← The AI Daily Brief: Artificial Intelligence News and Analysis
The AI Daily Brief: Artificial Intelligence News and Analysis
OpenAI IPO? Grok-SpaceX Merger? The AI IPO Race Heats Up
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Today on the AI Daily Brief, OpenAI IPO, SpaceXAI merger a bunch of stories that help us understand the state of the AI race as we head into February. Before that, in the headlines, you can finally play with Google's Genie 3 world model. The AI Daily Brief is a daily podcast and video about the most important news and discussions in AI. Alright friends, quick announcements before we dive in. First of all, thank you to today's sponsors, KPMG section, zencoder and Super Intelligent. To get an ad free version of the show, go to patreon.com aidaily brief or you can subscribe on Apple Podcasts. To learn about sponsoring the show, send us a note at sponsorsidailybrief AI and while you are on aidailybrief AI, I would so appreciate it if you would fill out our AI Usage Pulse Survey. The TLDR here is that I think everyone is trying to start benchmarking themselves and actually understand with data and not just anecdotes, how others are using AI. To help with that, we're trying to do a lot more original research, a lot more data collection, and one piece of that is these monthly Usage Pulse Surveys. It's going to ask you questions like which AI models did you use this month? What use case categories were most valuable, how often you use it? It should take you about two minutes. Like I said, you can find that at aidailybrief AI. There'll be a couple of different links to it and I would so appreciate it if you would take the time to fill that out. I'll just be leaving it up for a few days, probably till about the middle of next week and anyone who fills it out will get the first read results about a week before we share it more broadly. Thanks in advance for your help. Now with that said, let's talk some world models. Welcome back to the AI Daily Brief Headlines edition. All the daily AI news you need in around five minutes. One of the things that we Talked about throughout 2025, but especially towards the end of the year, was the idea of world models. World models are in some ways a fundamentally different approach for getting to the next level of AI. World models have a deep understanding of the physics of the world around them, which allows them to do things that LLMs can't. Last year, one of the most impressive demos we got was the research preview of Genie 3 that came in August. That preview was circulated among a fairly tight group of researchers, but we still got to see some fairly breathtaking videos. Genie 3 is capable of generating playable 3D worlds, allowing the users to navigate through the scene with the mouse and arrow keys. Even back in the preview, the quality was fairly astounding, and it seemed like DeepMind was making rapid progress on world models. Well, now the model is fully available to the public, rolling out first to Gemini Ultra subscribers. It's still a research preview, but people can now start playing around and creating their own generated worlds for the first time. Jay Peters from the Verge used it to generate a string of worlds that resembled popular Nintendo games, including Mario 64, Metroid prime, and Legend of Zelda. Rebecca Belan of TechCrunch used it to create a marshmallow castle in a claymation style. You better believe that I am an Ultra subscriber. And thankfully this was a model where when they said a certain category of subscribers had access to it, they actually did. The first thing I generated was a neon cyberpunk world set in the 2000s, but where there were no humans, only animals. I wanted a flying squirrel character, and the thing that you're seeing bounce around your screen now is that the way that it works is you use text to describe your environment as well as your character, and then it's off to the races. The second world I created was an alternative multiverse Earthworld, but where we actually got things like flying cars in a 1960s retro future aesthetic. The character I plopped down was a time Traveler from the 1990s. Lastly, it being the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence and the birth of America, I of course had to do a bleak winter scene of late 1776. Chris on Twitter summed up the feelings of a lot of folks who had a chance to play around with this. He writes, the fact that the whole world isn't talking about Genie 3 right now is deeply concerning. This is going to hit the general public like a truck. It's genuinely going to cause such a disruption I'm calling it right now, that there will be no Grand Theft Auto 7 because we are just simply going to be able to generate it, even if we extrapolate half the rate of progress from Genie 2 to Genie 3. Kyle Russell agreed, resharing Ethan Malick's generation of the world of Hamlet