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- 🐒 Welcome to YouSlop 2026
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How AI junk is floodMing YouTube, why it still makes millions, and what it says about where the internet is heading in 2026? Happy New Year each of our 70K friends 💌
What's on FIRE 🔥
IN PARTNERSHIP WITH MASTERWORKS
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AI INSIGHTS
AI Slop Report: The Global Rise of Low-Quality AI Videos
New research from Kapwing shows that over 1 in 5 videos shown to fresh YouTube accounts are low-effort, AI-generated content, what we call “AI slop”. Here’s how they tested it:
Kapwing made a new YouTube account to see what the algo recommends
Out of the first 500 videos, 21% were flagged as “AI slop”
Low-quality, fully auto-generated videos made to farm views
The top “slop” channels are making bank. Bandar Apna Dost (India) - a creepy cartoon monkey with 2B+ views and estimated $4.25M/year in ad revenue. It’s not just India:
S. Korea led slop viewership with 8.45B views
USA: 3.39B. Spain-based channels gained the most subscribers
AI slop was just algorithm bait, yet many people still love it. Or maybe they’re not noticing, or they just don’t care or maybe, “they” are not even human?
This supports the Dead Internet Theory, the idea that bots and low-effort AI content are increasingly dominating the web. Now it’s hitting YouTube, at scale.
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If you’re looking to have a breakthrough year, beehiiv is the place to start. And to help motivate you even more, we’re giving you 30% off for three months with code BIG30.
AI SOURCES FROM AI FIRE
1. One unfair way to learn faster than 90% with 3C protocol that scares most professors. Use this to compress, compile, and consolidate skills faster than you thought possible
2. How to make 2026 the best year of your life with GPT/Gemini. Forget complex tech stacks. Here’s how you can automate & build anything without coding
TODAY IN AI
🔬 GPT-5.2 Pro just amazed everyone by scoring 29.2% on one of the toughest math challenges. It's truly a big win for OpenAI. Here’s the live ranking if you wanna track.
🎁 Bonus, here're 10 Mega Prompts to make you outsmart every other OpenAI user & get perfect research and plans. This is the unfair advantage you need for your work.
🕵️ 2 Chrome extensions were exposed for stealing ChatGPT & DeepSeek data from 900K+ users & sending them to attackers. One was even "Featured" by Google!? Check & uninstall them ASAP guys.
✨ Google's Opal is now inside Gemini (one of the easiest no-code AI we've tried). You can create any mini-app you can imagine in minutes. Try it in Gemini now.
💰 Big AI Investment: SoftBank finished a $41B investment in OpenAI, taking ~11% ownership. They’re going all‑in on AI as OpenAI’s valuation hits $300B–$500B.
NEW YEAR, NEW WAY OF COMMUNICATE
🎉 Quick Note Before You Scroll…
We’re off tomorrow for New Year’s Eve (finally), so here’s an early Happy New Year from the whole AI Fire team 🥂, thank you for riding with us through all of 2025.
But before you disappear into party mode, we need your help shaping AI Fire in 2026, we’re down to bribe you for it.
No boring “5-minute, 20-question” survey. Nobody wants that right? Instead, below you’ll see a mix of news, insider takes,… → Please just click on what you actually like.
And if nothing feels right today? Vote in the poll and leave a quick comment. Thank you, not just for clicking, but for caring. Happy New Year everyone 💘💘
How Do You Rate Today's Newsletter? Drop Your Needs!Your feedback helps us create the best newsletter possible |
Yeah, not “new year, new me”, it’s New Year, New Machine. We built a full New Year 2026 Toolkit to help you start strong:
Clone your face for hyper-real AI greeting videos
Animate your favorite icons (yes, even Musk and Trump)
Dig up hidden coupons with GPT 5.2 + Perplexity
And prep for the future with books, strategies, and survival workflows
If you made it this far, and felt even a tiny spark of inspiration, or maybe just smiled at the thought of partying with Musk and Trump in AI form…
💞 Drop a quick comment inside the post to say congrats to Neil, who wrotes all that. Why not making another’s New Year a little better 🥂
NEW EMPOWERED AI TOOLS
🤖 NVIDIA Nemotron 3 gives you open models & everything you need to build custom multi-step agents
📣 Influcio finds the best influencers, runs campaigns end-to-end, manages them & uses performance data to optimize every next launch
📊 HowTheyMakeMoney compares companies (Apple, Google,…) to spot trends & get full picture
AI BREAKTHROUGH
Self-taught coding agents? That’s where we’re headed. Meta’s AI research team (FAIR) dropped a new method called Self-play SWE-RL, and it’s a pretty wild shift in how we train AI devs.
Instead of feeding models human GitHub data, they just let the AI create and solve its own bugs over and over. Here’s how it works: You take one model & give it 2 jobs:
Bug injector – it breaks working code
Solver – it tries to fix what it broke
And, it’ll learn from its own failed fixes. Meta calls these “higher-order bugs,” and they make the AI smarter every time it messes up.
On the SWE-bench Verified benchmark (a standard test for coding agents), it improved by 10+ points, and beat models trained on real GitHub issue data.
It's early. But if this scales like AlphaZero did in games, we might see a new breed of coding agent emerge: One that just improves itself nonstop.
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The AI Fire Team
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