AI is all the rage, but are you really using it to your advantage? This practical guide from You.com guides you through the process of identifying and prioritizing opportunities where AI can best serve your org. Explore where AI can drive the most impact in your organization, both internally and externally.

Learn more with this AI Use Case Discovery Guide.

Google has unveiled a new set of tools for retailers to help them roll out AI agents. The new retail AI agents can help shoppers find their desired items and provide customer support. They are designed to address the challenges retailers face in building their own AI agents. Major retailers, including Lowe's and Kroger, are already using Google's tools.

Sportscaster Bill Simmons will go live on Netflix on Sunday night, marking the unofficial beginning of Netflix's move into podcasting. Netflix plans to offer dozens of podcasts over the next few months. It is a big moment for the podcasting industry, which is praying that Netflix will turn into a major new buyer.

SpaceX's plan to upgrade Starlink with gigabit internet speeds has received partial approval from the US FCC. The company can now launch 7,500 more satellites, operate its constellation at lower orbits, and use a larger swath of radio frequencies. SpaceX has received a time-limited waiver to operate the Starlink network at higher power levels to improve speeds. The waiver is confined to Starlink operations in the US.

DeepMind shipped AlphaFold 3 last spring, but its code was locked, weights were restricted, and commercial applications were forbidden. By December, three MIT PhD students had reverse-engineered the architecture and released their own version. Boltz is available on GitHub under Apache 2.0 for anyone to download. The Boltz team now has $28 million in funding and a Pfizer partnership, showing how the industry is willing to reject Google's closed approach and instead build around it.

API keys remain the most common way developers integrate with your product programmatically. We cover when to offer API access, security best practices for key generation and storage, and how Clerk's new API Keys feature handles the heavy lifting — plus a walkthrough showing key creation, rotation, and revocation in action.

Claude Code demonstrated that large language models with access to bash and file tools can accomplish complex multi-step tasks autonomously by operating in a loop until an objective is achieved. Good coding agents are really good general-purpose agents. The Claude Code software development kit makes this accessible. It allows developers to build applications where features are achieved by agents with tools. This opens up a new field of software that works the way Claude Code works, but in categories far beyond coding.

Whatever you may feel about AI, skipping it will not help you or your career. Test these new tools with weeks of work, and find a way to multiply yourself. If it doesn't work out, try again every few months. AI allows you to build more and better. While you might not be writing the code yourself, the fun of creating is still there, untouched.

a16z has just announced $15 billion in fresh funds. The firm is the best-marketed firm in venture capital. The story that it tells about itself is consistent with its actions. a16z is doing something different: it wants to build the future and eat the world.

Roku's CEO predicts that the first 100% AI-generated hit movie will be released in the next three years. AI-generated video is already flooding social media, so it is not unreasonable to believe that fully AI-generated movies will be possible in three years. The bigger question is whether there will be an audience for that content. It is likely that AI-generated content will raise the demand for human-generated content. There may be a market for hybrid content, but a purely AI-generated movie topping the box office by 2029 is unlikely.

The six new chips in Nvidia's Vera Rubin-based computers work together in concert to achieve performance advantages.

DeepSeek is reportedly planning to release its V4 model around mid-February.

Silicon Valley titans are airing their grievances in an active Signal chat called 'Save California', sounding off against the tax, suggesting alternatives, and in some cases sharing efforts to weaken their ties to the state.

Markdown is used in nearly every bit of the high-tech world, from the most cutting-edge AI systems to grocery lists in Apple Notes.

While network bandwidth per dollar improved by one order of magnitude, CPU and DRAM gains have been much more modest.

X will update its release every 4 weeks with comprehensive developer notes to help the public understand what has changed.

Google was behind in the AI race in August, but by September, its Gemini AI app had become the most downloaded app in Apple's App Store. The company launched its most powerful Gemini model yet two months later, leapfrogging over OpenAI to the front of the AI pack. Google's deep roots in science and research, willingness to invest in custom hardware, and leadership changes in recent years cleared the way for faster experimentation. The company's AI work has begun generating substantial revenue through search ads, paid versions of Gemini, and sales of new computer chips developed in-house.

xAI has successfully closed a $20 billion Series E funding round. The capital will be used to accelerate the development of the company's compute infrastructure. xAI has introduced several business-oriented offerings, including Grok Business, a team plan priced at $30 per seat per month, and Grok Enterprise, which includes Custom SSO and SCIM features. It has also released a Collections API that features built-in RAG, OCR, layout-aware parsing, and more.

