Overview
- Meta agreed to buy Manus for about $2 billion to bring autonomous agents into Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp, Nvidia struck a nonexclusive deal with Groq as its founder and other leaders join Nvidia, and OpenAI posted a role to assess frontier risks.
- Executives now frame AI agents as collaborators, with 76% holding that view and adoption accelerating as 35% of organizations explore agentic AI and another 44% plan to implement it.
- OpenAI has added ChatGPT Atlas, Agent mode and instant payments that enable in-chat shopping on platforms like Shopify and Etsy, and some shopping features were removed in December after user pushback as the company evaluates advertising.
- Studies and recent episodes highlight a surge of low-quality AI content, with Graphite estimating roughly half of online articles were AI-generated in 2025 and public discomfort growing over errors, deepfakes and ad environments.
- Investors are channeling vast capital into cloud and hardware even as volatility rises, with analysts flagging $2.1 trillion in commitments by major players and anticipating 2026 IPO steps by leading AI firms, while the U.S., China and the EU split innovation, scale and regulation leadership.