Weekend Warp: January 4, 2026
Top Big AI and Tech developments every week you must know
Welcome to Dharma of AI. Find here essay on AI’s true nature, the world it’s quietly building, and our place within that new order. A journey beyond hype and fear into what AI really is. By Jaspreet Bindra—The Tech Whisperer.
You did not hear me say it, but the last week was a slow one for AI! The holidays may have wound down, but AI’s consolidation wars are heating up! While OpenAI quietly perfected its audio future with Jony Ive, Nvidia made its biggest bet ever on Groq, and Meta pounced on Manus. This week’s “slow” news? Anything but.
OpenAI decided to take a break this year, unlike the last days of 2024 when they launched 12 new products in 12 days! Having said that, OpenAI seems to have doubled down on audio/speech in the last few days. It is taking steps to improve its audio AI models, in preparation for its eventual release of an AI-powered personal device, said a person with knowledge of the effort. The device is expected to be largely audio-based, said three people with knowledge of it. The device being built with Jony Ive—the legendary British designer who spent nearly three decades at Apple creating the iconic iPod, iPhone, and iPad, before founding his design firm LoveFrom in 2019—is going to be one of the big news stories of 2026. OpenAI acquired Ive’s startup io for $6.4 billion in May 2025, bringing the designer who revolutionized consumer technology into the AI hardware race. The first prototypes are already finished, and Sam Altman has promised a device that brings “peace and calm” rather than the frenetic smartphone experience—a screenless, audio-first gadget that could redefine how we interact with AI. The company is aiming to release the new audio model in the first quarter of 2026, the person with knowledge of the effort said. I have always believed that speech or audio is the right interface for Generative AI, as speech can convey not only information, but also context, tone, emotion, urgency, and many other subtle inflections which mere text cannot. Plus, voice will bridge the AI digital divide in countries like India, where digital literacy stands at just 38% overall and 25% in rural areas, making voice-based technology a necessity rather than a convenience for millions who interact more naturally in their native languages than through text.
Meanwhile, ‘slow’ in AI is relative. NVIDIA did not wait for the Holidays to end to usurp Groq. It swooped down to strike a roughly $20 billion non-exclusive deal to license Groq’s ultra-low-latency AI inference technology and hire key Groq talent, including founder Jonathan Ross and president Sunny Madra. Groq remains an independent company and continues operating its GroqCloud services, while Nvidia integrates Groq-style inference IP into its AI platform to boost real-time, cost-efficient inference workloads and protect its dominance against emerging accelerator architectures. Groq’s Language Processing Unit (LPU) architecture enhances Nvidia’s GPU-dominant stack with specialized inference capabilities optimized for ultra-low latency and efficiency. Jensen Huang saw the writing on the wall of model pretraining moving more and more to inferencing, and he intends to be a leader in that too. The controversial arrangement transfers Groq’s key assets, IP, and talent (like founder Jonathan Ross) to Nvidia while keeping Groq nominally independent, sidestepping Hart-Scott-Rodino Act filings required for traditional acquisitions. Regulators view this as a “stealth acquisition” or “acquihire loophole,” similar to Microsoft-Inflection, maintaining a fiction of competition despite effective neutralization of a rival.
Meta made its own moves, gobbling Manus AI, the Chinese-Singaporean company which had created a viral sensation with its multi-agent demos. The $2 billion deal at the turn of the year marked one of its largest deals after WhatsApp and Scale AI. Founded by Chinese entrepreneurs with roots in China but relocated operations, Manus specializes in semi-autonomous “general-purpose” AI agents that handle complex tasks like coding, data analysis, research, planning, and web interactions with minimal user input—earning its name from Latin for “hand.” The acquisition accelerates Meta’s shift from foundational models like Llama to full AI agent platforms integrated across Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, Meta AI, and enterprise tools. Manus, which hit $100-125M ARR in under a year serving millions via subscriptions, brings proven revenue and 147T+ tokens processed on 80M+ virtual computers. Manus operates semi-independently from Singapore, retaining its app/website sales while Meta scales the tech globally; all Chinese ownership ties were severed to address security concerns. CEO Xiao Hong joins as VP, emphasizing unchanged workflows amid Meta’s AI monetization push.