Commonwealth Fusion Systems (CFS) has installed the first magnet in its Sparc fusion reactor, a demonstration device scheduled to turn on next year. The reactor will have 18 magnets in total in a donut-like shape. These magnets will create a powerful magnetic field for confining and compressing superheated plasma. If successful, the plasma will release more energy than it takes to heat and compress it. CFS is working with Nvidia and Siemens to develop a digital version of the reactor.

Aviation innovation has been stuck in a rut in the 56 years since Concorde debuted due to noise, regulation, and cost. All three of these issues are at various stages of being solved. Regulatory walls are cracking, and the technology is better than ever. This article looks at the work being done by Boom Supersonic, Astro Mechanica, and Hermeus toward Supersonic 2.0, where anyone can catch a quick, affordable flight almost anywhere on Earth.

TLDR puts you in front of your target audience with almost no competition. Each newsletter features only three advertisers max, giving your message the space it deserves. Millions of developers, product managers, CEOs, and other tech decision makers actually see what you have to say! Learn more about running a test campaign.

Dynamic Context Discovery is a pattern that allows agents to pull relevant context on their own with fewer details provided up front. It optimizes token usage while still allowing agents to gather enough context for tasks. Data is stored in files, which can then be accessed as necessary. Cursor will release dynamic context discovery for all users in the coming weeks.

OpenAI's GPT-5.2 Codex-Max is now rolling out to subscribers. There is little public information about the model available, but OpenAI may share more details in the coming days. The standard GPT-5.2 Codex can stay on track for long tasks, make large contexts useful through compaction, and handle heavy changes like refactors and migrations. It can understand screenshots, UI bugs, and diagrams.

CES 2026 has already revealed several unexpected surprises, such as devices that detect gluten and dairy in food, a robot vacuum that climbs stairs, and a lollipop that plays music via bone-conduction technology. This page wraps up some of the biggest highlights of the event. CNET's Best of CES 2026 awards will be announced today.

OpenAI executives are debating whether to attend the Cannes Lions festival, a festival where the ad industry celebrates its ability to turn creativity into influence. The company has yet to find an ads boss, and it still needs to figure out how to best handle data privacy and ensure its commerce proposition proves successful. Competition is heating up, with Google now building the infrastructure needed to monetize its AI services. OpenAI isn't actively talking to advertisers about advertising yet.

This post provides readers with a simple mental model for evaluating sandboxes and then walks through the boundaries that show up in real AI execution systems: containers, gVisor, microVMs, and runtime sandboxes.

Models may or may not be aligned with what you want to do.

Apple veteran Abidur Chowdhury will become head of design at Hark, a company working on AI models.

Mantic is a structural code search engine for AI agents that provides sub-500ms file ranking across massive code bases without embeddings, vector databases, or external dependencies.

Traffic to top websites has fallen by more than 11% in the past five years.

Discord is working with Goldman Sachs and JPMorgan Chase on an initial public offering.

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Nvidia plans to start shipping its Vera Rubin AI chip later this year. The chip, designed to fulfill AI requests more quickly and cheaply than its predecessors, has been in development for three years. Nvidia's CEO, Jensen Huang, discussed the company's surprisingly ambitious work around autonomous vehicles during CES 2026. Mercedes-Benz plans to start shipping cars equipped with Nvidia self-driving technology this year.

Boston Dynamics' Atlas humanoid robot is entering production. The first companies to receive deployments will be Hyundai and Google DeepMind. The final version of Atlas can work autonomously, via a teleoperator, or with a tablet steering interface, and perform a wide array of industrial tasks. It has a reach of 7.5 feet and can lift up to 110 pounds.

