Good morning and happy 2026! Have you noticed how everything online lately feels like a greasy slice of 3 am gas station pizza? You wonder if it’s real, but somehow still end up consuming it. Microsoft’s CEO Satya Nadella says we should stop calling AI content “slop” and just accept it as the “new equilibrium” of human nature. One person who gets this better than most is the 22 year old college dropout making $700k from gen AI YouTube videos. By the way, this newsletter is still made by two real people. You’re welcome.
China is flooding the market with cheap humanoid robots. This is the moment robotics stops being a science project and becomes an economic weapon. Backed by massive government subsidies, Chinese companies are shipping thousands of humanoids into real jobs at prices under $6k. This makes robots cheaper than employees. The US still treats humanoids like a moonshot. China treats them like inventory. Tesla hasn’t sold one. China is already scaling the industry.
ChatGPT may soon prioritize brands over facts. Sam Altman once called ads a last resort. Billions in potential ad revenue (and a massive burn rate) changed his mind. OpenAI is now testing how to slip sponsored ads into your conversations. They’ve brought in veteran marketers to turn ChatGPT’s nearly 900 million weekly users into a digital billboard. Internal mockups show sidebar ads and popups triggered mid-chat. Let’s see if they can figure out how to cash in without destroying user trust.
✈️ What happens... Next
Stay ahead of the curve at Google Cloud Next. Join leaders in AI and cloud tech in Vegas this April to get insights, strategies, and tools to build the future.
- Connect with experts and innovators
- Dive into talks, live demos, and workshops
- Grow your AI expertise and learn new skills
- For startup founders, developers, leaders, and security pros
Register now to save on early bird tickets.
Musk sends Grok to work. xAI just launched business versions of its chatbot, hoping to win enterprise deals from rivals like OpenAI and Anthropic. Grok for Business targets smaller companies at $30 a month, while Grok Enterprise aims for bigger firms (pricing TBD). But without a sales force, it’s unclear if Grok will have much of a market outside Tesla and SpaceX. The first day at work should be interesting.
Should robots feel pain? Scientists are creating advanced robotic skin that senses everything from gentle taps to serious damage, triggering human-like reflexes. The idea is to help machines avoid injury and make them safer to work around people. Each patch of skin sends a live pulse, telling exactly where it’s hurt. They’re not self-healing, but the damaged patches snap off magnetically for quick replacement. Finally tech that’s built to suffer like startup founders.
Thousands of satellites will soon beam light directly to Earth. Reflect Orbital says its space mirrors can deliver “sunlight on demand,” lighting up remote locations or even powering solar farms. Yet astronomers aren’t buying it. They point out the satellites barely produce 4x the brightness of the full moon, far too weak to power solar energy. Plus, even tiny impacts from space debris could ruin their reflective surfaces, scattering what little useful sunlight they produce. If your solar farm needs moonlight-level power, maybe invest in batteries instead.
OpenAI wants you to ditch screens. ChatGPT sounds brilliant when you type, but talking to it is still pretty awkward. So OpenAI’s rebuilding its audio AI model to handle conversations more naturally, even if you interrupt it. The goal is a screenless audio AI gadget that acts like a companion. Former Apple design legend Jony Ive is leading the charge, hoping to solve the screen addiction problem he helped create. Soon we’ll be able to argue with AI in public instead of just online.
fun stats
💰$20 billion. Cash value of Nvidia’s deal to buy AI chip startup Groq. The acqui-hire is the largest in Nvidia’s history.
🤑$1.5 million per worker. Average OpenAI employee compensation in 2025. It’s more than any major tech startup in history, and 34x higher than pre-IPO norms.
👀1.7 million vs 45,000. Number of Meta Quest VR headsets shipped in 2025 vs Apple’s hyped Vision Pro. VR is facing a hard reality check as consumers go for smart glasses.
📉#2. Tesla is no longer the leader in global electric vehicle sales as China’s BYD takes the lead. Good thing Musk is focusing on autonomy, AI, and robots.