Monday, January 19, 2026

TL;DR

Today’s briefing covers 305 items from 13 sources. Top stories include: Moxie Marlinspike has a privacy-conscious alternative to ChatGPT.

Top Stories

Moxie Marlinspike has a privacy-conscious alternative to ChatGPT

TechCrunch AI

Confer is designed to look and feel like ChatGPT or Claude, but your conversations can’t be used for training or advertising.

Research Corner

Paper Source
Japanese AI Agent System on Human Papillomavirus Vaccination: System Design arXiv AI
Do You Trust Me? Cognitive-Affective Signatures of Trustworthiness in Large L… arXiv AI
Building AI Agents to Improve Job Referral Requests to Strangers arXiv AI
ORBITFLOW: SLO-Aware Long-Context LLM Serving with Fine-Grained KV Cache Reco… arXiv AI
CTHA: Constrained Temporal Hierarchical Architecture for Stable Multi-Agent L… arXiv AI
Optimisation of complex product innovation processes based on trend models wi… arXiv AI
ARC Prize 2025: Technical Report arXiv AI
What Matters in Data Curation for Multimodal Reasoning? Insights from the DCV… arXiv AI
AdaMARP: An Adaptive Multi-Agent Interaction Framework for General Immersive … arXiv AI
Efficient Protein Optimization via Structure-aware Hamiltonian Dynamics arXiv AI

Industry Updates

News & Analysis

Deep Dive: Today’s AI Landscape

Synthesized from multiple research sources

Key AI announcements around January 19, 2026, focus on robotics advancements, model releases, personalization features, infrastructure deals, and medical tools, with CES 2026 marking a major robotics tipping point.[1][2]

Major Breakthroughs and Launches

  • NVIDIA’s Robotics Revolution at CES 2026: On January 5, NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang announced the “ChatGPT moment in robotics,” signaling AI’s shift to physical applications and driving robotics displays at the Las Vegas event.[1]
  • DeepSeek V4 Model Announcement: On January 9, Chinese startup DeepSeek revealed plans for its V4 model release in mid-February, excelling in long-context coding (outperforming Claude and GPT series in tests) and introducing the Engram training method for lower-performance chips.[1]

Sources:

Major AI funding deals in recent weeks (up to early January 2026) include xAI’s record $20B Series E, Etched.ai’s $500M round, and Merge Labs’ $252M seed, signaling strong investor interest in frontier AI, chips, and interfaces amid a brisk pace of large financings.[1][4]

Largest Recent AI Funding Rounds

These stand out from weekly roundups for scale and AI focus, primarily from U.S.-based startups:

Sources:

This newsletter is automatically generated by PAI using RSS aggregation and AI research tools. Sources include arXiv, HuggingFace, OpenAI, Google AI, MIT News, VentureBeat, and more.

Have feedback? Reply to this post or reach out on X/Twitter.