Remarkable 11
Pinterest is experimenting with Chinese AI models to hone its recommendation engine. “We’ve effectively made Pinterest an AI-powered shopping assistant,” the firm’s boss Bill Ready told me. Of course, the San Francisco-based tastemaker could use any number of American AI labs to power things behind-the-scenes. But since the launch of China’s DeepSeek R-1 model in January 2025, Chinese AI tech has increasingly been a part of Pinterest. Ready calls the so-called “DeepSeek moment” a breakthrough. “They chose to open source it, and that sparked a wave of open source models,” he said. Chinese competitors include Alibaba’s Qwen and Moonshot’s Kimi, while TikTok owner ByteDance is also working on similar technology. Pinterest Chief Technology Officer Matt Madrigal said the strength of these models is that they can be freely downloaded and customised by companies like his - which is not the case with the majority of models offered by US rivals like OpenAI, which makes ChatGPT. “Open source techniques that we use to train our own in-house models are 30% more accurate than the leading off-the-shelf models,” Madrigal said. And those improved recommendations come at a much lower cost, he said, sometimes ninety percent less than using the proprietary models favoured by US AI developers. Pinterest is hardly the only US enterprise depending on AI tech from China. These models are gaining traction across an array of Fortune 500 companies.
Is China quietly winning the AI race?
Chrome stopped being a mere window and started moonlighting as a digital intern. The new right‑hand side panel, powered by Gemini, can summarize reviews, juggle your calendar, and even tweak images via Nano Banana — all without opening extra tabs. The headline feature, Auto Browse, chains together multistep errands like booking flights or stuffing Etsy carts, though paying Pro users are capped at 20 tasks a day (Ultra subscribers get 200). Permission prompts guard major moves, and logins piggyback on Chrome’s password manager. Rolling out first to US-based Windows, Mac, and Chromebook Plus users, the upgrade positions Chrome’s 70% market share as Google’s home‑court advantage in the browser‑bot wars.
Daily Tech Insider Unpacks the Week AI Became Your Intern, Concierge, and Lip-Reader
A months-old but until now overlooked study recently featured in Wired claims to mathematically prove that large language models “are incapable of carrying out computational and agentic tasks beyond a certain complexity” — that level of complexity being, crucially, pretty low. The paper, which has not been peer reviewed, was written by Vishal Sikka, a former CTO at the German software giant SAP, and his son Varin Sikka. Sikka senior knows a thing or two about AI: he studied under John McCarthy, the Turing Award-winning computer scientist who literally founded the entire field of artificial intelligence, and in fact helped coin the very term. “There is no way they can be reliable,” Vishal Sikka told Wired. When asked by the interviewer, Sikka also agreed that we should forget about AI agents running nuclear power plants and other strident promises thrown around by AI boosters.
AI Agents Are Mathematically Incapable of Doing Functional Work, Paper Finds
For decades, tech companies have relied immensely on India’s vast workforce, from entry-level call center jobs to software engineers and high-ranking managerial positions. But with the advent of advanced AI, which has been accompanied by employers greatly cutting back on hiring with the hopes of eventually automating tasks entirely, India’s tech workers are having to cope with a vastly different reality in 2026. As Rest of World reports, rising anxiety over the influence of AI, on top of already-grueling 90-hour workweeks, has proven devastating for workers. While it’s hard to single out a definitive cause, a troubling wave of suicides among tech workers highlights these unsustainable conditions. Complicating the picture is a lack of clear government data on the tragic deaths. While it’s impossible to tell whether they are more prevalent among IT workers, experts told Rest of World that the mental health situation in the tech industry is nonetheless “very alarming.” The prospect of AI making their careers redundant is a major stressor, with tech workers facing a “huge uncertainty about their jobs,” as Indian Institute of Technology Kharagpur senior professor of computer science and engineering Jayanta Mukhopadhyay told Rest of World.
Wave of Suicides Hits as India’s Economy Is Ravaged by AI
According to the most recent data released by the Federal Reserve Bank of New York in mid-December, the unemployment rate for recent college grads stands at 5.8 percent, a full 1.7 percent higher than the average across all workers. Recent college grads are also experiencing an unemployment rate almost double the average for all college grads, which stands at 2.9 percent. That comes as typical on-ramps like internships are being gutted by major companies. As the former head of early career programs at Raymond James Financial, Simon Kho told NY Mag, AI has completely upended the financial calculus around hiring and training young talent. Breaking it down to brass tacks, Kho said it took around 18 months for fresh college grads to “pay off” on the time and resources required to train them.
