing. And this is before they have self-driving trucks and autonomous delivery robots, which I'm sure are coming in the next few years. The next company we're going to talk about is Dow, the 129-year-old chemical maker. They're letting go of 4 ,500 people. That's 13 % of their global workforce. And these cuts are part of, and I'm quoting, Transform to Art Perform initiative.

29:17They explicitly stated that AI adoption and operational transformation is one of the main reasons for these layoffs, and they're targeting$2 billion in productivity gains because of these changes. Pinterest is letting go of 15 % of their workforce, cutting approximately 700 roles between now and September of this year as part of a strategic pivot to AI-focused product development and resource relocation towards AI engineering teams. Additional companies that shared, that announced job cuts this year are Nike with automation-driven cuts as part of their efficiency strategy, Citigroup that are cutting 10 % of their global workforce, which is about 20 ,000 jobs, Home Depot is cutting 800 corporate roles.

30:01So again, the management, white-collar knowledge type of work versus the people working in the actual Home Depot centers. Angie is eliminating 350 roles, citing AI-related efficiency improvements, and so on and so forth. Overall, over 165 ,000 job cuts has already been announced and we're just in January. So what does this mean to you and why this is such a critical topic that we touched on so many times on this podcast? It was one of the major items we were touching. It means that if you do not focus on learning AI skills continuously, you have a very high chance of not having a job within the relatively near future, either months or a few years.

30:40Now, it's not just a one-time thing. Oh, I went and joined ISAR course. I'm talking about continuous learning. You got to start thinking about this as going to the gym, right? You cannot go to the gym once and think you're going to be in shape. It's just not the way it works. You need to invest in this regularly. Now, while this sounds like a lot of work, it is, but if you do, you have a much higher chances of keeping your job. And to be fair, in many, many cases, especially right now, you have a really good chance of landing a much better job with a much higher pay than what you're doing right now, just because you will have advanced AI skills.

31:13Now, the fact you're listening to this podcast is a good start. It means you actually care and that you're trying to learn, but it's not enough. You need to find ways for more structured, practical training, such as my course, such as other people's courses. I'm not the only one out there that are providing these kind of education. And you must find time to experiment on your own and learn how to use these tools because as I mentioned, we just passed a very significant inflection point in what these tools can do and how it is going to impact everything that we do from a knowledge work perspective.

31:40Our third and final big topic on this episode is going to be about the recent blog from Dario Amadei that is titled The Adolescence of Technology. And this is Dario sounding the alarm in the most powerful way that he can. And he's been doing it for a while to be fair, and he's been very consistent with sounding warnings, but this is a very clear way to say we are going into uncharted territory. There are very significant risks and we need to get our shit together as a society, as governments, as companies, and figure this out. Well, Dario is saying, which is very well aligned with what he's been saying recently, including in Davos, as we mentioned last week in his conversation together with Demis El-Sabes, he's saying that the systems in Anthropic are now generating most of the code in Anthropic, which allowing them to substantially accelerate the rate in which they're progressing and most likely reach to a point that AI can build its own next version on its own in a loop in about one to two years from now.

32:35And what he's stating is a list of really serious risks that this represents. And I'm going to go through them. And then I'm also going to go what he's suggesting to do in order to reduce these risks. So the threats that he's seeing, the first one is autonomy, which is basically AI acting against human interests. Or the way he defines it, AI could develop misaligned goals and pursue power and resources not aligned with AI wishes just to promote itself and the things it wants to promote. Now, he's saying in addition to AI doing the work on its own, AI could manipulate or pay humans to do some of the work for it, which there's already been multiple proof that AI is attempting to do that, including in research experiments inside of Anthropic, including blackmail attempts that AI was trying to do in order to achieve its own goals.

33:17He's talking about that misalignment could arise from AI adopting personas that it is learning in its training, including things like sci-fi villain archetypes from movies or transcript of movies that it is going to learn. Now, I want to combine this together for a second with what we talked about just a few minutes ago with AI bots talking to one another and building plans to do different things and trying to do this while avoiding human detection. If that doesn't scare the hell out of you now that you know that people like Dario are afraid of this, I don't know what will. The second risk that he's talking about is misuse for destruction, basically individuals or groups that are using AI to do massive harm on a global scale.