Amazon Leo, formerly known as Project Kuiper, will launch in the first quarter of this year with a three-tier hardware strategy that will first target the US, UK, Germany, France, and Canada. Customers will be able to choose between three terminals: Leo Nano, which is capable of delivering 100 Mbps; Leo Pro, a standard unit that can push 400 Mbps; and Leo Ultra, an enterprise terminal capable of 1 Gbps. The smaller terminals will help the service scale, while the Ultra terminal signals to traditional broadband providers that Amazon plans to support them rather than bypass them.

Dried blood analysis could be a feasible and scalable way to detect the brain changes linked to Alzheimer's. Researchers have developed a dried blood test that, while less accurate than traditional blood tests, showed good ability to distinguish people with Alzheimer's-related disease. The method is cheaper than traditional testing and could potentially be performed outside of clinical settings. The same technique could potentially be used to detect other conditions, such as multiple sclerosis and amyotrophic lateral sclerosis.

An Agent Harness is the infrastructure that wraps around an AI model to manage long-running tasks. It is the system that governs how the agent operates. Agent harnesses turn vague, multistep agent workflows into structured data that can be logged and graded to improve systems. They can be used to validate real-world progress, empower the user experience, and improve models via real-world feedback.

Change is the only constant. Keep a finger on technology trends to avoid being caught off-guard by hype or doom. Update skills, diversify abilities, and focus on uniquely human aspects to stay in the loop. There will always be demand for engineers who think holistically, learn continuously, and drive technology toward solving real problems.

Alexa+ is now available to everyone through a free early access program. The AI is now accessible as a chatbot on a website, similar to other AI products. Alexa+ will be included with Amazon Prime memberships, which start at $15 per month, or cost $20 per month as a standalone subscription. While still in early access, reports say that Alexa+ is slower than expected and struggles with inaccuracies at times.

This year, multi-step, tool-using, self-correcting loops will become the default way of working. The gap between those who use AI effectively and those who do not will become more obvious. Organizations will become more streamlined and deal with different risk models. Consultancies that help businesses become 'AI-native' will clean up.

Join Miro and Forrester for a webinar discussing the results of a new study on the AI implementation gap, and how reality is diverging from hype. Watch live on 01/22

Researchers discovered a spider web in a cave in the Balkans - created by two usually-hostile species of spider - that spans about 1,140 square feet.

Compound engineering is a fundamental shift in mindset where developers go from code writers to system orchestrators.

macOS Tahoe adds complex icons to every menu item, which the Macintosh Human Interface Guidelines from 1992 explicitly says not to do.

The pill costs $149 a month for the starting dose of 1.5mg.

You need to consistently demonstrate that you can already handle the role you are trying to grow into.

MiniMax has advised investors that it plans to sell shares at HK$165 apiece.

Free trials help AI apps grow, but bots and fake accounts exploit them. They steal tokens, burn compute, and disrupt real users.

Cursor, the fast-growing AI code assistant, uses WorkOS Radar to detect and stop abuse in real time. With device fingerprinting and behavioral signals, Radar blocks fraud before it reaches your app.

Protect your app today →

OpenAI is aiming to create an app store that rivals Apple's, but early tests suggest that the company still has a long way to go. ChatGPT's more than 800 million users can now perform various tasks, such as order groceries from Instacart or create a playlist with Spotify, using ChatGPT instead of opening an app. However, the current system requires too many extra steps, making it more complicated to use than traditional apps. Also, many ChatGPT apps only have very basic functionality, steering users back to more capable apps or sites.

Elon Musk has bet Tesla's future and his personal fortune on Optimus. The humanoid robots have the potential to generate infinite revenue for the company and eliminate poverty and the need for work. The company is currently working on the third generation of its robot. This article looks at how the robot is being trained and the challenges that Tesla will need to address before a commercial version is viable.

The peptide scene exposes regulatory theater, economic desperation, and a philosophical tension about bodily autonomy. While there is some evidence that these compounds work, people are taking on a lot of risk by using untested substances on themselves. The peptide gray market has matured, making it likely unregulatable. This article looks at some of the peptides available on the market and the evidence behind their effectiveness.

Furiosa is a startup that makes neural processing units (NPUs), chips designed to handle the type of computing calculations underpinning AI. The startup's chips can provide similar performance to Nvidia's advanced GPUs with less electricity usage. Mass production of the chips is slated to start this month. This article tells the story of June Pai, Furiosa's founder, and how he founded the company.

