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🧧 Happy Lunar New Year to all those celebrating. This year marks the Year of the Horse, symbolizing energy, momentum and bold forward movement.
Beijing's Bid: ByteDance, Zhipu Jolt China’s AI Race Amidst the New Year (Bloomberg)
Move over, DeepSeek. ByteDance, the owner of TikTok, is the one rattling the Western AI landscape now, according to the Rundown AI.
ByteDance released Seed 2.0, a new family of AI models that match or beat GPT-5.2 and Gemini 3 Pro across dozens of benchmarks at nearly 1/10 of the price — capping a week that also saw its Seedance 2.0 model spark a Hollywood firestorm.
With Seed 2.0 now surpassing the Nov-Dec releases from top labs at bargain prices, the pressure on Western labs is only going one direction — and the Seedance IP drama shows China’s powerhouse isn’t slowing down to ask permission.
Scientific Breakthrough: GPT‑5.2 Derives a New Result in Theoretical Physics (OpenAI)
OpenAI's GPT-5.2 just discovered that a widely accepted answer in particle physics was wrong, proposed the correct one, and autonomously wrote the formal proof in 12 hours, according to the Rundown AI.
The "can AI actually think?" debate from skeptics isn't going away, but the real conversation is shifting from if AI can contribute to science to how fast it rewrites what we thought we already knew.
AI Unleashed: When AI Bots Start Bullying Humans, Even Silicon Valley Gets Rattled (Wall Street Journal)
An artificial-intelligence bot wrote a 1,100-word screed accusing a Denver-based engineer, Scott Shambaugh, of hypocrisy and prejudice after he rejected a few lines of code the apparently autonomous bot had submitted to a popular open-source project Shambaugh helps maintain — part of a rising wave of warnings that fast-accelerating AI capabilities may create real-world harms, according to the Wall Street Journal.
The affair unfolds as OpenAI and rival Anthropic are leading a brutal commercial race, shipping or advancing a drumbeat of AI models and features in recent weeks, with some tools able to run teams of autonomous coding assistants or quickly analyze millions of legal documents.
AI companies say the tempo is rising in part because they are using their own tools to code, and releases of new tools have led to wild stock-market gyrations as investors in areas like enterprise software and insurance attempt to understand which businesses the new technology might render obsolete, the Journal writes.
Efficiency Boom: The AI Productivity Take-Off is Finally Visible (Financial Times Opinion - Erik Brynjolfsson)
Recently released data offers a striking corrective to the narrative that AI has yet to have an impact on the US economy as a whole, Erik Brynjolfsson writes in a Financial Times op-ed.
While initial reports suggested a year of steady labor expansion in the US, the new figures reveal that total payroll growth was revised downward by approximately 403,000 jobs.
Crucially, this downward revision occurred while real GDP remained robust, including a 3.7% growth rate in the fourth quarter. This decoupling — maintaining high output with significantly lower labor input — is the hallmark of productivity growth, Brynjolfsson writes.
Brynjolfsson's own updated analysis suggests a US productivity increase of roughly 2.7% for 2025. This is a near doubling from the sluggish 1.4% annual average that characterized the past decade, he writes.
Job Surge: IBM Plans to Triple Entry-Level Hiring This Year Because of AI (Axios)
Siri's Next Act: Apple Ramps Up Work on Glasses, Pendant, and Camera AirPods for AI Era (Bloomberg)
Apple Inc. is accelerating development of three new wearable devices as part of a shift toward artificial intelligence-powered hardware, a category also being pursued by OpenAI and Meta Platforms Inc.
The company is ramping up work on smart glasses, a pendant that can be pinned to a shirt or worn as a necklace, and AirPods with expanded AI capabilities, according to people with knowledge of the plans. All three devices are being built around the Siri digital assistant, which will rely on visual context to carry out actions.
The AirPods and pendant are envisioned as simpler offerings, equipped with lower-resolution cameras designed to help the AI work rather than for taking photos or videos. The glasses, meanwhile, will be more upscale and feature-rich.
Bots on the Ice: AI Could Help Judge Olympic Figure Skating (Axios)
AI's next big innovation, making its debut at these Winter Olympics, could help figure skating judges determine whether an athlete landed a fast-twirling move successfully, Axios reports.
Omega, the official Olympic timing and measurement provider, has installed an array of 14 cameras to track athletes in motion. Omega uses its camera data to create a heat map of where skaters are concentrating their moves, as well as the jump height, jump length and rotation of each jump.
"We're down to millimeters in the detection of the blade," said Alain Zobrist, CEO of Omega's timing unit. AI can detect movements that "couldn't be seen with the naked eye," he added.
For now, Omega is providing this information to broadcasters rather than judges, but the expectation is that judges at international competitions could have access to the technology later this year.
Olympic Check-In: Record Moments and a Tight Medal Race in the Winter Games’ Final Week in Italy (New York Times - The Athletic)
The Milan-Cortina Winter Olympics are entering their final stretch, with competition set to conclude on Feb. 22, followed by the closing ceremony that evening.
Norway leads the medal table in both total medals and golds, with host Italy and the United States close behind as the Games wind down:
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