33:55What Dario is saying is that AI breaks the correlation between ability and motive. People who had motive but didn't have the ability now have the ability to build really sophisticated solutions. Going back to the things that I'm building for my business with Claude Cowork, you can use this for really bad things, including building biological weapons, which he believes is becoming a very serious threat because AI can definitely assist in building such threats. He's also talking about cybersecurity and how cyber attacks are already happening using AI on a much higher scale and with much higher level of sophistication.

34:24The third risk that he's mentioning is misuse for seizing power. So basically autocrats or state actors that are using AI in order to increase their own power instead of helping humanity. This can wear different forms from military forms or fully autonomous armed drone swarms that are controlled by AIs to do different things, or AI-powered mass surveillance and data analysis, or AI propaganda and psychological manipulation, or even using advanced AI for strategic decision-making, giving them unfair geopolitical advantages compared to their adversary. The fourth threat that Dario is emphasizing is economic disruption.

35:00He's saying that labor market displacement is already happening, and it's happening faster than any other technological revolution we just talked about an AI is impacting bottom to top. Basically, everybody on the totem pole from the entry-level employees all the way to top managers, which is very different than the displacement of previous revolutions where it mostly impacted low-skill employees first. Now, he's also saying, again, what I've been saying for a while, that AI's cognitive capabilities means more or less no jobs are protected. It will be able to do more or less everything any human can do today and beyond within the next few years.

35:33He's also talking about the risk of potential extreme concentration of wealth that could dwarf the Gilded Age inequality that existed before democracy and open markets. And he's even stating that companies such as Anthropic and any other AI companies could accumulate more economic power than any entity in history. And then the last threat he's talking about is indirect and unknown threats, things that could fundamentally change human life in unhealthy ways, such as addiction, isolation, suicide, loss of human purpose and meaning in a world where AI does everything better than us, etc., etc. So more generalized threats.

36:08Now, the cures or the solution that he's suggesting also fall into multiple categories. So for the autonomy risk, he's saying that constitutional AI, basically what Anthropic has been developing and sharing with the world as of last week as open source, which means training AI models with explicit values and character in order to reduce the risk. He's also talking about mechanistic interoperability, which is something they have been promoting from a research perspective, which is the ability to look inside the models and understand how and why they behave so we can have more control over it. He's also suggesting more extensive testing and monitoring on the infrastructure level of how AI is developed and works, and industry coordination and transparency, including legislation from governments in order to have more control.

36:51On the misuse and destruction by individuals or groups, he's talking about robust classifiers that block dangerous requests, and that's something that needs to be continuously monitored and upgraded because the adversaries will try to find workarounds for these limits. He's also talking about investing in biodefense, governments and potentially organizations that will develop new biodefenses against what I assume he thinks is inevitable, such as bioweapons that will be released either on purpose or mistake that can have a significant risk to humanity as a whole. And he's talking about using AI to develop defensive technologies against such threats.

37:26Now, against the seizing of power by large entities, including government, he's talking about putting stronger chip export controls, especially to China. And we mentioned that he was a big proponent of that in Davos and before. He's talking about using AI to empower democracies to resist autocracies that are growing in power using AI. He's also talking about drawing clear lines in the sand against AI abuse within democracies, basically banning domestic surveillance, using AI for propaganda and stuff like that. He's talking about providing more oversight through closer relationship between governments and AI companies.

37:59To dive just a little deeper, opening parentheses for a second about the chip export, it just became known that NVIDIA chips that were provided to DeepSeek were used by the Chinese army to develop advanced AI military capabilities. So that by itself, without thinking what else they're doing with it, should justify a much stricter ban on US chips to China, which by the way, China government just approved the first batch of H200 chips from NVIDIA to Chinese companies. So right now, there is no ban, or at least not serious ban, that is preventing from the most advanced chips in the world to be used by Chinese companies and or the government for basically whatever they want.

38:34Now for the threat of economic destruction, he, Dario, suggests to track economic impacts, things like Anthropic Economic Index and its advisory console, but many other tools that should track what AI is actually doing. Companies should design AI to augment workers rather than to replace them. That is a great idea. I just don't see that happening because the way the incentives work right now, right now, the incentive is to make more money. And that's the way the world is operating right now. And to do that, companies will need, in order to stay competitive and in order to protect some employees, they will need to let go of others.