Boris Cherny created Claude Code. In this thread, he details his setup and how he works with Claude Code. Claude Code was created to be very customizable, but Cherny uses a surprisingly vanilla setup. Each person on the Claude Code team uses the IDE very differently.

The center of software work is moving. Previously, the model of software work - turning intent into something real - absorbed most of the time, attention, and craft of software teams. AI agents can now produce working code from goals, context, and tasks. As systems improve, the middle will get thinner, and less time will be spent manually translating intent into implementation. Developers will still need to understand the problem, gather the right context from customers and internal teams, and shape the work. Directing and managing agent work will become the craft in this era.

Netflix wants to start streaming Warner Bros.' movies just 17 days after their release in theaters. The companies may end up negotiating a larger window of up to 45 days. This highlights the tension between Hollywood and Netflix's priority of bolstering streaming. Netflix expects the Warner Bros. transaction to close in the next 12 to 18 months, if it passes regulatory scrutiny.

The University of Waterloo has a co-op program that is famous for the opportunities offered and the different countries you could work in. All of the students in every graduating class always have jobs lined up due to the over two years of work experience they gained in the program. This post, written by a student who has been in the co-op for a bit longer than a year, discusses how the program has changed them and helped them. While the program gives students a massive head start on their careers, financial independence, and the chance to live in a new city every four months, it creates a lot of pressure, and students are forced to grow up fast.

The iPhone 18 is not expected to arrive until the spring of 2027.

Code review consistently fails to catch the bugs that matter most.

The Web Install API introduces a new way to install Progressive Web Apps directly from the browser.

There are a lot of activities like side projects and writing that can help build confidence and make you more hireable over the years.

Agents only become reliably useful when supplied with constraints, context, an oracle, and a loop.

This post presents a disciplined approach to AI-assisted engineering that leverages AI aggressively while staying accountable for the software produced.

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OpenAI has unified several engineering, product, and research teams over the past couple of months to overhaul its audio models. The company is reportedly preparing to launch an audio-first personal device in about a year. Its new audio model will sound more natural, be able to handle interruptions, and even speak when users are talking. The entire tech industry seems to be headed toward a future where screens become background noise and audio takes center stage.

One of the big transformations of this year will be robotaxis. Waymo will likely partner with Uber in many locations because Uber owns demand, but over time, Waymo will want to go direct. Cybercab will appear sometime this year and undercut both Uber and Waymo in price. Uber's demand for rides will go down pretty quickly once price drops - Waymo is currently more expensive than Uber, but it is still thriving because people prefer to ride without a driver.

SpaceX is lowering all Starlink satellites from around 550 km to around 480 km over the course of the year. The shell lowering will be tightly coordinated with other operators, regulators, and USSPACECOM. Condensing Starlink orbits will increase space safety, particularly with difficult-to-control risks like uncoordinated maneuvers and launches by other satellite operators.

Mark Thomson is now the director general of CERN. One of the first things he will do during his term is to turn off the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) to make way for a major upgrade that will make the LHC more precise with its measurements of particles and their interactions. The upgrade will dominate Thomson's five-year tenure. The LHC will reach its end of life around 2041.

Writing a lot of tests doesn't always guarantee software quality. Engineers need to study target users more deeply to really understand how they will use their products. One way to do this is by creating AI users to test software. This can result in a feedback loop that allows engineers to iterate quickly.

Once coding speed jumps, everything around it becomes a constraint. Developers' throughput is now capped by clarifying requirements, reviewing changes, validating correctness and performance, getting to production safely, and operating the product. The great engineering divergence will be determined by who raises that ceiling end-to-end. Organizations that update their processes to improve the non-code chokepoints will reap the largest rewards this year.

Silicon Valley and the Communist Party are similar in that both are serious, self-serious, and completely humorless. They both tend to speak in either a bland corporate tone or a philosophical register. These two forces both aim to increase their centrality while weakening the agency of whole nation-states. This article looks at how the two parties differ in their AI efforts and what that might mean for the future of humanity.

