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Race to AGI Daily Digest - Monday, January 5, 2026
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TLDR
Local communities push back on $98B of US AI data center build-out, putting hard limits around the chip boom.
Global probes into Grok’s sexualized deepfakes turn model abuse and safety into board-level questions for AI labs.
CES shows AI assistants escaping the browser as Samsung and iFLYTEK demo bots and earbuds powered by on-device intelligence.
A new ‘periodic table’ of multimodal AI from Emory hints at more structured, comparable designs for future models.
Baidu, ASML, Intel, and Alibaba rally as investors double down on core AI infrastructure, while Palantir drifts on the sidelines.
The Full Story
So, last week was all about geopolitics and GPUs: the US let Nvidia’s H200 ship to China with a 25% fee, and everyone treated chips as the new oil. We said the real battle would slide from chip specs to where all that compute gets installed and who controls it. That call is already aging well.
Today’s headline: a $98B backlash against US AI data centers. Local communities are pushing back on power, water, and noise just as cloud giants race to add capacity. The tug-of-war over infrastructure is now as strategic as export controls, and it ties straight into our running AI chip-export narrative ->. If last week was about who gets the silicon, this week starts with who lives next to it, as covered in the local backlash story ->.
At the same time, frontier models are colliding with social norms. Regulators are circling Grok after reports of sexualized deepfake content, turning xAI’s promise of a more uncensored assistant into a global compliance test. You can dive into the probe here: Grok investigation -> and see who’s on the hook at xAI’s profile ->. The message is clear: safety and abuse controls are now business risks, not just research headaches.
On the more tangible side, CES is quietly rewriting what “AI assistant” means. Samsung’s concept AI OLED Bot, a teaching helper that lives in your living room or classroom, makes ‘agentic’ AI feel very physical very fast Samsung AI Bot preview ->. iFLYTEK’s AI recorder and translation buds push the same idea into your ears, turning meetings and travel into live language streams iFLYTEK earbuds ->. And in the background, Emory’s “periodic table” of multimodal AI hints at a more systematic way to design all these systems Emory multimodal framework ->.
Markets seem to like the infrastructure side of this story: Baidu, ASML, Intel, and Alibaba all popped, while Palantir slipped as attention swings back to raw compute and hardware. Even smaller players like AGIBOT pulling in fresh capital underline the same point: the race to AGI is now constrained as much by neighborhoods, norms, and devices as by model weights.
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