Top Story: Industry Shake-up

• Nvidia has struck a $20 billion licensing deal for technology from AI chip startup Groq. While not a full acquisition, Groq's CEO Jonathan Ross, president, and other key employees will join Nvidia. The deal targets Groq's LPU chips, known for running AI models with high speed and cost efficiency. Ross previously helped create Google's competing TPU chips.

The Rise of AI Agents & The Future of Work

• Tech CEOs are predicting a massive shift in the workforce due to AI agents:
• OpenAI's Sam Altman highlights an "arbitrage gap" for early AI adopters, noting that GPT-5.2 can already outperform experts in 71% of knowledge work tasks.
• Nvidia's Jensen Huang envisions "digital humans" joining the workforce as nurses and accountants, estimating the agentic labor market could be worth trillions of dollars.
• Google's Sundar Pichai stated that a CEO's job might be one of the easier roles for an AI to perform in the future.
• Google Cloud's Director of Product Management for AI Agents noted that enterprises are struggling with agent adoption due to concerns about quality and trust. He emphasized that a common mistake is limiting agents to chat interfaces instead of leveraging them for autonomous background tasks.
• UK bank NatWest implemented an agentic AI platform that reduced its campaign launch time from 100 days to just one day, cutting staffing needs by 90%.

Model Wars & Open Source Advances

• China is making significant strides in open-source AI, with Chinese models now accounting for 17.1% of global downloads, surpassing the U.S. The country's generative AI user base has reached 570 million.
• Chinese startup Z.ai released GLM-4.7, a new open-source model that has topped benchmarks for coding with a 73.8% score on SWE-bench. The company is reportedly heading for a Hong Kong IPO.
• OpenAI CEO Sam Altman stated that the key breakthrough for achieving AGI is not better reasoning but developing perfect memory. He confirmed OpenAI aims to make significant progress on this by 2026.

Market & Investment

• AI avatar startup Lemon Slice raised $10.5 million in a seed round to develop its photo-to-video avatar technology.
• UK startup Electric Twin secured $9 million from Atomico to expand its AI platform that simulates focus groups, claiming 91% parity with traditional polling.
• India's startup ecosystem raised nearly $11 billion in 2025, with AI startups accounting for $643 million of the total.

AI in Society: Regulation & Culture

• China has proposed draft regulations to govern AI systems that mimic human personalities and emotions. The rules would require providers to monitor users for signs of addiction or distress and intervene if necessary.
• The rise of AI influencers is blurring the lines between real and virtual personas, while a new study found that over 21% of YouTube content is now low-quality, AI-generated "slop".
• OpenAI is hiring a "Head of Preparedness" for a salary of $555,000 plus equity to lead efforts in mitigating catastrophic AI risks.

Robotics & Physical AI

• Chinese firm AgiBot launched a humanoid robot rental platform, with daily rates ranging from $138 to $1,380.
• In a world-first, a humanoid robot from Chinese startup TARS successfully threaded a needle and performed two-handed embroidery.
• The White House has effectively banned new models of foreign-made drones, a move that heavily impacts market leader DJI.