as seen from the perspective of the Poison writing World models are going to hit the video game industry like an atomic bomb. Swix from Latent Space said that this finally got him to pony up for a Gemini Ultra subscription and said that while Genie 3 has obvious flaws, it's here real time playable video world model for the flaws. He says it clips through a lot of terrain, worse than in a game engine. It also sometimes errors out that you can only live in the world for 60 seconds and that nothing else except the main character moves. But at the same time he points out that it is again a real time video world model, that its instruction following was pretty good, that its movement accommodates weird legs. He asked for a giant robot spider like in Wild Wild west. And finally he said they never ever shipped GENIE models to production. Never ever. What TPU sorcery is this? Congrats to the Genie 3 team. I can't believe this actually shipped. What absolute mad lads. Now, speaking of AI video and AI video adjacent things, TechCrunch reports that the Sora app from OpenAI is struggling. Now. You might remember that when OpenAI launched Sora 2 in late September, it came along with a companion app. That app gathered over 100,000 downloads on day one and actually became the top app exceeding ChatGPT. New data suggests, however, that the churn is extreme and new downloads have rapidly tapered off. According to App figures, Sora saw 3 million downloads across September and October, with another 3.2 million in November. Monthly downloads are now down almost 2/3 since then, with January figures at 1.2 million. On the US App Store, Sora has now fallen out of the top 100 list for free apps on both iOS and Android. Now at this point we don't really know exactly how OpenAI views Sora. I don't think that they necessarily released it because they had conviction that it was going to become the next TikTok. I think they released it because they wanted a place for people to try Sora Video Generations and they wanted to see how people would receive an AI first social network. Remember OpenAI has a deal with Disney and so we'll see if over time that actually changes the fate of sora or whether AI video just ain't it. As an AI video aside, if you haven't seen times on this day, 1776 yet, I highly encourage you to go check it out. You can find it on Times website. And basically they got Darren Aronofsky to use AI to create a series that brings us back to the incredibly fraught and important year of 1776. But in a way that's an actual film rather than just a documentary of historians talking about it. The comments are of course, just chocker block full of people screaming about what AI slop it is. And while I understand that there could be good faith critique of where we are with AI video. I think it's pretty awesome. Really well done and shows of course where we are headed. Moving back however to our last couple of headlines, Perplexity has signed a massive new cloud deal with Microsoft, diversifying them away from AWS. The deal includes 750 million in spending across a three year term. Interestingly, Perplexity said that part of the rationale for the deal was the ability to Access models from OpenAI, Anthropic and XAI through Microsoft's Foundry platform. Perplexity has their own in house model that powers free usage, but paid users have access to a variety of models from other labs. The Microsoft deal could allow them to consolidate the service onto a single platform instead of tapping individual APIs from rival labs, which could of course become relevant if first party API access is blocked as Anthropic has done to multiple other competitors over the past year. The deal also gives Perplexity a failover option if Amazon pulls the plug. AWS has been Perplexity's major cloud provider since launch. However, in November, Amazon sued Perplexity for disguising their web crawling activity related to agentic shopping. If that lawsuit gets nasty, Perplexity could certainly benefit from having another option. Speaking of Anthropic, our last story today is that Anthropic is going to war with the Pentagon over limits to their military AI deal In the first half of last year, each major AI lab signed a deal to provide AI technology to the military. OpenAI, Meta, Google, XAI and Anthropic all signed up with multiple labs shifting their acceptable use policies to facilitate the deals. Now the notion was that the technology would be mostly used for administrative tasks at the Department of Defense Department of War, with limits on surveillance and warfighting applications. Anthropic steel came in July and was worth 200 million, which for some felt like kind of a big departure from Anthropic's founding principles regarding AI safety. In the latter part of the year, the Department of War announced a string of initiatives aimed at driving AI adoption at the Pentagon, which