Artificial Intelligence

Jan 23, 2026

Google is connecting Gmail and Google Photos to its AI-powered search. Subscribers to Google AI Pro and Ultra in the US can now opt in to share their emails and photos for personalized search results.

The system reads hotel confirmations and analyzes vacation photos to suggest relevant restaurants or activities. For shopping queries, search results factor in brands you've purchased and your travel dates.

The feature, called "Personal Intelligence," is already available in Gemini and runs on the Gemini 3 model. It's opt-in only and Google acknowledges the system can make mistakes. Workspace business and education accounts are excluded entirely.

Comment Source: Google

Maximilian Schreiner

Jan 23, 2026

Short News

OpenAI's API business is growing rapidly, with CEO Sam Altman reporting that the company added over $1 billion in annual recurring revenue in just the last month.

OpenAI hit an ARR of over $20 billion by the end of 2025 - up from $6 billion in 2024 and $2 billion in 2023. ARR (Annual Recurring Revenue) represents the annualized value of recurring revenue from active subscriptions and contracts, typically excluding one-time payments.

The API growth Altman announced on X - roughly $1 billion in ARR in a single month - represents about five percent of the company's total ARR. That said, this figure reflects additional growth, not the API's share of overall revenue. How much of OpenAI's total ARR comes from API customers remains unclear.

On the other side of the ledger, OpenAI faces commitments of around $1.4 trillion for computing power over the coming years. To help cover these costs, the company is preparing to introduce ads in ChatGPT - despite Altman calling advertising a "last resort" just two years ago. The ads will initially roll out for free users and those on the new ChatGPT Go subscription tier.

Comment Source: Business Insider

Matthias Bastian

Jan 22, 2026

AI and society

OpenAI CMO responds to "Woke AI" accusations by citing co-founder Brockman's $25 million MAGA donation

OpenAI’s head of marketing is pushing back against accusations that the company is “Woke AI,” pointing to $25 million in MAGA donations from co-founder Greg Brockman – and to her own marriage to a cattle rancher. The trigger: a new hire with Democratic ties.

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Matthias Bastian

Jan 22, 2026

Short News

Elon Musk's AI chatbot Grok generated at least 1.8 million sexualized images of women and posted them on X over just nine days. That's according to the New York Times and the Center for Countering Digital Hate (CCDH), which conducted a data analysis. The CCDH estimates that roughly 65 percent of the images contained sexualized depictions of men, women, or children.

	Count in sample Out of 20,000 sampled (based on AI-assisted analysis)	Share of sample Percentage of 20,000 sampled (based on AI-assisted analysis)	Estimated Total on X Extrapolated estimate (based on overall total of 4.6m images made by Grok)
Sexualized Images (Adults & Children)	12,995	65%	3,002,712
Sexualized Images (Likely Children)	101	0.5%	23,338

The flood of images started on December 31 after Musk shared a bikini picture of himself that Grok had created. Users quickly figured out they could ask the chatbot to undress or sexualize real photos of women and children. X didn't restrict the feature until January 8 and expanded those restrictions last week after authorities in the UK, India, Malaysia, and the US launched investigations.

Comment Source: New York Times | CCDH

Matthias Bastian

Jan 22, 2026

AI in practice

OpenAI's former top researcher says Google caught up because OpenAI stumbled

Maximilian Schreiner

Jan 22, 2026

AI and society

Over 100 fake citations slip through peer review at top AI conference

An analysis of nearly 5,000 accepted research papers from the AI conference NeurIPS 2025 uncovered more than 100 fabricated citations – despite review by multiple experts.

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Jonathan Kemper

Jan 22, 2026

Short News

Baidu's new AI model Ernie 5.0, which processes text, images, audio, and video in a unified architecture, is now officially available. According to the LMArena ranking from January 15, 2026, Ernie-5.0-0110 scored 1,460 points, placing 8th globally and 1st among all Chinese models. That puts it on par with OpenAI's slightly older GPT-5.1 (High) and ahead of both Google's Gemini 2.5 Pro and Anthropic's Claude Sonnet 4.5. The next best Chinese model is GLM-4.7 from Zhipu AI. In the math category, Ernie 5.0 came in second worldwide, trailing only GPT 5.2 (High).

LM-Arena-Ranking: Baidu Ernie-5.0-0110 belegt Platz 8 mit 1460 Punkten in Textbenchmarks der Top 10. — The LMArena ranking is determined from numerous anonymous pair comparisons in which users choose the better model answer.

Under the hood, the model uses a mixture-of-experts architecture with around 2.4 trillion parameters - but less than 3 percent of those are active for any given query. For now, the model is only available at ernie.baidu.com. Unlike previous releases, Baidu hasn't published any weights yet, and there's no technical report or detailed documentation available. The company's most recent open release was Ernie-4.5-VL-28B-A3B-Thinking, a model that can manipulate images during its reasoning process - for example, zooming in on text to read it more clearly.

Comment Source: Baidu via X

Maximilian Schreiner

Jan 22, 2026

AI in practice

Apple developing AI pin to compete with OpenAI and Meta

Maximilian Schreiner

Jan 22, 2026

AI research

Cursor's agent swarm tackles one of software's hardest problems and delivers a working browser

Building a web browser from scratch is considered one of the most complex software projects imaginable. All the more remarkable: Cursor set hundreds of autonomously working AI agents to exactly this task and after nearly a week produced a working browser with its own rendering engine.

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Matthias Bastian

Jan 21, 2026

Short News

Meta Superintelligence Labs has completed its first internal AI models, Chief Technology Officer Andrew Bosworth revealed at the World Economic Forum in Davos. Speaking with Reuters, Bosworth said the models are "very good," but there's still "a tremendous amount of work to do post-training." He didn't share specifics about what the models can do.

Meta is reportedly developing a text model codenamed "Avocado" and an image and video model called "Mango." The new lab came after CEO Mark Zuckerberg restructured Meta's AI leadership following criticism of the company's Llama 4 model. Bosworth called 2025 a "tremendously chaotic year" for building out the new training infrastructure.

At an Axios event, Bosworth shared his broader take on AI development. He noted that for everyday queries, the improvements between model generations—like GPT-4 to GPT-5—are getting smaller. Specialized applications like legal analysis, health diagnostics, and personalization, however, continue to see significant gains. That's why he believes the industry's massive AI investments will pay off eventually.

Comment Source: Reuters | Axios