Good morning. It's Friday, January 23, and we're covering LeCun’s AI rethink, OpenAI’s Africa health pilot, NVIDIA chip export politics, and more.
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💰 OpenAI Eyes Profit Cut From AI Discoveries (Paywall)
OpenAI is exploring a model where it would take a share of the economic value created using its AI tools. The idea goes beyond usage fees, tying OpenAI’s revenue to successful inventions or discoveries. It reflects pressure to find new monetization paths as AI costs rise. Details remain early and internal.
🔲 Trump Backs NVIDIA AI Chip Sales
Trump’s administration has greenlit the export of NVIDIA’s high-end H200 AI chips to China. This move spurred Congress to advance the “AI Overwatch Act,” which would give lawmakers the power to review and possibly block such exports. Supporters argue this maintains U.S. tech leadership, while critics like Rep. Gabe Amo warn it effectively “gives our opponents our coordinates”.
🛠️ Anthropic Reworks Interviews As Claude Advances
Anthropic reports that each successive Claude model has forced them to redo their coding test. As Claude’s capability improved, even top applicants’ answers became indistinguishable from the model’s output. In practice, allowing AI assistance on the take-home test has left it unable to gauge human skill.
🔥 SpaceX Eyes Record-Breaking IPO
SpaceX is lining up Bank of America, Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan, and Morgan Stanley to underwrite a possible 2026 IPO. While unconfirmed, some reports have speculated a valuation as high as $1.5 trillion. Even on the low end, an offering on the order of $25–30 billion would exceed any previous IPO.
🤔 FRIDAY FACTS
Can a Garden Tool Defeat the Internet?
When we think about threats to the global internet, we imagine cyber warfare, botnets, or solar flares. Not a 75-year-old with a garden tool. And yet, in 2011, 90% of a country’s internet disappeared in seconds because of one.
Stick around to find out what happened 👇
🪧 POWERED BY LEVANTA
The Future of Shopping? AI + Actual Humans.
AI has changed how consumers shop, but people still drive decisions. Levanta’s research shows affiliate and creator content continues to influence conversions, plus it now shapes the product recommendations AI delivers. Affiliate marketing isn’t being replaced by AI, it’s being amplified.
📺️ FROM THE LIVE SHOW
The real bottleneck for enterprise agents is context, not intelligence.Aaron Levie (@levie), CEO of @Box, on what separates early agent pilots from full agentic enterprises:“Knowledge workers already operate with tons of context, and they get it for free.”“Now the massive… pic.twitter.com/1QEmExQykh
@ForwardFutureView post on X🚀 STARTUPS
Yann LeCun Launches AMI Labs To Challenge LLM-Centric AI
Yann LeCun has launched a new Paris-based company, Advanced Machine Intelligence (AMI Labs), betting against the industry’s heavy reliance on large language models (LLMs). In an exclusive interview with MIT Technology Review, LeCun argued that LLMs cannot achieve human-level intelligence because they lack an understanding of the physical world.
AMI Labs will focus instead on “world models,” trained on video, audio, and sensor data, using LeCun’s Joint Embedding Predictive Architecture (JEPA). Why it matters: the venture positions Europe as a potential third pole in AI development, emphasizing open-source systems over closed, U.S.- or China-centric platforms. → Read the full article here.
🩺 HEALTHCARE
Gates Foundation and OpenAI Pilot AI Tools in African Primary Care
The Gates Foundation and OpenAI are backing a new initiative, Horizon1000, to deploy AI tools in primary healthcare clinics across Africa, starting in Rwanda. Reported by Reuters, the project aims to reach 1,000 clinics and surrounding communities by 2028, supported by $50 million in combined funding.
Rather than advanced diagnostics, the focus is on routine tasks such as patient intake, triage, scheduling, and record-keeping in severely understaffed systems. → Read the full article here.
🤝 COORDINATION
Humans& Raises $480M To Build AI Focused on Coordination, Not Chat
Humans&, a three-month-old startup founded by alumni from Anthropic, Meta, OpenAI, xAI, and Google DeepMind, has raised a $480 million seed round to build a new kind of AI model designed for coordination and collaboration. In reporting by TechCrunch on January 22, 2026, the company said it is developing a foundation model optimized for “social intelligence,” capable of managing group decisions, long-running workflows, and competing priorities over time.
Rather than plugging into existing tools, Humans& aims to own the collaboration layer itself, potentially replacing platforms like Slack or Notion. → Read the full article here.
🛰️ NEWS
What Else is Happening
🤥 AI Snow Videos Fool Viewers: AI-generated clips of massive snow walls spread online after real storms in Russia’s Far East, highlighting how disasters can amplify convincing synthetic misinformation.
🕵 Google Personalizes AI Search: AI Mode can now tap Gmail and Photos to personalize answers for AI Pro and Ultra users, expanding Google’s push toward context-aware search.
💵 Altman Courts Mideast For $50B Round: Sam Altman is meeting Middle Eastern investors to raise a new funding round of at least $50 billion for OpenAI. The talks include state-backed funds in Abu Dhabi. (Paywall)
📉 NVIDIA Cuts RTX 50 Output: Reports say NVIDIA is trimming consumer GPU production up to 20% through Q3 2026 to prioritize AI demand, prolonging RTX 5090–5060 shortages.
🧑💼 Google Acqui-hires Hume AI Team: DeepMind licenses the startup and brings CEO Alan Cowen plus engineers to boost Gemini voice, underscoring voice AI’s rising strategic value.
🧰 TOOLBOX
Trending AI Tools
🎬 Lens: Prompt-based AI video editor that trims, styles, and syncs footage instantly for faster workflows.
🎥 Recall.ai: Unified API to stream, transcribe, and analyze video meetings across major platforms.
🎙️ AssemblyAI: Developer-friendly AI for real-time speech-to-text and audio insights like topics and speaker detection.
🗒️ FEEDBACK
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🤔 FRIDAY FACTS
How One Shovel Silenced a Nation
The woman responsible was Hayastan Shakarian. She was digging near the capital city of Tbilisi, Georgia, scavenging for scrap copper to sell. While digging, her spade struck a hard object buried in the dirt. Thinking she had found a root or a rock, she hacked through it.
She hadn't found copper. She had severed the primary fiber-optic backbone cable connecting Georgia to neighboring Armenia.
The Fallout:
1. Total Blackout: Because this single cable carried the vast majority of data traffic for the region, 90% of Armenia lost internet access instantly.
2. Collateral Damage: Large portions of Georgia and Azerbaijan also went dark.
3. The "Cloud" is Physical: The outage lasted for several hours while frantic ISP teams hunted for the physical break in the ground.
Hayastan was nicknamed the "Spade Hacker" by the press.
That’s a Wrap!
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Matthew Berman & The Forward Future Team
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