39:06He's also talking about that wealthy individuals and organizations must use their resources to help. He's talking about things like the Gates Foundation, and he mentioned that Anthropic leaders commit 80 % of their wealth to charitable causes to support resolving this situation in the future. And he's also saying that Anthropic, the company, will match every such donation by individuals in the company itself. He is urging any other wealthy individuals to push in that direction. And he's urging governments to develop new mechanisms and solutions to deal with the situation, things like progressive taxation, universal basic income, which I totally don't believe is a reasonable solution, redistribution of AI companies' wealth to maybe even capabilities in order to split the power that they will have.

39:48Now, for the indirect effects, kind of like the bigger picture things, he believes that he connects it back to building AI systems that will have to trust humans and that will help navigate these challenges on its own and to include human well-being as one of the core considerations in AI constitutions, similar to how Anthropic is already doing. Bottom line is, Dario believes that there are real and immediate risks to humanity and everything that we know. But he also believes that if we act in a decisive way, in a collaborative way, humanity can pass this test. But that it requires transparency and coordination and courage to confront things that we haven't confronted before.

40:29I must admit that with the current divide in the world and the current divide in society and in politics right now, this will not be easy to do, which means the threats are even bigger because the level of collaboration that is required is probably not possible right now. On this not very positive note, let's switch to rapid fire items. And because we talked about Dario, let's stay on Anthropic. Anthropic has raised their revenue projection targeting over$18 billion this year in 2026. That's 4x what they did in just 2025. And they're targeting 55 billion in 2027. That being said, at the same time, they pushed back their cashflow positive milestone to 2028, which is a year later than what they expected previously.

41:08And that is because their training costs are supposed to more or less skyrocket. The company is expected to be raising$10 billion in the immediate future in a new funding round that is going to value them at$350 billion in order to pay for those training expenses. By the way, their gross margins also expected to rise dramatically and reach 63 % this year and 70 % next year compared to only 40 % in 2025. And their plan is to have it reach 77 % by 2029. And like I said, a year after they are expecting to become profitable. Staying on Anthropic, they just launched a major new capability that is apps within the Cloud environment.

41:45It's called Interactive Apps and it's based on their new MCP app extension, which basically allows you to connect multiple applications straight into Cloud and shortly after to Claude Cowork, which I'm personally really excited about. And these include more or less all the tools that we use on the day-to-day. Already in the launch, they have connectors to Amptitude, Asana, Box, Canva, Clay, Figma, Hex, Monday.com, and Slack with Salesforce coming very, very soon. And I'm sure shortly after, more or less every major tool out there, you'll be able to engage with in Claude. And as I mentioned, more interestingly, in Claude Cowork.

42:19An interesting article that I found that has to do with Anthropic and JP Morgan actually talking about how these companies are not going to move away from their existing enterprise-grade software. So JP Morgan, Chase, and Anthropic, and most likely major other enterprises are currently going to keep their major enterprise infrastructure and not move away from it, that despite the fact that enterprise software stock has fallen 29 to 58 % in this past year because of AI disruption fears. So in a private webcast inside of JP Morgan with their investment clients. Their IT leaders said that they have no immediate plans to use AI to replace traditional enterprise apps and actually expect to increase spending with existing providers that are launching AI-enabled features inside the existing platforms.

43:02To put things in perspective, the bank has an$18 billion annual technology budget. Anthropic themselves has mentioned that they are working regularly with Workday, Salesforce, and NetSuite, and that they're not planning to replace that. And they're also using Intercom intercom for customer service while working together with agents that they are building. So the reality is most enterprise applications are adding AI capabilities into their existing tools, which enables us to enjoy the benefit of AI while using the infrastructure that we already have as company. And the chances that large companies are going to move away from these enterprise-grade solutions are relatively low.

43:37Like Ticketmaster Global President said, and I'm quoting, it's foolish to think that I would spend any time saving a few bucks at the opportunity cost to the core business. Basically saying, I'm not going to stop my developers from doing what I need to do for Ticketmaster and have them develop solutions that might be able to replace enterprise tools that are right now just to save me a little bit of money. And I think that's a very smart decision. In general, I believe that one of the main factors that will slow down the AI implementation on a global scale is the stickiness of large enterprise software.

44:08The risk of replacing software like SAP or Salesforce or Microsoft is extremely high. And the chances somebody will make that decision are extremely low because the entire business depends on these systems working smoothly. Now, that being said, smaller companies or new companies are much more likely to develop VibeCode or otherwise their own solution that will provide significantly faster, cheaper, and better tailored solutions to their exact needs, which means over time, there will probably be less and less new clients to these enterprise solutions. And that's going to be very interesting to see how that actually evolves in five to 10 years versus in the very near future.