It’s Starting to Look Like AI Has Killed the Entire Model of College
A few details make this a fascinating decision. Rather than these changes occurring as a result of Samuel López taking full control as Alcaraz’s head coach, Alcaraz says he autonomously changed his service motion. He then later showed those changes to the rest of his team. This is unusual. When tennis players usually make technical changes, they are either initiated by a coach or executed in conjunction with a coach. Alcaraz’s method reflects how much he works on instinct, and how his feel for the game is one of his greatest strengths. It also shows the confidence Alcaraz has in his own decision making as he continues to grow and mature.
China reveals 200-strong AI drone swarm that can be controlled by a single soldier — ‘intelligent algorithm’ allows individual units to cooperate autonomously even after losing communication with operator.
China reveals 200-strong AI drone swarm
But after leaving Meta in November, Dr. LeCun has become increasingly vocal in his criticism of Silicon Valley’s single-minded approach to building intelligent machines. He argues that the technology industry will eventually hit a dead end in its A.I. development — after years of work and hundreds of billions of dollars spent. The reason, he said, goes back to what he has argued for years: Large language models, or L.L.M.s, the A.I. technology at the heart of popular products like ChatGPT, can get only so powerful. And companies are throwing everything they have at projects that won’t get them to their goal to make computers as smart as or even smarter than humans. More creative Chinese companies, he added, could get there first.
Yann LeCun, an A.I. Pioneer, Warns the Tech ‘Herd’ Could Hit a Dead End
Microsoft is betting on a deeper kind of AI control… one most users never see. On Monday, the tech giant introduced Maia 200, its newest custom-built AI workhorse. Designed specifically to handle the heavy lifting of running massive AI models, this chip serves as a direct challenge to the hardware crowns held by Amazon and Google. The Maia 200 is built on a cutting-edge 3-nanometer process and packed with over 140 billion transistors. According to the Microsoft announcement, this translates into a massive jump in raw power, delivering over 10 petaFLOPS of 4-bit precision performance. But for Microsoft, it’s not just about speed; it’s about the bottom line. The company claims this new silicon is its most efficient yet, offering 30% better performance-per-dollar than the hardware it currently uses.
Microsoft Introduces Maia 200, Its Most Powerful AI Chip Yet
In the 10km classical cross-country skiing event at Nagano 1998, Philip Boit made history as Kenya’s first Winter Olympian. The former middle-distance runner, who had switched to skiing only two years prior, finished in 92nd, the last man over the line. His finishing time was nearly eight minutes behind the second-to-last finisher, and nearly double the time of the winner Bjorn Dæhlie’s 27min 24.5sec. Despite the vast difference in performance, the Norwegian gold medallist waited at the finish line to greet Boit with an embrace. This act moved Boit so much that he later named his first son, Dæhlie Boit, in honour of the champion. “All my friends and family said he had to be a very good-hearted man because he waited for me in Nagano, and that I should keep his name in my family,” said Boit.
The Joy of Six: unlikely Winter Olympics stars | Winter Olympics | The Guardian
America’s economic mood deteriorated in January to its lowest level in more than a decade as consumers fretted about geopolitical tensions, affordability and President Donald Trump’s unrelenting trade war. The Conference Board’s Consumer Confidence Index for January, released Tuesday, declined 9.7 points to a reading of 84.5, the lowest since 2014, surpassing the lows of last year when Trump unveiled stiff tariffs and the depths of the pandemic recession in 2020. January’s reading came in much lower than the 91.1 reading economists projected in a poll by data firm FactSet.
Consumer confidence collapses to lowest level since 2014
This week, a blog post went up on the OpenAI website, broadly discussing the company’s financial outlook. The write-up is authored by Sarah Friar, OpenAI’s Chief Financial Officer, where she claims that there’s a direct relationship between available computing power and revenue generation, and thus, adding more AI accelerators equals more money coming into the firm’s coffers. Friar’s figures say that OpenAI’s computing power grew threefold every year between 2023 and 2025, from 0.2 to 0.6 and 1.9 GW, respectively. Meanwhile, the firm’s revenue purportedly followed the same pattern, at $2B, $6B, and over $20 billion at the end of last year.
