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- 🔥 Welcome to AI 2026
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OpenAI wants AI off your screen… and into your hand. China’s AI labs are quietly closing the cost gap. And ChatGPT ads? They might be sneaking straight into answers.
We’re back in 2026. AI didn’t slow down for the holidays.
What's on FIRE 🔥
IN PARTNERSHIP WITH COACTIVE
Media Leaders on AI: Insights from Disney, ESPN, Forrester Research
The explosion of visual content is almost unbelievable, and creative, marketing, and ad teams are struggling to keep up. Content workflows are slowing down, and teams can't find the right assets quickly enough.
The crucial question is: How can you still win with the influx of content and keep pace with demand?
Find out on Jan 14, 2026, at 10am PT/1pm ET as industry leaders—including Phyllis Davidson, VP Principal Analyst at Forrester Research, and former media executive Oke Okaro as they draw on their deep media research and experience from ESPN, Disney, Reuters, and beyond.
In the webinar, "The Future of Content Workflows: How AI is Powering the Next Wave," you’ll learn:
The forces reshaping content operations
Where current systems are falling short
How leading organizations are using multimodal AI to extend their platforms
What deeper image and video understanding unlocks for monetization
Get clear insight and actionable perspective from the leaders who built and transformed top media and entertainment organizations.
AI INSIGHTS
🖊️ OpenAI Is Building Its First AI Devices - Not Phones
Right now, AI lives on screens. Phones. Laptops. Text boxes.
Even “screenless” gadgets still push you back to an app.
OpenAI wants to change that.
Leaks point to screenless, audio-first AI hardware. Two devices.
Built with Jony Ive
Turns handwritten notes into ChatGPT
Lets you talk to AI while you write
Designed as a third core device, next to phone + laptop
OpenAI bought Ive’s startup io for ~$6.5B in May 2025. Manufacturing is handled by Foxconn in Vietnam, not China.
Pocket-sized, voice-first
Not earbuds. Not a wearable.
A new form factor built for conversation
The big change: audio rebuilt from scratch. Led by Kundan Kumar (ex-Character.AI).
What improves:
More natural speech
Faster replies
Real-time interruptions
Accuracy close to text models
Target launch: Q1 2026.
Why it matters: After failures like Humane AI Pin and Rabbit R1, OpenAI isn’t replacing your phone. They’re betting on clear use cases. Calm devices. Voice over typing. The message is simple: AI’s next step isn’t another app. It’s getting off the screen.
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AI SOURCES FROM AI FIRE
1, AI Generalist in 2026: Copy this 4-week plan to do the work of 10. Learn the 4 Powers (Automate, Build, Create, Connect) using GPT + Gemini, no coding needed.
2, The 3C Protocol: One unfair way to learn faster than 90%. Use Compress → Compile → Consolidate to stop forgetting, study less, and lock skills in with micro-breaks + deep rest.
FIRE RECAP: BIGGEST AI NEWS THIS WEEK
🧠 Sam Altman is hiring a Head of Preparedness at OpenAI, offering $555,000 plus equity to manage growing AI safety risks. The role is high-stress with frequent turnover.
📢 OpenAI may reintroduce ChatGPT ads, placing sponsored content directly inside answers for shopping or service queries.
💸 The rising cost of AI slop could force a 2026 reset, as AI revenues lag far behind massive investment and infrastructure spending.
🧩 Google’s December AI recap highlights Gemini 3 Flash, new verification tools, Gemini API updates, and wider rollout across Search, Translate, and YouTube.
TODAY IN AI
AI HIGHLIGHTS
🧑💻 Chinese AI lab IQuest Labs just released IQuest-Coder-V1, claiming it beats Claude Sonnet 4.5 and GPT-5.1 on coding benchmarks, with strong real-world performance.
🏆 LMArena’s 2025 rankings put Gemini 3 Pro on top for text, vision, and search, while Google’s Veo 3.1 led video benchmarks.
📉 Similarweb shows ChatGPT’s genAI traffic share just fell below 70%, as Gemini nears 18% and Grok keeps gaining. The gap is closing fast.
⚠️ Reports say OpenAI tested ChatGPT ads inside answers, blending sponsored content with recommendations. With 900M weekly users, trust and discovery could shift.
⏳ The AI Futures Project now predicts full coding automation in 2031–2032, pushing timelines back 3–4 years from its AI 2027 forecast.
💰 AI Daily Fundraising: China’s Moonshot AI has raised $500M in a Series C round, pushing its valuation to $4.3B. The round was led by IDG Capital, with Alibaba and Tencent joining. The Kimi AI maker now holds about $1.4B in cash and says it’s in no rush to IPO.
NEW EMPOWERED AI TOOLS
🧭 Surgeflow automates browser tasks with one command, letting you review the plan and watch it run.
🎙️ Typeless turns natural speech into polished writing, adapting tone, fixing grammar, and keeping context.
🤝 ConnectMachine is a private AI networking agent, managing contacts with voice or text queries.
🌐 Firecrawl converts entire websites into LLM-ready data, exporting clean markdown or structured outputs.
AI BREAKTHROUGH
DeepSeek just released new research that points to cheaper and more stable AI models ahead. The paper introduces mHC, a new neural network structure that improves training stability with very little extra compute.
Key takeaways:
Tested on 3B, 9B, and 27B models
Outperforms existing methods, especially on reasoning tasks
Designed to scale without driving up costs
Notably, Liang Wenfeng personally co-authored and uploaded the paper to arXiv, showing direct involvement from leadership.
Why it matters: Last year, DeepSeek surprised the field with R1 reaching near-frontier performance at much lower cost. This paper suggests they’re not done finding efficiency gains. 2026 is shaping up to be far more competitive, especially from China-based labs
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The AI Fire Team
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