included discussions of lethal applications of the technology. Reuters now reports that Anthropic's relationship with the Department of War is souring to the point the contract might be terminated. Sources said that tensions began almost immediately. Anthropic's terms had rejected the use of the technology for lethal operations and domestic surveillance. Administration officials were reportedly frustrated by Anthropic dictating terms, arguing that usage should be unrestricted as long as it complies with US Law. The government's desire to leverage AI fully autonomous weaponry and mass surveillance is apparently weighing on the mind of CEO Dario Amade, which with both themes featuring prominently in his recent essay about the dark side of AI adoption called the Adolescence of Technology. Secretary of War Pete Hegseth is also airing the grievance in public. At an event earlier this month, he said the Pentagon would not, quote, employ AI models that won't allow you to fight wars. Sources said that these comments were squarely aimed at the simmering dispute with Anthropic. Officially, Anthropic issued a partial denial of the schism. Their spokesperson said Anthropic is committed to protecting America's lead in AI and helping the US Government counter foreign threats by giving our warfighters access to the most advanced AI capabilities. They added that Claude is used, quote, extensively in national security missions and that Anthropic is in productive discussions with the Department of War about ways to continue that work. However, with a quick glance over the current headlines, it's easy to see why Anthropic might be second guessing their provision of the technology to the government. Both Wired in the information reported On Ice's use of AI in 2025, which has also become apparently an issue for Palantir employees. Mai on Twitter summed up the stakes, writing, the stakes here go way beyond one contract about whether frontier AI labs become neutral infrastructure providers or political actors that get to say no when governments want to weaponize their models. Whatever compromise or standoff emerges will likely shape how regulators, allies and rivals think about AI red lines for years. This, my friends, is very much deserving of a full exploration, and I'm sure we will have context at some point to do that. For now, however, that is going to do it for the headlines. Next up, the main episode Foreign. Sure, there's hype about AI, but KPMG is turning AI potential into business value. They've embedded AI and agents across their entire enterprise to boost efficiency, improve quality, and create better experiences for clients and employees. KPMG has done it themselves. Now they can help you do the same. Discover how their journey can accelerate yours at www.kpmg.usagents. that's www.kpmg.us agents. Here's a harsh truth. Your company is probably spending thousands or millions of dollars on AI tools that are being massively underutilized. Half of companies have AI tools, but only 12% use them for business value. Most employees are still using AI. To summarize Meeting notes if you're the one responsible for AI adoption at your company, you need section section is a platform that helps you manage AI transformation across your entire organization. It coaches employees on real use cases, tracks who's using AI for business impact, and shows you exactly where AI is and isn't creating value. The result. You go from rolling out tools to driving measurable AI value. Your employees move from meeting summaries to solving actual business problems and you can prove the roi. Stop guessing. If your AI investment is working, check out section@section AI.com that's s e c t I o n a I.com if you're using AI to code, ask yourself are you building software or are you just playing prompt roulette? We know that unstructured prompting works at first, but eventually it leads to AI slop and technical debt. Enter zenflow. Zenflow takes you from vibe coding to AI first engineering. It's the first AI orchestration layer that brings discipline to the chaos. It transforms freeform prompting into spec driven workflows and multi agent verification where agents actually cross check each other to prevent drift. You can even command a fleet of parallel agents to implement features and fix bugs simultaneously. We've seen teams accelerate delivery 2x to 10x, stop gambling with prompts, start orchestrating your AI. Turn raw speed into reliable production. Grade output at Zenflow free. Today's episode is brought to you by Superintelligent. Superintelligent is a platform that, very simply put, is all about helping your company figure out how to use AI better. We deploy voice agents to interview people across your company, combine that with proprietary intelligence about what's working for other companies and give you a set of recommendations around use cases, change management