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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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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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.
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.
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.
Softbank sent over the final amount to complete its $40 billion investment in OpenAI last week. The company's stake in OpenAI is now around 11%. Softbank has been betting big on technology and AI companies. It recently agreed to pay $4 billion for data center investment firm DigitalBridge to strengthen its AI push.
OpenAI's average stock-based compensation for its roughly 4,000 employees is about $1.5 million per employee. The company's equity awards, aimed at helping it keep its lead in the AI race, are inflating its heavy operating losses and diluting existing shareholders. OpenAI recently announced the discontinuation of a policy that required employees to work at the company for at least six months before their equity vests. This could lead to further compensation increases.
Tesla has released a year-in-review video for 2025 that recaps major achievements for the company. The montage celebrated the company's progress on EVs, energy, and Robotaxi development. It also confirmed that the production of the Cybercab has started. The video can be viewed in the article.
There is too little money to be made in rare earth to be of much interest to mining giants, so the challenge of reestablishing a domestic industry in the US has fallen to small companies. Metal prices have risen in recent months as China has restricted exports in response to US tariffs. It will be difficult for local startups to compete as China's grip on the industry is tight, and it is known to sell rare-earth metals for less than it costs to produce them. The biggest question is whether the US government will continue to subsidize the domestic industry, and at what level.
Efficiency improvements reveal latent demand that was previously uneconomic to address. The pattern is consistent throughout history. We are about to see an increase in knowledge work output of several orders of magnitude. This will likely reveal that humanity has been massively under-investing in knowledge work because it was too expensive.
The primary impact of AI tooling so far is that the marginal cost of producing code has gone down significantly. However, producing code is only part of the job, so the bottlenecks for engineering time will shift elsewhere. The software engineering field seems poised to be more mechanized, but more productive as a result. Most of the effects of the mindset shift that has been accelerating for the last few months have yet to be fully realized.
A lot of the assumptions across the tech industry were seriously put to the test this year. This post takes a look at some of the things that happened to see what the future may bring. It covers OpenAI's business, Google's dominance in AI, Alan Dye's role at Apple, software on-demand, and what Apple needs to do to win next year.
Progress is a smooth trend that obscures jagged details. History is a record of thousands of years of stasis before hundreds of years of growth. There hasn't been any constant normal trend ever, so no one should expect AI to be the same. Nothing is truly inevitable, but it would be strange if progress stopped tomorrow.
Meta has agreed to acquire Manus, a Singapore-based company that conducts deep research and performs tasks for paying users. Meta will continue to operate and sell Manus' services while integrating it into its suite of social media products. The deal will help Meta cement its position in the product segment of AI agents. It is one of the first times a major US tech company has bought a startup with Chinese roots.
Nvidia locked in a purchase price of $23.28 per share for Intel when the companies struck a deal in September. The deal had been under scrutiny by the US Federal Trade Commission, but was then greenlighted on December 18. The purchase of 214 million shares closed on December 26, and Intel shares closed Monday at $36.68, making Nvidia's $5 billion purchase worth $7.58 billion. The deal will involve the companies jointly developing multiple generations of chips for datacenters and PCs.
Chinese researchers have created an artificial robotic skin that can sense pressure and locate input and injuries. The neuromorphic robotic e-skin (NRE-skin) is assembled from a collection of segments that snap together using magnetic interlocks, automatically linking up any necessary wiring. Each segment broadcasts a unique identity code, so it is relatively easy to pop out the damaged segment and replace it with fresh hardware if the system identifies damage.
Biomedical progress has become less productive for the last several years despite staggering advances in basic science. One of the reasons for this is that institutional bureaucracy has become harder to overcome. Increasing the number and efficiency of clinical trials would help create a faster feedback loop and result in better data to inform models and ideas. This could help decrease the cost of bringing new drugs to market and break a trend that has held since the 1950s.