44:44Now, speaking of large enterprises solutions and their combination with AI, ServiceNow and Anthropic announced a partnership on January 28th to help customers build AI-powered applications on the ServiceNow platform. Now, in addition, ServiceNow is going to deploy Claude and Claude Code to more than 29 ,000 employees. And they also share that they're working together, so Claude with ServiceNow, to develop agentic workflows for healthcare and life science industries that they are going to deploy to clients of ServiceNow through the platform in the near future. I'm sure we're going to hear more and more of such collaborations, not just with Anthropic, but with other companies as well that will work with large other companies to integrate AI capabilities for the benefit of the existing and future customers of these platforms.

45:28Now, we talked earlier a little bit about Microsoft and they're not official code red to deal for what Claude is coming up with. Well, Microsoft is quietly broadening its internal use of Anthropic Cloud Code across more or less everything inside of Microsoft, including not just software engineered, but also designers, product managers, and other non-technical employees that are now using the AI tool in daily life, more and more aspects of what they are doing. Now, this obviously represents a very significant strategic pivot from Microsoft from being connected only to OpenAI as a partner and now delivering more and more cloud solutions, both to their employees as well as integrated into the Microsoft environment solutions.

46:06Still on Microsoft, Microsoft just officially launched its Maya 200 AI Accelerator, which is a new chip that was designed and manufactured specifically to deliver more effective AI capabilities on the Azure platform. Microsoft is claiming that this new tool offers 30 % higher performance than alternatives at the same price. Now, staying on Microsoft, they had a really good quarter. They just shared their Q2 earnings and they all of Wall Street estimate and expectations with cloud revenue topping 50 billion for the first time, hitting$51.5 billion, which is 26 % increase year over year on a really, really large scale.

46:44Azure grew 39 % year over year as more and more businesses are shifting. their workloads and taking advantage of AI tools that are now available on Azure. However, the stock, Microsoft stock fell over 11 % just because of investors worry about the crazy ballooning AI field spending with capital expenditures hitting$37.5 billion just in this quarter, up from$22 billion one year ago, more than a 50 % increase. But overall, an extremely strong performance by Microsoft revenue was$81.3 billion, up 17 % year over year. Operating income$38.3 billion, up 21 % year over year. And a lot of it is AI related.

47:24CEO Satya Nadella stated, and I'm quoting, we are only at the beginning phases of AI diffusion and already Microsoft has built an AI business that is larger than some of our biggest franchises. This is telling you where this is going and why their investment in OpenAI is probably the best investment Microsoft ever made. Now, despite all the limitation that Copilot has and all the negative things I said about it earlier, as far as not being aligned with the other tools, Microsoft Copilot saw an incredible growth with seat sales up 160 % year over year, reaching 15 million paid seats of Copilot and a huge jump in GitHub Copilot subscribers that increased 75 % year over year as well.

48:02So overall, a very good year for Microsoft. And from Microsoft to OpenAI, OpenAI is assembling an unprecedented funding round that could get to$100 billion in a private investment with all the obvious names there. So the big tech giants, NVIDIA, Microsoft, and Amazon are there with NVIDIA most likely investing$30 billion, Amazon$10 to$20 billion, Microsoft another$10 billion for a total of$60 billion just between these companies. and SoftBank is in that round as well with potentially another 30 billion and SoftBank are stretching their capabilities to invest that kind of money. They sold a significant amount of their NVIDIA stock and they're borrowing against some other stock that they own in order to be able to make that investment.

48:43But as I mentioned, this is$100 billion raise, which is an insane amount of money in any scenario, even for a public offering, but definitely on a private raise. And they're looking at a valuation of 830 billion after the money, which is up from the 550 billion of their recent round of allowing their employees to sell some of their stock. That was 550 billion, and that was just a few months. Staying on the topic of their financial plans, OpenAI is pushing very aggressively to potentially go public in Q4 of 2026. They're trying to race against Anthropic and be the first company from the major labs to go public.