initiatives that add up to an AI roadmap that can help you get value out of AI for your company. But now we want to empower the folks inside your team who are responsible for that transformation with an even more direct platform. Our forthcoming AI Strategy Compass tool is ready to start to be tested. This is a power tool for anyone who is responsible for AI adoption or AI transformation inside their companies. It's going to allow you to do a lot of the things that we do at superintelligent, but in a much more automated, self managed way and with a totally different cost structure. If you are interested in checking it out, go to aidaily Brief AI Compass, fill out the form and we will be in touch soon. Welcome back to the AI Daily Brief. Yesterday's episode was all about Meta and Microsoft's earnings and of course the context through which we explored that was what it said about the market's expectations and thoughts around an AI bubble. And as we move into 2026, interestingly, we got a set of news in the past 24 hours that almost serves as a complement to that to get a better view of the entire state of the AI race, looking at basically all of the big players. Some of it's expected and some of it's very unexpected. So let's look at some of the biggest stories defining the AI race as we head into the new month of February. First off, Apple. Yes, Apple has made an acquisition in the AI space. It is not Perplexity or any of the big ones that people have speculated on. Instead, it's a frankly mysterious company called qai, the goal of whom seems to be understanding what a person wants without them having to speak. So let's talk about what this isn't. This is not a slam dunk. Get back into the LLM race. Acquisition of the type that people had been advocating for throughout 2025. You might remember that back at the beginning of last summer, I said that Apple should try to pay up and get Anthropic while they were still even in the realm of affordable. But at that time, Anthropic was worth around 60 billion. The latest fundraising has it at 350 billion. So probably fairly outside of acquisition range. Anthropic, of course, has given no indication that they have any interest in doing anything than continuing to accumulate consumer and business devotion. And so that, I think, can safely be taken off the table. Now, there had been rumblings at various points that Apple had explored a deal like Perplexity. Apple SVP of services at EQ in particular, was a leading advocate of a Perplexity deal, although that didn't come to fruition either. Instead, what we have is the second largest acquisition in Apple's history. Their deal for Beats remains their largest at 3 billion. But according to the Financial Times, they are paying $2 billion for Qai. So what is Qai? Qai works on imaging and machine learning, using the technology to develop a system that can detect speech without audio. At the moment, their systems can enhance audio in noisy environments and detect whispered speech. However, the reporting noted that QAI holds a patent for optical sensors technology that can recognize and interpret facial skin micro movements as speech. The patent describes the technology being built into headphones or glasses. And the speculation is that this technology could be used to enable silent communication with an AI assistant by simply mouthing words. Now, making the deal even more notable, QAI was acquired out of stealth without releasing a product. That said, the company does have an extremely strong pedigree For CEO and co founder Aviad Maisels, this is his second time being acquired by Apple. He previously founded Prime Sense, which developed the image recognition technology that powered Xbox Connect and was repurposed for Apple's Face ID system. Tom Hulme, a venture investor at Google Ventures who led Qai's seed round, wrote that their technology could help us find out what happens when the computer finally disappears into our daily lives. Broadly speaking, I think there are two interpretations of this. The first is when you combine this move with Apple's decision to partner with Google on foundation models that are going to power experiences like Siri, it feels like they're more or less at least unless something radical changes passing on the foundation model space. At the same time, one could view this move as Apple sticking to their core focus around hardware. Indeed, it's been a long time since Apple was truly a software first company. The iPhone has become their core business and their only notable AI success, to the extent that you can call it that, has been on the hardware side with the M Series chips and the perpetual popular Mac mini, which we'll talk about in a minute. So some wonder, maybe Apple doesn't need an AI model and they are in fact better off putting all their resource into winning the competition for AI devices now. Yesterday also