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The primary users of infrastructure software are rapidly shifting from developers to AI agents. AI uses systems very differently from how developers do, and it changes many long-held assumptions about how databases should be used. Many things developers took for granted need rethinking. The focus of engineers is shifting from perfected individual systems to designing foundational capabilities that AI can use at scale, iterate on, and run cheaply.
AI will likely make 24/7 on-call a thing of the past. 24/7 monitoring is a lot simpler than the development process. There are often reference documents that engineers can follow to bring systems back up, and if they fail, there's always a backup and recovery plan in place. On-call jobs have always been more systematic. This post introduces an autonomous monitoring agent that does what an on-call engineer would do, but autonomously, forever.
Labor and capital have traditionally complemented each other. While wealthy people can keep accumulating capital, it becomes less valuable when there aren't enough hands to use all of it, and hands grow more valuable when capital is plentiful. However, this correction mechanism breaks in the world of advanced robotics and AI. A global and highly progressive tax on capital (or at least capital income) may be the only way to prevent inequality from growing extreme.
The immediate AI risk comes from people overestimating AI's capabilities. A lack of reliability and trust is preventing wide adoption. There is a growing AI perception gap between quantitative users and qualitative users. AI leaders aren't even attempting to explain how AI works because it's complicated, and they're also incentivized to oversimplify and overpromise.
The infrastructure buildout happening right now may be a sign that the AI chip competition may already be over. Nvidia recently requested 16-Hi HBM deliveries from Samsung, SK Hynix, and Micron by Q4 2026. This infrastructure layer could make AI inference effectively infinite and nearly free at the margin. The rollout of capability is arriving faster than our ability to conceptualize what to do with it.
All of Groq's VCs, employees, founders, and the whole cap table will get paid from the recent acquisition by Nvidia. 85% of the payment will be up front, with the rest coming by the end of 2026. Nvidia will likely weaponize the patents it gained from the acquisition to create a 'scorched-earth zone' around SRAM-based inference. GroqCloud has become a shell of its former self with no IP and no technical leadership.
Max Space's Thunderbird is designed to host four astronauts in an expandable interior structure that can be reconfigured by the crew to support different activities. It can be used for research as well as orbital manufacturing of pharmaceuticals and other materials. The space station can be launched on a medium-lift vehicle such as the Falcon 9 rocket. The Thunderbird space station is set to launch as early as 2029.
Alzheimer's Disease (AD) is caused by multiple factors. Each individual factor doesn't necessarily guarantee an AD diagnosis in every situation, but it increases the odds of it all else being equal. Preventing AD and reversing or stopping the disease are two separate areas of research. Attempting to modify risk factors of the disease once it has already started is unlikely to lead to a cure. Targeting the underlying dynamics of the disease is a more likely pathway to a treatment.
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Claude Code dominated the CLI coding product experience this year. This guide shows readers the thought processes and simple things to keep in mind to get the most out of Claude Code. Learning how things work in Claude Code directly transfers to other tools, both in terms of personal usage and production-grade engineering. The post will help users keep up with coding agents in general.
Kubernetes is often described as a container orchestration tool, but that mental model isn't always the most useful way to think about what's happening. It is more like a platform where developers declare the desired state of their infrastructure and let the system continuously work to match that intent. In that way, Kubernetes is more like a runtime for declarative infrastructure with a type system. Thinking this way results in very practical approaches to operating clusters.
2026 will hopefully be full of surprises and developments that give us hope for healthier and more fulfilling work and lives. The AI hype cycle will die down, allowing the most meaningful innovations to become clear. This post takes a look at what we should expect in the coming year and beyond, and what the implications of that will be.
Tech-driven efficiency improvements tend to lead to massive growth because there are more use cases for the resources than previously contemplated. AI is going to lead to a lot more knowledge work by making it cheaper, as that allows people to take on tasks previously unimaginable. The vast majority of AI tokens in the future will be used on things that we don't even do today. AI will enable work that previously wouldn't have been considered, as it would have been too expensive or impractical.
