Gemini 3.1 Pro and Sonnet 4.6 land inside a week, Alibaba slips Qwen3.5 out hours before Lunar New Year, the EU stretches its AI Act timeline, and Baker McKenzie cuts 600-1,000 attorneys citing AI. The cadence is compressed; white-collar is now in scope.
Delhi hosts the first Global South AI summit, Chinese labs race to ship before Lunar New Year, OpenAI quietly retires GPT-4o and GPT-5 from ChatGPT, the Microsoft-OpenAI-AWS triangle gets rewired, and Block crosses the half-the-workforce mark on AI-cited cuts.
Super Bowl week. Anthropic ships Opus 4.6 with agent teams and takes a swing at OpenAI on national TV. Mistral pushes Voxtral and closes the open-weights audio gap. Block cuts headcount nearly in half. SB 53 is officially live and the first frontier safety frameworks are in the wild.
Post-Davos week. The China open-weights flywheel is the most consistent shipping story in AI right now. Kimi K2.5, Qwen wired into Taobao, Tencent dropping cash for Lunar New Year. Plus Yahoo Scout on Claude, three different bets on agentic commerce, and the AI-cited layoff playbook hardening.
Davos week. Amodei calls chip exports to China selling-nukes-to-North-Korea. Nadella warns the AI bubble is real if adoption stays inside big tech. Musk promises AGI by year-end. The labor displacement story hardens, and the pace is the part to watch.
OpenAI flips the switch on ChatGPT ads, the DOJ's AI Litigation Task Force stands up to challenge state laws, xAI closes a $20B Series E, and the Q1 layoff wave starts taking shape. Davos opens Monday. What I make of the week.
CES 2026 week. NVIDIA unveils Rubin and the DGX Spark/Station desktop AI line, AMD ships Ryzen AI 400 with a 60-TOPS NPU, Qualcomm pushes Snapdragon X2 to 80 TOPS, Samsung wires Bixby and Alexa+ into every appliance, and Mercedes ships Nvidia-powered L2 in the CLA. My take.
The bridge week. SB 53 went live on January 1, the year-end retrospectives all said roughly the same thing about 2025, the 2026 prediction pieces from Sequoia and a16z dropped with surprisingly compatible takes, and CES 2026 is sitting on Tuesday's runway. What I make of the turn of the year.
Christmas week, so most of the news is the year itself sitting up and asking to be summarized. Nvidia buys Groq for $20B in the largest deal in company history, Z.ai ships GLM-4.7 as the new top open coding model, and the Challenger AI-layoffs number lands at 54,836. A partial year-end take.
The week the model arms race went thermonuclear: GPT-5.2 lands as the answer to a 'code red' memo, Google ships Gemini 3 Flash three days later, NVIDIA drops Nemotron 3 as open weights. Meanwhile Trump signs an EO to preempt state AI laws and Accenture's AI-driven RIF crosses 11,000.
Trump signs an executive order to preempt state AI laws. OpenAI rushes GPT-5.2 out under a self-declared code red. Disney puts a billion into OpenAI and licenses 200 characters into Sora. Accenture pledges 30,000 Claude practitioners. The week the AI story stopped being about models.
AWS re:Invent dominates with Trainium3, Nova 2, and AgentCore. Mistral 3 lands as the open-weight counter. OpenAI's leaked 'code red' memo reframes the Gemini 3 fallout. And the Challenger layoff numbers land, the displacement is real, the pace is the issue.
