Good morning. It's Friday, January 16, and we're covering Taiwan’s $250B US investment, key Thinking Machines Lab departures, Gemini in Gmail, and more. First time reading? Join a community of 600k+ people keeping up with the future of tech. Sign up here.
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💰️ Taiwan to Invest $250B in U.S. Chip Manufacturing
Taiwan has agreed to invest $250 billion into U.S. semiconductor, energy, and AI production, with another $250 billion in credit guarantees. In exchange, the U.S. will lower tariffs on Taiwanese goods and increase investment in Taiwan’s tech and defense sectors. The deal aims to reduce U.S. reliance on foreign chipmakers and deepen bilateral tech ties amid tensions with China.
💸 OpenAI Backs Altman’s Brain Interface Startup
OpenAI invested in Merge Labs, a brain–computer interface startup founded by CEO Sam Altman, leading its $250M seed round at an $850M valuation. Merge Labs aims to connect brains and AI noninvasively using molecules and ultrasound instead of implanted electrodes. OpenAI said BCIs could enable more natural interaction with AI.
↩️ Murati Startup Loses Founders To OpenAI
Thinking Machines Lab, founded by former OpenAI CTO Mira Murati, is losing two co-founders as Barret Zoph and Luke Metz return to OpenAI. Another early employee, Sam Schoenholz, is also rejoining the company. Murati announced Zoph’s exit and named Soumith Chintala as the new CTO, without addressing the other departures. The moves follow a $2B seed round valuing the startup at $12B.
✨ OpenAI Unveils Open Responses Standard
OpenAI introduced Open Responses, an open-source specification for building interoperable, multi-provider LLM interfaces. The standard is designed to support real-world, agentic workflows without forcing developers to rewrite their stacks. Early adopters include Hugging Face contributors, with the standard aiming to reduce lock-in while preserving advanced features across providers.
🤔 FRIDAY FACTS
Is Google Maps Secretly Using Time Travel?
Every time you check directions, your phone relies on a 100-year-old physics theory most people associate with sci-fi movies.
Answer below 👇
🪧 POWERED BY ADOBE
Adobe Brought Popular Apps Into ChatGPT for Free
Adobe is bringing three of its industry-leading apps — Adobe Photoshop, Adobe Express, and Adobe Acrobat — directly into ChatGPT.
With Adobe apps for ChatGPT, anyone can edit photos, create designs, and transform PDFs in the most intuitive way possible: using their words inside the chat.
Adobe apps for ChatGPT expands Adobe’s reach to one of the world’s most popular conversational AI platforms with over 800 million weekly users, introducing Adobe’s category-defining tools to people who may not have used Adobe’s apps before — through a surface they already use every day.
📺️ FORWARD FUTURE LIVE
Today on Forward Future Live
📽️ VIDEO
Altman v Musk AI War Exposed
Unsealed lawsuit documents reveal behind-the-scenes emails, texts, and drama between Elon Musk, Sam Altman, OpenAI, and Microsoft.
🏗️ INFRASTRUCTURE
Tech Industry Questions Whether Smaller, Local Data Centers Can Replace Giants
Technology leaders are increasingly questioning whether the future of computing requires ever-larger data centers, or many smaller ones closer to users. Aravind Srinivas, CEO of Perplexity, argues that powerful AI tools could eventually run directly on personal devices, reducing reliance on remote facilities.
While companies such as Apple and Microsoft already deploy limited on-device AI, most advanced systems still depend on vast, energy-hungry data centers. The debate comes as investment in large facilities accelerates, even as environmental, cost, and resilience concerns grow. → Read the full article here.
📩 AI INBOX
Google Adds Gemini AI to Gmail, Boosting Productivity and Privacy Concerns
Google has begun rolling out Gemini-powered AI features inside Gmail, introducing natural-language email search, auto-generated replies, and an upcoming AI Inbox that summarizes conversations into task-oriented to-do lists. The update represents one of the most significant shifts in email in decades, recasting inboxes from chronological message streams into dynamic dashboards designed to surface priorities and next actions.
Many of the new features, including suggested replies, thread summaries, and the “Help Me Write” button, are now free and enabled by default, while more advanced search capabilities require a $20-per-month subscription. Google says Gemini can analyze inboxes without human review and that Gmail data is not used to train its AI, though some interactions may still be disclosed under legal warrants.
🩻 MEDICINE
Google Updates MedGemma With Stronger Medical Imaging, Launches MedASR
Google released MedGemma 1.5, an updated open medical AI model with significantly improved support for high-dimensional medical imaging, alongside MedASR, a new open medical speech-to-text model. The updates expand MedGemma’s capabilities across CT scans, MRI, histopathology, longitudinal imaging, and medical document extraction. → Read the full article here.
🛰️ NEWS
What Else is Happening
🔠 ChatGPT Translate Takes on Google: OpenAI launched a standalone translation tool with 50+ languages and style controls, directly challenging Google Translate’s long-held dominance.
📈 TSMC Posts Record AI Quarter: Taiwan’s chip giant beat estimates as profit jumped 35% on surging AI demand, with advanced chips driving 77% of wafer revenue and fueling a bullish 2026.
💲 Self-Help Goes Subscription AI (Paywall): Fans pay up to $99 monthly to chat with AI versions of gurus like Tony Robbins, showing how advice brands are turning into chatbot businesses.
🎭 X Curbs Grok Deepfake Abuse: After backlash and regulatory pressure, X said Grok will stop undressing images of real people where illegal, highlighting growing scrutiny of sexual AI deepfakes.
🥇 Gemini Pulls Ahead in AI Race: Google’s Gemini pairs top models, custom chips, scale, and products, positioning the company to outpace OpenAI and shape the next phase of AI dominance.
🤔 FRIDAY FACTS
The technology is GPS, and it fails without Einstein's Theory of Relativity
Satellites orbiting Earth experience time differently than we do because of their massive speed and distance from Earth's gravity. As a result, the atomic clocks on GPS satellites tick 38 microseconds faster every day than clocks on the ground.
The Consequences: GPS calculates your location using the speed of light.
1. In those "tiny" 38 microseconds, light travels about 11 kilometers.
2. If engineers didn't mathematically correct for this time warp, your GPS accuracy would drift off by 10 kilometers (6 miles) every single day.
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Matthew Berman & The Forward Future Team
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