saw Apple report earnings with a blowout result. They recorded their largest quarter ever for iPhone sales with 85 billion in smartphone revenue. Mac sales and services revenue both came in below expectations, but top line revenue still grew by 23%, which was a significant beat. Going back to those possible interpretations, the earnings really reinforce that Apple is in the iPhone business and business is good on the AI side. The company continues to be completely directionless, at least in terms of what they're telling us. TechCrunch summed it up with the headline guys, I don't think Tim Cook knows how to monetize AI. Responding to a question about how Apple will turn AI bets into revenue, Cook said, well, let me just say that we're bringing intelligence to more of what people love and we're integrating it across the operating system in a personal and private way. And I think that by doing so it creates great value and that opens up a range of opportunities across our products and services, which even for a public market CEO is some impressive word salad. Then again, it does feel like it's not impossible that over the next year or two Apple's strategy, whether intentional or not, is going to come into clearer view. Robert Scoble wrote, this is an important purchase for Apple because Later this year it will introduce a new kind of camera. In two years, everyone will have a camera, headphones and glasses that all work together, joined by the phone. This sort of echoes those recent comments from Mark Zuckerberg on his earnings call, where he said, it's hard to imagine a world in several years where most glasses that people wear aren't AI glasses. The other topic of conversation around this was summed up by Village Global's Ben Casnocha, who wrote, Apple just did its second largest acquisition ever. One can imagine a world where Apple, feeling behind in AI, finally ramps up M&A and spends 10 to 20 billion dollars buying AI startups over the next couple of years. That would be great for the venture ecosystem, so maybe the hanging back and letting it all happen will work for them. In the flurry last weekend around claudebot, which is now known as openclaw, it didn't escape people's notice that one of the major beneficiaries was Apple, as dozens, if not hundreds or even thousands of people took to Twitter to talk about how they had ordered a Mac Mini. Sharing a post of Google's Logan Kilpatrick sharing his Mac Mini order, investor Sam Lesson wrote, apple's AI strategy remains undefeated Next up, let's talk about Amazon. Broadly speaking, I would say that the perception of Amazon is at once similar and opposite to the perception of Apple when it comes to AI. Whereas many have felt Apple felt rudderless for having no AI strategy, to some, Amazon has felt rudderless for having every AI strategy. The most recent news is that the company is considering a $50 billion bet on OpenAI. Earlier in the week, we got reports that suggested that Amazon, Nvidia and Microsoft were all in talks to invest in OpenAI to the tune of 60 billion. Between them, the rumors were that Amazon was probably in for 20 billion. At the time, the takeaway was mostly that OpenAI should have no problem hitting their $100 billion fundraising target. However, the Wall Street Journal is now reporting that Amazon is the lion's share of that number, which dramatically changes the implications at OpenAI's rumored $830 billion valuation target. This investment, if it comes to fruition, would give Amazon a 6% stake. It would also represent around half of their capex spend for last year. Reports suggest that CEO Andy Jassy is holding negotiations directly with Sam Altman around the exact shape of the deal. An investment of this size could change Amazon's position in the AI race. They already put $8 billion into Anthropic in 2024, which is likely somewhere north of a 10% stake. By adding a sizable chunk of OpenAI, Amazon simply might not need to compete on frontier models. They could license or create a custom version to make AI Alexa and just focus on their core infrastructure business as their big AI bet. It looks kind of like Amazon is trying to construct a win, win win scenario for themselves. If either OpenAI or Anthropic come out on top, Amazon wins. If both companies flounder, well, Amazon made a ton of money along the way selling them compute. At the same time, I certainly don't think it's clear that markets are seeing things in quite that light. Jason Luongo summed up the bull case when he wrote guess who bought another Amazon leap today while everyone else was panicking, Everyone still thinks of Amazon as a retail company. Meanwhile, AWS is the backbone of AI infrastructure in talks to invest 50 billion in OpenAI owns 15% of Anthropic and Claude is everywhere right now 750,000 robots automating their warehouses, ads business quietly printing 50 billion the most