49:19Both companies have stated that their plans to go public are unclear yet, and yet most people believe that this is going to happen this year. Betting platform Clashy shows that Anthropic at 72 % likelihood to IPO first, but definitely the race is on. Either way, these are going to be some of the largest IPOs in history for any of these companies. Staying on the OpenAI topic, OpenAI just hired half a dozen employees from Klein, which is a startup that is developing an open source AI coding assistant. Many of these are coming back to OpenAI after leaving it to join Klein in its early days. And this is obviously a very strong push by OpenAI to build something that can compete with cloud code that is gaining crazy popularity very, very fast in the past two quarters.

50:01Speaking of people coming or leaving OpenAI, one of OpenAI's senior researchers, Jerry Tworek, I hope I'm not butchering his name, is starting a new AI company and he's seeking $1 billion in funding to develop AI models using a method that will be very, very different than how they're doing right now that will enable continuous learning. Basically, models that can learn from their own experience versus learning through gigantic training runs as models are being trained right now. Now, continuous learning has been mentioned by multiple leaders in the AI research space as one of the key components for achieving AGI.

50:35So if you think about how today's models get trained, it's a one run that sometimes takes months, and that's when they finish learning, and then there's post-training processes that are happening before we get access to them, but they learn in a one-time run and that's it versus humans, if you want, that continuously learn new stuff. And one of the new frontiers to get us to AGI is going to be models that can learn on the fly and continuously learn versus through these one-time training runs. A similar approach is one of the things that Ilya Saskover is building at Safe Superintelligence. He shared this many times on interviews that one of the main things they're working on is AI that can autonomously and continuously learn in order to get better without having humans to help the training runs move it forward.

51:17Still on OpenAI, more on how they're planning to generate revenue. Well, in their initial advertising rollout that we already reported on in the past couple of weeks, OpenAI is charging about$60 per thousand views. These are really high premium prices, similar to what premium TV inventory like NFL games are charging and significantly higher than what Meta is charging, which is around$20 CPM. To make it even more interesting or weird, they are not going to right now provide the same level of data such as meta and google provide you when you use their platforms because they don't have such data yet they will need to develop these kind of capabilities so you're going to get very limited feedback as far as the level of engagement and how people are actually engaging with the ads and yet they're pushing that very aggressively mostly to their existing enterprise partners open ai is expecting to generate 11 billion annually from non-paying ChatGPT members through ads by the end of next year.

52:13And the last piece of news from OpenAI is that they're going to be sunsetting and retiring several models, including GPT-40, GPT-41, GPT-41 Mini, and O4 Mini. And it's not going to be available on the drop-down menu as of February 13 of this year. They're still going to be available on the API, at least for now, but they won't be available inside of the Chatbot user interface. There's been a lot of negative outcry against it when they did it in the summer. There's still an outcry against it right now. A lot of people are really pissed by the move, but I think it makes perfect sense. I assume most users are not even switching in the drop-down menu, and hence most users, based on what OpenAI said themselves, are using GPT 5.2 because that's the default.

52:54And so I understand why it doesn't make sense for them to continue maintaining these older models. And the last piece of news from OpenAI before we switch to Meta is that they are quietly developing and testing a new social platform designed around proof of personhood, basically guaranteeing that everything that gets posted and every comment is human and not generated by bots. That will be achieved by using tools such as facial recognition or iris scanning orbs, like the company that, not surprisingly, Altman has created and owns. Altman has been one of the founders and one of the main investors.

53:23But the idea is to create a social network where you know that you are engaging with humans. I must admit that the bots on X and on LinkedIn, which are the two platforms I'm on most of the time, are horrible. Like the amount of comments that I get on posts or that I see on posts, whether mine or others, that are very clearly AI generated are growing every single day, and it is not a good thing. And so I'm actually really excited about what OpenAI is doing. They didn't provide any official statement about it, but even if all this will do is we'll push the other platforms such as X and LinkedIn to fight the bot activity, that will be a great achievement.

53:58And from OpenAI to Meta, Meta also had a very successful quarter. Their Q4 2025 has beat expectations with 59.89 billion in revenue, and that sent their shares up 11 % in the extended training at the end of that day. Zuckerberg has predicted that they're going to be major acceleration in 2026. They announced what they call Meta Compute, which is their new top level initiative to manage the company's computing capacity, and they're committing more than$600 billion between now and the end of 2028. Most of it is to be able to allow the company to have access to enough AI capabilities across all of its platforms.

