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- 🥊 Beijing Investigates Meta's Deal
🥊 Beijing Investigates Meta's Deal
DIAMOND Club Only: 4 Private Deals Available!
Wendy
January 06, 2026
In partnership with
2 billion dollars. One AI startup. And now China’s watching. We’ll also cover Alibaba’s AI, which just flagged pancreatic cancer cases, even human doctors missed.
What's on FIRE 🔥
IN PARTNERSHIP WITH BELAY
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AI INSIGHTS
Meta acquired Manus, an AI assistant startup, for $2 billion last week. Manus used to be based in Beijing, so this is actually a rare move where U.S.–China tech tensions are running red hot.
Manus attracted early heat from U.S. lawmakers as Benchmark (a U.S. firm) investment triggered noise. New rules were tightening around U.S. money flowing into Chinese AI.
→ So they moved: Beijing → Singapore. People are calling it Singapore-washing. Then:
Meta saw Manus as a way to fast-track their AI roadmap: No need to build an agent stack from scratch, just buy one that works
Chinese regulators are investigating whether the deal violates tech export controls. They ask:
Did Manus export restricted AI tech when it moved to Singapore?
Did it need an export license when it relocated key infrastructure?
Why the sudden concern? Because this could become a playbook for other Chinese AI startups: Build something powerful → relocate quietly → get acquired by a U.S. giant. Beijing does not want this becoming a trend.
China’s playbook isn’t new. They used export controls to block Trump’s attempted TikTok ban a few years ago. Some in Washington are celebrating this moment: “the U.S. AI ecosystem is more attractive.”
PRESENTED BY THE MARKETING MILLENNIALS
The best marketing ideas come from marketers who live it.
That’s what this newsletter delivers.
The Marketing Millennials is a look inside what’s working right now for other marketers. No theory. No fluff. Just real insights and ideas you can actually use—from marketers who’ve been there, done that, and are sharing the playbook.
Every newsletter is written by Daniel Murray, a marketer obsessed with what goes into great marketing. Expect fresh takes, hot topics, and the kind of stuff you’ll want to steal for your next campaign.
Because marketing shouldn’t feel like guesswork. And you shouldn’t have to dig for the good stuff.
AI SOURCES FROM AI FIRE
1. n8n Chat Hub guide: How to turn messy workflows into one clean control center. It lets you talk to your automations and fix issues in real time so easily
2. 10 Prompt Rules to make any AI outputs 10x better: For Claude/ GPT/ Gemini. Here are the rules Anthropic offers, plus how I use them in real work
3. Gemini 3 Flash: Super cheap model yet outperforms "Pro" in practice!? You’ll know exactly when to use Gem3 Flash, Pro, Thinking or switch to GPT-5.2
4. Simple 5-input method to make Nano Banana Pro outputs look truly professional. No complex prompts. You just need to answer 5 simple questions
PREMIUM DEALS #1 FOR PRO CLUB
So this is the thing we’ve been hinting at for a while. And today, we’re finally doing it. Every Wednesday, PRO, Annual, and Lifetime members get a private drop, with real deals you can actually use.
These are not public offers. You won’t find them on Google. Free tier won’t see them. We only share the ones that are worth your time.
Some of these are startup perks. Some are hidden lifetime pages. Some are upgrades for tools you’re already using but paying full price for.
That’s it for today. If you’re PRO, you already see the deals. Grab what you need before they expire. If you’re still on the free tier, please join the AI Fire PRO club to see all.
If you’ve got tools you’ve been eyeing, or stuff you’re already paying for but wish you had a better deal on, just tell me inside the deal page.
No promises, but if enough of you ask for it, I’ll go get it. Let’s build the deal list you actually want.
TODAY IN AI
AI HIGHLIGHTS
🤯 A Google Principal Engineer said Claude Code compressed a year’s worth of his work into just 1 hour. Whether to believe it or not, that post already hit 8.2M views.
🗺️ OpenAI's CPO Fidji Simo wants to turn ChatGPT into a "personal super-assistant" that helps proactively for 2026. Here's its latest roadmap if you want to take a look.
👨💻 Claude Code's own creator shared how he actually uses the tool, including running up to 15 parallel sessions at once. Seriously impressive. Read his ultimate guide here.
🚀 xAI is looking aggressively for people ready to join small teams with big ambitions. Anyone interested can apply today at x.ai/careers (remote options available)
🧠 Amazon launched Alexa+, a family-first web chatbot at CES 2026. It controls your home, updates calendar & Free during Early Access. Try using it & see the result here.
🚨 TikTok scammers are using AI to fake Princess Leonor on TikTok, offering fake cash rewards. Some hit 1M+ views already. If you see one of these videos, just ignore.
💰 Big AI Fundraising: xAI closed a massive $20B Series E. The round includes NVIDIA and Cisco, who are helping xAI scale the largest GPU clusters in the world.
NEW EMPOWERED AI TOOLS
⚒ Gobii deploys your proven digital worker, it does your online work automatically, 24/7
📃 Kael organizes research in a workspace, explores connections across multiple sources & gives clear, presentation-ready slides
🏠 Amazon’s Alexa controls your smart home in the same window at your fingertips
📱 Google Edge Gallery lets you try AI models directly on your iPhone, so you can chat, use images, even ask with audio
💪 2-b.ai combines the structure of a task manager (like Todoist) with the brain of ChatGPT inside your browser
AI BREAKTHROUGH
A Chinese hospital just confirmed that Alibaba’s PANDA AI tool has analyzed 180,000+ CT scans since November 2024. Pancreatic cancer is often called the "king of cancers" because:
It has a 5-year survival rate below 10%
80% of cases are found too late
It’s nearly impossible to catch early using regular scans
Using non-contrast CT scans + AI, Alibaba’s Academy and over a dozen hospitals created the first-ever screening method for early pancreatic cancer:
In trials with 20,000+ patients, PANDA found 31 missed lesions
2 early-stage patients got surgery and were cured
Sensitivity: 92.9%
Specificity: 99.9%
The best part is that it only produced 1 false positive in every 1,000 cases. Since deployment, it’s already been used 500,000+ times in hospitals and physical checkups. Doctors initially missed some of those cases. PANDA didn’t.
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The AI Fire Team
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