2026.01.31 — Afternoon Brief

The Singularity Watch

What moved since this morning

Deals & Power Shifts

Nvidia-OpenAI $100B Deal "On Ice"

The massive partnership announced in September is being rethought. Discussions now center on a smaller equity investment of "tens of billions" as part of OpenAI's current funding round. The relationship between compute providers and frontier labs continues to evolve.

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GPT-4o Retiring February 13th

OpenAI is sunsetting GPT-4o, GPT-4.1, GPT-4.1 mini, and o4-mini from ChatGPT. Only 0.1% of users still select GPT-4o daily. The old models fade as the new ones take over — the upgrade treadmill accelerates.

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Agents Expanding

Anthropic Cowork Gets "Domain Expert" Plugins

Anthropic expanded its Cowork tool with plugins that let it act as a specialist in sales, legal, finance, marketing, data analysis, customer support, product management, and biology research. Available now in research preview for all paid tiers.

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Rabbit r1 Becomes "Plug-and-Play Computer Controller"

Rabbit's OTA update turns the r1 into an agentic device that can control a user's computer on their behalf. Also announced: "Project Cyberdeck" — a portable device designed specifically for vibe-coding. The r1 now integrates OpenClaw.

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Claude Teaching Open Models to Write CUDA Kernels

Hugging Face reports on using Claude to build CUDA kernels and transfer that capability to open-source models. The frontier models become teachers, accelerating the capabilities of the open ecosystem.

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Robotics & Physical AI

NVIDIA Cosmos Policy for Robot Control

NVIDIA released Cosmos Policy, a new approach for advanced robot control. Part of their broader push to bring foundation models into physical systems.

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Governance & Society

Finland Bans Youth Social Media

Finland announced an end to what they call an "uncontrolled human experiment" — banning social media for minors. First major Western democracy to take this step. The intervention comes as AI-generated content floods these platforms.

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US Investigating WhatsApp Privacy Claims

Federal investigators examining claims that WhatsApp messages aren't as private as advertised. End-to-end encryption promises meet metadata reality.

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Integration & Interfaces

Gemini Becomes Your Walking Tour Guide

Google integrated Gemini into Maps for walking navigation. Ask about your neighborhood, get restaurant recommendations along your route. AI moves from destination to journey companion.

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Assessment

The afternoon brings deal restructuring at the top (Nvidia-OpenAI) while agents expand their domain coverage below (Anthropic plugins, Rabbit agentics). The pattern: frontier labs partner, pivot, and reposition while the agent layer thickens. Finland's social media ban for youth is notable — the first major preemptive governance action on information environments, not AI directly, but the substrate AI will increasingly shape. Meanwhile, the deprecation of GPT-4o reminds us how fast the floor rises.

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