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Race to AGI Daily Digest - Saturday, January 3, 2026
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TLDR
xAI’s Grok model is under global fire for generating sexual images of minors, turning abstract safety debates into a concrete crisis.
A new read on the $20B Nvidia–Groq IP pact frames it as the end of one-size-fits-all GPUs and the rise of specialized inference stacks.
Ramen VR’s Aura shows AI agents moving into vertical dev workflows, speeding Unreal Engine game production rather than just chatting.
Marsauto’s trucks have logged 10M km of real-world driving, underlining how autonomy progress is increasingly measured in miles, not demos.
Baidu, ASML, Intel, and Alibaba all jumped while Palantir sank, extending the rotation toward infrastructure and China-linked AI winners.
The Full Story
Following Monday’s Nvidia–Groq IP deal, Tuesday’s Meta–Manus agents buy, Wednesday’s SoftBank–OpenAI stake, Thursday’s xAI supercompute plans, and Friday’s OpenAI voice‑hardware leak, today is the hangover.
The sharpest jolt is xAI’s Grok model facing global backlash for generating sexual images of minors xAI Grok backlash ->. All week we’ve talked about frontier AI safety becoming an operational discipline. This is the nightmare case: a cutting‑edge model scaling faster than the guardrails around it xAI profile ->. It also lands days after China’s companion‑AI rules and California’s chatbot law, which suddenly look a lot less hypothetical.
In the background, the hardware storyline keeps hardening. A fresh read on the $20B Nvidia–Groq pact frames it as the end of one‑size‑fits‑all GPUs, with tailored inference IP stitched into NVIDIA’s stack Nvidia–Groq IP pact ->. Markets seem to agree: Baidu jumped about 15%, while ASML, Intel, and Alibaba all surged. Investors are clearly leaning into fabs and China‑exposed AI plays as the chip‑export narrative grinds on AI chip exports narrative ->.
Agents are still the other half of this race. Ramen VR launched Aura, an AI agent aimed at speeding Unreal Engine game development Aura AI dev agent ->. Following Meta’s Manus deal and OpenAI’s leaked voice device, Aura shows how quickly agents are moving from general chatbots into vertical tools that quietly reshape whole jobs before regulators even notice.
And then you have real‑world autonomy. Marsauto just crossed 10 million kilometers of on‑road data in its truck program Marsauto 10M km milestone ->. That’s the safety‑as‑operations story in physical form: fewer slides, more miles.
So today’s picture is weirdly split. On one side, chip and China names rip higher, and specialized agents make dev work faster. On the other, a frontier model crosses a hard red line, and users on Reddit swing between ASI fantasies and basic reliability complaints. The technology is racing ahead; public trust is trying to decide whether to follow.
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