Race to AGI Daily Digest - Friday, January 16, 2026

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TLDR

Baidu’s ERNIE 5 entering the global LMArena top‑10 signals China’s top models are now fully in the frontier race.

Baidu ERNIE 5 enters global LMArena top-10, tops China ->

Wikipedia’s licensing deals turn the web’s reference backbone into a contracted data source for Microsoft, Meta, Amazon, Mistral AI, and Google.

Wikipedia signs landmark AI licensing deals with Microsoft, Meta and Amazon ->

OpenAI’s $250m seed into Merge Labs shows brain–computer interfaces moving from sci‑fi toward the AGI race roadmap.

OpenAI leads $250m seed in Merge Labs BCI startup ->

GovDash and Higgsfield funding rounds underline how agents are going vertical, from gov contracts to marketing video, increasing both impact and security stakes.

Higgsfield raises $80M to push generative AI video for marketers ->

The Full Story

Following Monday’s chip euphoria, Tuesday’s Alibaba spike, Wednesday’s Intel pop, and yesterday’s wake-up call on agent security, today feels like the week zooming out to the full stack: models, data, and even brain–computer interfaces. On the model front, Baidu’s ERNIE 5 just entered the global LMArena top‑10 and now leads among Chinese models. That’s a clear move in the “From Chatbots to Agents” storyline: ERNIE isn’t just chatting, it’s competing with the frontier for tool use and reasoning. You can see the details in the ERNIE 5 leaderboard story ->. Hardware is still cheering from the sidelines too, with ASML and TSM up sharply, extending the chip boom we started tracking on Monday. Check their profiles if you’re following the fab race: ASML -> and TSM ->. Now, look at the data layer. Wikipedia just signed landmark AI licensing deals with Microsoft, Meta, Amazon, Mistral AI, and Google. That turns the web’s reference backbone into a gated resource for the biggest labs. The announcement is here: Wikipedia AI licensing deals ->. For our "AI Safety, Censorship, and Speech" storyline, this is huge: instead of scraping everything, access to trusted knowledge is becoming contractual, auditable, and, in some ways, censorable. Building on yesterday’s focus on enterprise agents as a security surface, today’s Reddit thread on open‑source PII redaction middleware shows the community trying to retrofit brakes onto increasingly powerful tools. That pairs neatly with GovDash’s $30M round to bring AI deeper into government contracting and procurement and Higgsfield’s $80M raise for generative video for marketers. Those are agents creeping into high‑stakes workflows and the retail attention battle, not just chatbots in a sidebar. You can dig into the Higgsfield round here: Higgsfield generative video funding ->. And then there’s the interface jump: OpenAI leading a $250m seed into Merge Labs, a BCI startup, is a bold bet that future agents might plug straight into our nervous systems. The deal is covered in OpenAI backs Merge Labs’ BCI seed ->, and you can zoom out on OpenAI’s broader ambitions on the OpenAI company page ->. Put this next to NVIDIA’s Groq acquisition arc in Nvidia’s Strategic Play: Groq Talent and Technology Deal ->, and the picture sharpens: the model war is now a race for compute, data, and direct access to users’ minds and workflows.

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Race to AGI Daily Digest - Friday, January 16, 2026

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The Full Story

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