- AI Fire
- Posts
- 🚗 Nvidia Hotwired Your Car’s Brain
In partnership with
A Chinese AI startup just had one of the biggest IPO pops in years. Then, automakers are hyping up “Physical AI” like it’s the second coming of Tesla Autopilot.
What's on FIRE 🔥
IN PARTNERSHIP WITH GLADLY AI
The CX platform redefining AI’s next decade
In customer experience, cost savings don’t mean much if loyalty declines.
Gladly helps brands achieve both—maximizing efficiency and lifetime value.
With 240M+ conversations powered and $510M in cost savings delivered, Gladly has the evidence that customer engagement, not deflection, drives stronger economics. Our unified architecture and context-aware AI enable brands to serve customers faster, more personally, and with higher satisfaction—without compromising long-term profitability.
Explore the awards, research, and momentum behind this shift in our Media Kit.
AI INSIGHTS
At CES this year, “Physical AI” is the marketing term automakers and chip giants are rallying around. It’s not just about robots anymore, now we see carsvvv that think, reason, and act in the real world.
The Afeela EV (Sony + Honda), Nvidia’s car partnerships, and Ford’s new hands-free system are all early signs:
Sony + Honda’s Afeela EV aims for full autonomous driving with sensors and a “Physical AI” system to understand its surroundings and make decisions
Ford’s 2028 promises cars that don’t need your eyes on the road
Nvidia’s supplying chips for Geely, Mercedes, and more. ARM announced a full focus on chips for these types of intelligent physical systems
Mercedes says its new system will drive users between home and work
Every autonomous feature needs more compute, more memory, more sensors, more AI. Chipmakers see a big future in these vehicles so they love “Physical AI.” Nvidia, ARM, and others are already selling into this growing stack.
"Physical AI" is a rebrand. It makes traditional robotics and autonomous systems sound new again. Everyone wants to own the “OS” of autonomous things.
PRESENTED BY I HATE IT HERE
The best HR advice comes from those in the trenches. That’s what this is: real-world HR insights delivered in a newsletter from Hebba Youssef, a Chief People Officer who’s been there. Practical, real strategies with a dash of humor. Because HR shouldn’t be thankless—and you shouldn’t be alone in it.
AI SOURCES FROM AI FIRE
1. How to design high-converting landing pages to win the 3-second attention. How to fix your layout so people actually stay and pay, zero tech skills
2. The ONLY skill that lets you stay in control when AI automates almost everything. Here’s your secret weapon to dominate the next decade of AI disruption
3. Proven zero-guessing framework to build what people will actually pay for. This is how we test ideas fast before wasting months building the wrong thing
TODAY IN AI
AI HIGHLIGHTS
🍅 Can Claude grow? Yes, it has successfully kept a a real plant alive. Not perfect, but Claude adapted & recovered. Here’s the thread to follow the journey & the real-time webcam of watch its conditions.
⚒ If you've never written code before, this course is for you. In less than 30 mins, you'll learn to describe an idea for an app & build it with AI (zero coding skills needed)
🗺️ This Situation Monitor is a live map tracking global conflicts, nuclear facilities, military bases, and even Pentagon Pizza Index. It’s free to watch, take a look here.
🛒 Microsoft's new Copilot Checkout just joins a growing list of AI shopping agents: OpenAI, Perplexity, Gemini,... It can now buy stuff for you. See how it works here.
👨💻 Elon Musk teased a "major upgrade" for Grok Code in February. He claims it can "one-shot" complex tasks. We'll test it & see how it stacks up against Claude Code.
🚫 X also restricted Grok's image generation to paying users only after huge backlash over AI non-consensual nudes images. A paywall isn't a safeguard, but here we are.
💰 Big AI Investment: OpenAI & SoftBank are putting $1B into SB Energy to help build new AI data centers. It’ll support the huge $500B Stargate expansion.
HOT PAPERS OF THE WEEK
🗂️ New AI paper proposes managing context like a file system. Every memory, tool, and note becomes a “file” with logs, updates & provenance
🧠 Prime Intellect launched a new recursive memory framework. Instead of bloated prompts, LLMs slice data with sub-LLMs to stay lean across tasks
🛠️ DeepCode on GitHub turns research papers into full codebases using a multi-agent system with parsing, and built-in test generation
📽️ Alibaba released Qwen3‑VL, a multi-modal model that ranks text, image, and video in one shared space. It’s the strongest MMEB‑v2 results to date
🧬 MIT and Sakana AI ran Core War battles with AI that mutates and learns through self-play, showing early signs of emergent strategy
NEW EMPOWERED AI TOOLS
📧 Gmail in the Gemini Era gets summaries, drafts, & more by asking your inbox anything
🧾 Awesome Gemini Prompts is a dedicated prompt library for Gemini with 1,800+ prompts. It's completely free
🔍 SEORCE sees where your brand is discovered across search and AI and fix what blocks it
📚 Chirpz Agent searches 280M+ papers, ranks the most relevant work, generates summaries & provides trusted citations
🎯 Muze AI reates, runs, and optimizes Meta and Google performance ads end to end
🦉 Owl Browser includes 104 automation tools, AI-powered natural language commands,…
AI BREAKTHROUGH
MiniMax, a Chinese AI company barely two years old, just pulled off one of the most remarkable IPOs in recent memory.
Listed today on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange, it raised $619M, hit a $12.8B valuation, and saw its shares surge over 100% on Day 1. The IPO was 1,837× oversubscribed.
They’re building apps on top of foundation models that people actually use.
Talkie: A consumer-facing AI character app (think emotional AI companions)
Hailuo AI: A GenAI video creation tool aimed at creators
Behind the scenes, MiniMax has been shipping top-ranking open-source models across text, audio, video, music, and images. Their models consistently rank near the top in industry benchmarks.
AI is the theme for 2026, and MiniMax hit the market early with momentum. And not just any public market, Hong Kong, which hasn’t seen a tech IPO pop like this in 4 years. This IPO means a lot.
Consumer AI is king right now. It’s not enough to just train big models. You need end-user apps that people actually want. MiniMax mastered the formula, and public markets rewarded them for it.
We read your emails, comments, and poll replies daily
How would you rate today’s newsletter?Your feedback helps us create the best newsletter possible |
Hit reply and say Hello – we'd love to hear from you!
Like what you're reading? Forward it to friends, and they can sign up here.
Cheers,
The AI Fire Team
Reply