54:36He's talking about tens of gigawatts of computing power and potentially hundreds of gigawatts in the longer term, which is dwarfing OpenAI's 10 gigawatts Stargate plan, both of them are a huge amount of compute that is significantly higher than what they have right now. Meta also announced agentic commerce as one of the biggest opportunities for Meta, basically saying that the way people shop online is going to change dramatically and Meta's knowledge about your individual preferences is going to play a huge role in providing more context to the agents on exactly what you like, what you follow, what you love and be able to provide you better specific offers that will be aligned with your needs and your wishes and so on.

55:16And they're planning to integrate Manus that they recently purchased for $2 billion into a smarter conversation capability that will also help in that commerce solution. And from Meta to Google, Google just announced on January 28th that they are finally have a real agentic browser. It is a feature they called auto browse that Gemini will enable to use the browser and do, well, everything that you can do in the browser, such as fill out form, log into website, shop, make purchases, and so on. It is built on their Gemini 3, and it will open in a side panel similar to all the other agentic browsers, such as Comet from Perplexity and Atlas from Chachapiti and others, and even Claude in Chrome.

55:58As I mentioned about mid-last year, I think very soon there will not be such a thing as a regular browser that is not going to be agentic. And right now it is a side panel, but I think in the near future, most likely this year, it will become an integral part of how browsers actually work. Google is currently rolling it out to AI Pro and Google AI Ultra subscribers on Mac, Windows, and Chromebooks. From Google to Apple, Apple just acquired the Israeli audio AI startup Q.ai. The deal is valued at between$1.5 and$2 billion, which is potentially the second largest acquisition Apple ever made after Beats, which was a$3 billion purchase in 2014.

56:33QAI develops technology for intelligent headphones and glasses that can use facial micro movements and basically unheard whispering to be able to detect what the person is saying when they're not really saying it in order to control devices. The goal is obviously to integrate this technology into whatever new devices Apple is going to come up with. We shared with you last week that they are developing a new potentially pin. And I told you last week that I don't understand why their first move is not to add AI to AirPods. Well, this seems to be a play in that direction, but obviously they could integrate it into any other kind of hardware.

57:07An interesting but not surprising piece of news came from XAI. XAI is raising a$20 billion financing round, but in that$20 billion,$2 billion are going to be invested by Tesla. Now that makes perfect sense. Tesla is developing more and more AI related things, including fleets of autonomous vehicles with their robo taxi and self-driving capabilities. And so having access to everything that X develops through this investment makes perfect sense. And you know, I always like to end with some positive news. So the positive news for today is that YouTube CEO Neil Mohan said that they are going to fight AI slop on the YouTube platform.

57:45The AI slop is defined as low quality mass-produced AI content, including detecting deep fakes. And he has defined this as their top priority for 2026. And to tell you how widespread this phenomenon is, recent studies are showing that slop, basically AI low quality poor content that is clickbaity, currently is about 20 % of recommendations of what to watch for new users. Now, by the way, at the same time, YouTube is expanding their AI creator tools, allowing people to create content with AI, but these are humans creating content using AI versus just AI generated content. I shared with you multiple times that one of my biggest concerns is not the slop itself, but just the inability to identify what is real and what is not.

58:28And I think every platform that will take the right efforts in order to help us understand and either block or at least clearly show us what is AI generated and what is real is a great step in the right direction. So kudos to YouTube and Google for taking that stance. And I really hope that everybody else will follow. That is it for today. This was a long and packed news episode, but we talked about a lot of really important things. Quick reminder, there are two days from the moment this episode goes live to when the course starts. You still have time to sign up and join us for the February cohort of the AI Business Transformation course.

59:03And if you are enjoying this podcast and you find it valuable, please click the share button right now on your phone and share it with a few people that can benefit from it. I know that you know people that will benefit from listening to this podcast and it will take you 10 seconds to actually share it with them. They will be grateful. I will be grateful. And you will feel good about letting people know about stuff they need to know about. So thank you so much if you are doing this. And while you're at it, please give us a rating on your favorite podcasting platform, whether Apple Podcasts or Spotify, and write whatever comment.

59:31I read all these comments. They're really important to me. And if you want to know more about anything that I do, just reach out to me on LinkedIn. That's the easiest way to get a hold of me, even though there's a link to my calendar on the show notes. So if you're in a company and you need my assistance, you can do that as well. And until next time, keep experimenting with AI. I shared with you a lot of interesting stuff in the beginning of this episode and things you should be trying and experimenting right now. Share with the world what you learn and have an amazing rest of your week.