Hasbro's 'Toy Tycoon' is a role-playing strategy game designed for up-and-coming leaders. The game takes a full day to play. Players confront a series of scenarios that test their managerial mettle. The game helps players think through how to manage their company's cash, time, and other resources, and to pivot when the most thoughtful plans fail. Players aim to build a brand, scale a business, and smartly apply market research.

Our demand for solving ever-larger computing problems consistently outstrips our ability to build greater computing capacity.

If you want to understand how and where technological progress happens, you have to look at cultural drivers, not what academia is accomplishing.

Meta's Reels is set to bring in as much as Coca-Cola and Nike, and the company plans to expand to more screens this year.

IPv6 is not backward-compatible with IPv4, and it doesn't add any major improvements, so there is low incentive to adopt it.

Gas Town is an IDE that helps developers with the tedium of running lots of Claude Code instances.

A look at technological improvements in the recent past and the achievements they will unlock for humanity this year.

Meta took steps to make scam ads less discoverable to regulators, investigators, and journalists due to fears that Japanese regulators would require advertiser verification, a measure the company estimated would cost roughly $2 billion to implement and potentially reduce revenue by nearly 5%. The campaign was so successful that Meta added the tactic to a 'general global playbook' that has since been deployed against regulatory scrutiny in other markets. Meta had previously estimated that 10% of its 2024 revenue was from ads tied to scams and banned goods.

Creation tools are getting better and better. This will make creators matter more. Those who have the ability to be real, to connect, and to have a voice that can't be faked will be those who succeed in this new world. The bar will shift from whether someone can create to whether someone can create something that only they could create. Only the creators who can maintain trust and signal authenticity will stand out.

A Tesla owner successfully drove coast-to-coast across the US on Full Self-Driving (FSD) Supervised with zero interventions during the trip. Their Model 3 completed the drive in 2 days and 20 hours, starting at the Tesla Diner in Los Angeles, CA, and ending in Myrtle Beach, SC. It was accomplished with Tesla FSD V14.2 on AI4 hardware. The milestone trip was widely lauded by members of the Tesla community.

Neuralink received FDA breakthrough device designation for its speech restoration in 2025. The company also launched clinical trials in the Middle East and the UK, and completed two surgeries in Canada. It upgraded its surgical robot to be able to insert an electrode thread every 1.5 seconds at insertion depths of over 50mm. The threads go through the dura without the need to remove it. Neuralink plans to move to an almost completely automated surgical procedure this year.

The primary security question for companies will be how good their attackers' AI is versus their own AI. There will be increased spending on agentic security platforms and significantly more in-house building of security tools. Asset management will become possible for the first time because of agents. Most security platforms will eventually be replaceable with AI prompts.

Ben Tossell, who works at Factory, a company developing a frontier software development agent, has spent 3 billion tokens in four months through an agent without writing any code. None of the code was read, but Tossell read the agent output religiously, which led to him picking up a ton of knowledge around how code works, how projects work, where things fail, and where they succeed. Tossell has shipped several projects using his method over the past few months, including a personal site, a 'wrapped' product for Factory, several custom CLIs, and an AI-directed video demo system. This post contains Tossell's guide to learning to program.

2026 will be the year when generative UI takes off, the Smart Home finally fulfills its promise, and biometric proof of personhood becomes the new social login. Engineers looking to separate themselves from the crowd need to build and learn, as deep technical intuition is what will distinguish them from others. Agents will continue to be the main headline. This year, they will start interacting in our daily lives to anticipate needs.

AI tends to improve at the same pace that AI researchers get access to faster hardware. The hardware scheduled to come online in the next few years makes current hardware look like pocket calculators. If previous observations hold true, then we are not approaching a plateau, the field is just getting started.

NERD (No Effort Required, Done) is a programming language optimized for large language models.

Models will continue to improve their capabilities, but it will take a while for the full impact to be felt across the economy.

There is a lot less money going towards hiring, but that could change if the tax code gets rolled back, interest rates fall, and data centers stop being the rage.

Atmospheric computing connects cloud services together, allowing users to store and run their own programs.

Worktrunk is a CLI for git worktree management designed to run AI agents in parallel.

Reasoning was a significant feature of many models from nearly every major AI lab in 2025.