In Today’s Issue:

🏎️ NVIDIA licenses Groq’s high-speed inference IP

⚖️ New draft regulations mandate a mandatory "AI reality check"

🛡️ Sam Altman warns that advanced agents are now discovering critical security flaws

🤖 AI giants are pivoting to humanoid robots and full-stack control

✨ And more AI goodness…

Dear Readers,

AI is sprinting into a new phase - fast, political, and a little dangerous: China is drafting rules for “human-like AI,” Sam Altman is openly warning that autonomous agents are starting to expose real-world vulnerabilities, and tech giants are quietly building a robot-powered future where chips, devices, and humanoids merge into one strategic battlefield. Meanwhile, Nvidia just pulled off a $20B power move, Larry Ellison is trying to reshape Hollywood with a $40B shockwave, and the AI industry is starting to feel like a high-stakes chess game where every piece matters. If you want clarity, context, and a sense of where this all leads next, let’s dive into today’s edition together, because what’s happening now will define the next decade of power, innovation, and human ambition.

All the best,

China unveiled draft rules to tighten oversight of human-like AI, requiring providers to ensure ethics, security, and transparency while clearly telling users they’re interacting with AI at login and every two hours - or sooner if overdependence appears. The proposal, led by the Cyberspace Administration of China, is open for public comment until Jan. 25, signaling a push to balance rapid AI investment with user safeguards.

Legendary Andrej Karpathy sparked a heated debate with his statement: since Claude Code and Opus 4.5, a vibe shift has been palpable. The AI revolution in coding is here.

AI Is Coming For These 3 Industries In 2026 (a16z Big Ideas)

Nvidia just pulled off a Silicon Valley judo move: instead of buying Groq outright, it’s licensing Groq’s inference chip technology and hiring key leaders to fold that know-how into Nvidia’s “AI factory” stack. The headline number floating around is about $20B, but the structure matters more than the price tag - non-exclusive IP access + an acqui-hire-style talent move, while Groq continues operating under new CEO Simon Edwards.

Why now? AI is shifting from training mega-models to serving billions of real-time queries, where latency and cost per response become the battleground. Groq’s architecture is built for fast, predictable inference, keeping more data on-chip (SRAM) to reduce expensive back-and-forth with external memory. For Nvidia, that’s a hedge: diversify beyond GPU-only inference, pressure-test new designs, and blunt challengers before they scale.

If this pattern spreads, “buying” the future may look less like M&A - and more like licensing + elite talent pipelines.

Why it matters: This deal signals that inference efficiency (latency, cost, memory bottlenecks) is becoming the next frontier, not just bigger training runs. And it shows how incumbents can absorb disruptive chip ideas without triggering the full regulatory blast radius of an acquisition.

Sources:

🔗 https://www.theinformation.com/articles/nvidia-struck-20-billion-megadeal-groq

🔗 https://www.theinformation.com/articles/20-great-books-read-holidays-2025

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A blockbuster bidding war just got a billionaire-sized plot twist: Larry Ellison is now personally backing Paramount Skydance’s push for Warner Bros. Discovery with an irrevocable $40.4B guarantee, trying to undercut Warner’s biggest objection - that Paramount’s equity support could be yanked via a revocable trust. Paramount also sweetened terms around flexibility and raised its regulatory breakup fee, while Warner confirmed it received the amended offer but is still publicly sticking with its Netflix-backed deal.

Zoom out and this is more than Hollywood drama. It’s a reminder that in a world where distribution is algorithmic, the scarcest asset isn’t bandwidth - it’s premium IP (films, franchises, libraries) and the cash to finance it at scale. Netflix, for its part, has been tightening its financing package by refinancing parts of the debt stack—signaling it wants to keep borrowing costs and credit optics under control.

AI is rapidly reshaping how content is produced, recommended, localized, and monetized—so control of top-tier libraries becomes strategic infrastructure. The winner isn’t just buying studios; they’re buying leverage over the next decade of AI-mediated entertainment.

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