underrated AI stock in plain sight. At the same time, I certainly don't think that view is consensus in the markets yet. Now part of that is that any sort of momentum narrative is confused by the fact that Amazon also this week announced that they were cutting 16,000 employees. This follows 14,000 layoffs from Amazon's corporate workforce back in October. On Wednesday, SVP of People Beth Galetti published a blog post confirming the layoffs were going ahead. She framed them as a continuation of the headcount reduction from October, stating that they will, quote, strengthen our organization by reducing layers, increasing ownership and removing bureaucracy. Now the post did say that this is it for the layoffs and Amazon is not going to get into a pattern of continuous downsizing between the two rounds. This is now a roughly 8% reduction in Amazon's 350,000 strong employee base. Although AI wasn't mentioned in any of the round of layoffs, it is certainly assumed to be a contributing factor. Back in June, CEO Andy Jassy sent a company wide memo stating that he expected AI adoption would lead to a reduction in how many employees the company needed. Of course, even if the layoffs have nothing to do with AI, that's going to be the widespread perception AI is even showing up in some of the reporting completely unsourced. That said, especially as we watch the political narratives that heat up in this US election year, an interesting wrinkle that I'm starting to see emerge is people calling out the AI job washing when Actually, there are other things to blame, hani Girgis wrote. Amazon says it will cut 16,000 more corporate jobs at the same time the company is expanding in India. They will call it AI efficiency or bureaucratic cuts. The optics are layoffs in the us, growth abroad and more visa inflow. And Lee Plum, meanwhile, is making it explicitly political. The new candidate for Congress in Texas made a long post about how this was not about AI and was in fact about outsourcing. He writes, well, this isn't exactly how I hoped my day would start. After eight years, I just got laid off, as did 16,000 of my peers. But before anyone rushes in with explanations that make them feel better, let me be clear about what this wasn't. It wasn't performance and it wasn't AI. It wasn't location, versatility, or impact. I was in L7. I led global AI enablement. I built systems executives depended on, moved wherever the company needed me, and fixed problems that had been sitting untouched because no one else could untangle them. And I was still cut. He argues that, in his words, in the US right now, experience isn't an asset, it's a liability, and that this is, quote, enabled by a global labor market with almost no guardrails. When replacement is cheaper than retention, he writes, the decision gets framed as strategy instead of consequence. AI, he writes, becomes the excuse, not the cause. It is way beyond the scope of this particular show to get into all that, but it's interesting to see outsourcing, not AI, emerge as the real political bugaboo. Interestingly, we had one other example this week of a company doing really well and yet still cutting jobs. Asml, who builds chip making equipment, posted record quarterly orders, increased projected sales by a few billion dollars, and still said that it was planning to slash about 1700 jobs in tech. And it this phenomenon of companies growing but still downsizing is something that I think we're going to need to watch this year. Still, moving on to our next story in the AI race, we also got some reporting around IPO plans. If you listen to my 2026 predictions, you'll have heard that my base prediction was that neither Anthropic or OpenAI would ultimately decide to go public this year. The reason being that I thought that private capital markets were going to remain strong and that being public came with headaches that the companies just wouldn't want. One of the big factors that I thought could change that was OpenAI wanting to get out ahead of Anthropic. I said in that episode that I thought it was Less likely that Anthropic would worry all that much about that, but that I could definitely see OpenAI trying to be the first to go. The Wall Street Journal reports that that is exactly what's happening. According to their reporting, OpenAI has pushed up plans to go public and are now targeting the fourth quarter. They are reportedly taking informal meetings with investment banks and have hired a chief accounting officer and corporate business finance officer to handle investor relations and financial reporting. Specifically, this reporting suggests that there's been a new sense of urgency, writes the journal. OpenAI executives have privately expressed concerns about Anthropic beating the company to an ipo. Anthropic has also reportedly told investment bankers that they're open to an IPO by the end of the year as