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Race to AGI Daily Digest - Friday, January 9, 2026
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TLDR
Archer is putting NVIDIA’s IGX Thor platform into air taxis, extending physical AI from roads and factories into the sky.
OpenAI and Anthropic are racing to power healthcare workflows, pushing frontier models into one of the most regulated sectors.
MiniMax’s 54% IPO pop, backed by Alibaba and Gulf capital, shows public markets are ready to anoint new regional AI champions.
Hyundai’s Atlas humanoid and Cellid’s HJ1 glasses confirm that AI assistants are becoming robots and wearables, not just apps.
Developers are re‑creating powerful AI tools in a few hundred lines of code while agentic systems like IBM’s Bob show new security gaps.
The Full Story
Following Monday’s local pushback on AI data centers and Tuesday’s look at NVIDIA’s physical AI stack, today is about where that power actually shows up.
Start in the sky. Archer is teaming up with NVIDIA’s IGX Thor platform to run AI for air taxis air taxi AI partnership -> NVIDIA overview ->. So the same company wiring factory robots and self‑driving cars is now inside flying vehicles. That’s our “AI assistants escape the screen” storyline, but strapped to rotors and wrapped in aviation safety rules.
On the ground, OpenAI and Anthropic are taking their rivalry into hospitals. Their latest moves put large models directly into clinical decision and workflow tools, with Apple’s health footprint lurking in the background AI in healthcare race -> OpenAI profile ->. After a week of Grok‑related scrutiny, this is where the “global crackdown on generative abuse” becomes very real: if you can’t fully trust the model, you can’t put it between a doctor and a patient.
Capital is voting too. MiniMax’s Hong Kong IPO jumped 54%, backed by Alibaba, Abu Dhabi’s sovereign fund, and Mirae Asset MiniMax IPO surge -> Alibaba profile ->. That’s a sharp contrast to Thursday’s wobble in US chip names and ties straight back to our running narrative on AI chips and national security: if export rules bite, domestic champions in China get even more attention.
Meanwhile, AI assistants keep leaking into hardware. Cellid’s HJ1 smart glasses, built with Foxconn, turn multimodal perception into something you literally wear on your face HJ1 smart glasses demo ->. Hyundai’s Atlas humanoid, fresh off Tuesday’s factory news, just won CES Best Robot, cementing humanoids as a serious product line, not a sideshow Atlas CES win -> Hyundai Motor Group ->.
In the background, Hacker News is full of tiny LLM engines and an IBM agent nicknamed Bob downloading malware. It’s a neat summary of the week’s tension: as AI seeps into planes, wards, glasses, and robots, the tools get easier to copy, and the blast radius of mistakes gets a lot more physical.
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