OpenAI shows clear compute and revenue scaling to soothe investor worries as company preps for IPO
The 1990s economic boom was fueled by spending from all income groups in the US. (Here’s a handy chart from Axios’ Emily Peck.) But today, as Peck notes, the top 20% of earners account for a staggering 59% of consumer spending. Yes, this is the K-shaped economy, where the rich are doing better and better while the poor are doing worse and worse. The rich have become so rich, in fact, that their spending alone can make it appear as if the entire economy is great, even as the majority of people are finding that suddenly the costs of basic staples like housing and food are getting harder and harder to bear and dollar stores warn that more and more people are going without..
Trump’s ‘run it hot’ economic strategy could work
Teaching rats to drive a tiny car around a laboratory had some far-reaching effects – it taught scientists a lot about the benefits of anticipating the joy brought by the things we love. We crafted our first rodent car from a plastic cereal container. After trial and error, my colleagues and I found that rats could learn to drive forward by grasping a small wire that acted like a gas pedal. Before long, they were steering with surprising precision to reach a Froot Loop treat. As expected, rats housed in enriched environments – complete with toys, space and companions – learned to drive faster than those in standard cages. This finding supported the idea that complex environments enhance neuroplasticity: the brain’s ability to change across the lifespan in response to environmental demands. Unexpectedly, we found that the rats had an intense motivation for their driving training, often jumping into the car and revving the “lever engine” before their vehicle hit the road. Why was that?
I taught rats to drive a car, and it may help us lead happier lives
Chemist Omar Yaghi invented materials called MOFs, a few grams of which have the surface area of a football field. He explains why he thinks these super-sponges will define the next century.
Nobel prizewinner Omar Yaghi says his invention will change the world
The Russian Armed Forces are in a state of profound decay. Reports now confirm that wounded convicts, many missing limbs, are being forced back to the front line to fill critical manpower gaps. Some have not even been provided prosthetics and are expected to return to combat on crutches. This is not resilience; it is desperation. After suffering well over 1.5 million casualties in Ukraine, Putin has been scraping the bottom of the barrel for manpower. He has bought and spent 15,000 North Korean troops. Russian press gangs have scoured Africa for mercenaries. The prisons have been emptied. And now, even the limbless are being thrown back into the fight. For anyone under Putin’s rule of fighting age, or indeed anyone who can just about stand and hold a rifle, this should be a chilling reality check. This tells us two critical things. First, the Russian Army is haemorrhaging combat power. Independent analysis shows Russia is advancing more slowly than armies did in the trenches of the First World War, and at a comparable cost in lives. Over the past two years, Russia has seized just over 1 per cent of Ukrainian territory at the cost of more than 500,000 casualties and continues to lose around 1,000 men a day. Since early 2024, Russian forces have advanced between 15 and 70 metres per day, a damning indictment of their tactics and leadership. This would be deemed a failure even by the standards of Passchendaele and Verdun in WW1. This is attritional warfare at its most brutal. These injured soldiers are being used as expendable “bullet catchers” in the hope that Ukraine will eventually run out of ammunition. That will only happen if we in the West allow it to. Second, it exposes the Kremlin’s utter disregard for its own people. While ordinary Russians endure crippling inflation and soaring interest rates, Moscow pours what remains of its resources into missiles and drones to terrorise Kyiv rather than into looking after its own people. To the Kremlin, the Russian Army is simply cannon fodder. Convicts and foreign recruits are worth even less, if that is possible. The irony is stark; if this truly reflects the state of the modern Russian Army, a relatively modest increase in Western support would almost certainly allow Ukraine to prevail.
Desperate Putin is coming to the end of the road
The UK is losing more jobs than it is creating because of artificial intelligence and is being hit harder than rival large economies, new research suggests. British companies reported that AI had resulted in net job losses over the past 12 months, down 8% – the highest rate among other leading economies including the US, Japan, Germany and Australia, according to a study by the investment bank Morgan Stanley. The research, which was shared with Bloomberg, surveyed companies using AI for at least a year across five industries: consumer staples and retail, real estate, transport, healthcare equipment and cars. It found that British businesses reported an average 11.5% increase in productivity aided by AI. US businesses reported similar gains, but created more jobs than they cut.
AI is hitting UK harder than other big economies, study finds