well. Now, the Wall Street Journal presented the obvious cause for concern, pointing out that whoever goes first out of Anthropic, OpenAI and SpaceX, which by the way is our last story in just a second, will gather a huge amount of investor interest. And they speculate that there may not be enough to go around. And even if there is enough to go around, I can see why OpenAI is concerned and why this isn't just a vanity thing. Let's game this out. If Anthropic goes first, what are the possible outcomes? Let's say that their IPO is arousing success, investors pile in and Anthropic commands the market's attention for months. In fact, it might even be confirmation of an ascendant Anthropic narrative that is taking hold right now in a big way. OpenAI would then still be able to go public, but they'd have to wrestle that narrative and investment dollars away from that competitor who's got a lot of momentum. What about on the other end of the spectrum? What happens if the IPO is a flop and in fact it's the event that pops the bubble that so many insist the market is in. In that case, the IPO window slams shut and OpenAI is forced to either launch into a bear market or raise another hundred billion dollars from private investors who either a might not have that appetite or b are looking at an actual valuation markdown. The point is that Both scenarios make OpenAI's IPO much harder than it needs to be. So I can see the logic in trying to get out first. Now, fintwit on this point is absolutely useless. With every little bit of news around an OpenAI IPO being basically nothing more than a Rorschach test for how you feel about Sam Altman. I would say. If anything, Fintwit has decided that it will be a major bust, which is wise. Analytics is taking the opposite side of the argument, writing Fintwit has already decided the OpenAI IPO is dead on arrival, if it happens at all. This means it's not even close to dead, exceeding expectations by a wide margin. Peter Turek sums up the fate of OpenAI IPO this year is going to tell us a lot about where we are in the AI tech bull market. Which brings us to our last story. Elon Musk is apparently considering plans to consolidate his corporate empire. Earlier this week, Tesla announced that they'd made a $2 billion investment in Xai, ignoring a failed shareholder vote. It now seems that Musk's plan is to go much further. Reuters is reporting that Space X and X AI are in talks to merge, and while the plan is reportedly in an early stage, new holding companies were established last week to facilitate the deal. SpaceX is believed to be considering an IPO over the summer, so this move could result in XAI going public on an accelerated schedule later in the day. Bloomberg reported that SpaceX is also considering a merger with Tesla, with the deal being reported as an alternative to the XAI merger. Now, Musk has frequently discussed the logic behind consolidating his companies into a tech conglomerate in order to share resources. And honestly holding aside feelings about Musk, if he wants to build products that intersect AI space in the physical world, then it would make a lot of sense to combine the companies rather than deal with the friction of dealmaking between them. The Optimus robots are an obvious early project where xai's research team might be needed to build the AI models that drive the robots, writes Bloomberg. Musk has also discussed using SpaceX's Starship rockets to carry Tesla's Optimus robots to the moon as well as to Mars. XAI could benefit enormously from computing capacity provided by SpaceX's data centers in orbit if the company can make the engineering work. Mostly the reaction to this one has been, well, yeah, of course that's what he's doing. Deva Hazarika writes, Anyone surprised by this in the slightest simply hasn't followed or paid attention to Elon's empire building. It's all just a part of Elon Inc. Signal, meanwhile, pointed out just how wild this ride is. They wrote lmao. Wait, hold up everyone. So XAI investors will get liquidity before OpenAI and anthropic investors? That outcome is genuinely insane. Even more insane is that the investors who backed Elon during the Twitter buyout are now sitting on a ridiculous trade. Twitter equity effectively morphed into XAI exposure, which now has a clear path into SpaceX. Remember when people framed Twitter as a catastrophically bad investment? Turns out it was a control layer bet with insane optionality. Every single one of those anti Twitter buy takes and making fun of Elon are aging extremely poorly. When you make investments, the pathway to success rarely if ever, looks clean. Extremely well stated and that is where we will end. TLDR In January of 2026, the AI race got even crazier than it's ever been. For now, that is going to do it for today's AI Daily Brief. Appreciate you listening or watching as always. Until next time. Peace.