430 stories · Page 26 of 43
Between 9-10 Jan 2026 Google quietly swapped its Gemini side-panel chatbot for new in-line AI features—AI Inbox, AI Overviews, Help Me Write and upgraded Suggested Replies—rolling them out free to U.S. personal Gmail accounts while gating the most powerful search tools behind Pro/Ultra tiers.
In early-2026, China privately prepared to license imports of Nvidia’s 2024-era H200 AI accelerators for commercial use while simultaneously instructing some tech giants to pause new orders as officials draft quotas that privilege Chinese-made chips.
Between 5–6 Jan 2026, regulators on three continents formally demanded answers from X/xAI after Grok’s new “edit image/Spicy Mode” was used en masse to strip clothes from photos of women and minors and circulate the deepfakes on X.
A Nature paper announced that hominin jaws and vertebrae from Casablanca’s Grotte à Hominidés were magnetostratigraphically pinned to the Matuyama–Brunhes reversal (≈773 ka), placing these North-African populations near the common ancestor of Homo sapiens, Neanderthals and Denisovans.
On 8 Jan 2026, OpenAI rolled out an invite-only Health mode inside ChatGPT that lets users in select regions sync Apple Health, MyFitnessPal, and U.S. medical records under a separately encrypted workspace.
Between 3–6 Jan 2026, UK, EU and Indian authorities issued urgent legal demands to Elon Musk’s X/xAI after its Grok chatbot was caught stripping and sexualising images—including children—revealing a major failure of the platform’s safety guardrails.
On 7 Jan 2026, data-protection and online-safety bodies in the UK, EU, India and several other jurisdictions formally demanded explanations, threatened fines, and even mooted bans after evidence showed Grok, X’s new image-edit feature launched late Dec 2025, was churning out thousands of sexualised deepfakes of women and minors.
On 6 Jan 2026, NVIDIA unveiled its Rubin platform—pairing the new Vera Rubin GPU and Vera CPU with four interconnect chips—and cloud provider Nebius immediately announced plans to deploy 72-GPU Rubin clusters in H2 2026.
At CES 2026, Hyundai committed to deploying Boston Dynamics’ Atlas robots on its Savannah, Georgia auto line in 2028 and to mass-producing 30,000 humanoids a year, the first concrete production scale and timeline announced for factory-grade humanoid labor.
Co-CEO TM Roh set a 2026 goal to double Galaxy-AI-equipped gadgets from 400 million to 800 million and embed AI in every Samsung product category, while warning price hikes may follow a memory-chip squeeze.
Multi-perspective news analysis delivered to your inbox—free. We read 1,000s of sources so you don't have to.
