Daily AI Recap: Jan 13, 2026

Welcome to today's curated briefing of the most important AI developments.

• The Great Parallel—Why AI is Simply "Labour at Scale": AI is often viewed as a radical departure from traditional work, but is it? Explore why AI risks, performance gaps, and 're-work' costs mirror manual human labour. Learn why AI acts as a risk multipli...

• Microsoft announces glut of new data centers but says it won’t let your electricity bill go up: The tech giant has pledged to be a "good neighbor" as it continues to invest in AI infrastructure throughout the country....

• #489 – Paul Rosolie: Uncontacted Tribes in the Amazon Jungle: Paul Rosolie is a naturalist, explorer, author of a new book titled Junglekeeper, and is someone who has dedicated his life to protecting the Amazon rainforest. Thank you for listening ❤ Check out our...

• The Complete Guide to Logging for Python Developers: Stop using print statements and start logging like a pro. This guide shows Python developers how to log smarter and debug faster....

• Veo 3.1 Ingredients to Video: More consistency, creativity and control: A collage of various generated images, including an astronaut on Mars, a raccoon barista, a person in a hallway, a fantasy cityscape, and a close-up of coffee art, with the text "Veo 3.1 Ingredients t...

• ElevenLabs CEO says the voice AI startup crossed $330 million ARR last year: The company said it took only five months to go from $200 million to $330 million in annual recurring revenue....

• Zenken boosts a lean sales team with ChatGPT Enterprise: By rolling out ChatGPT Enterprise company-wide, Zenken has boosted sales performance, cut preparation time, and increased proposal success rates. AI-supported workflows are helping a lean team deliver...

• CSV vs. Parquet vs. Arrow: Storage Formats Explained: Same data, different formats, very different performance....

• Apple launches ‘Creator Studio’ bundle of apps for $12.99 per month: The bundle includes access to Final Cut Pro, Logic Pro, and Pixelmator Pro on Mac and iPad, as well as Motion, Compressor, and MainStage on Mac....

• How to Build a Multi-Turn Crescendo Red-Teaming Pipeline to Evaluate and Stress-Test LLM Safety Using Garak: In this tutorial, we build an advanced, multi-turn crescendo-style red-teaming harness using Garak to evaluate how large language models behave under gradual conversational pressure. We implement a cu...

• Why Your ML Model Works in Training But Fails in Production: Hard lessons from building production ML systems where data leaks, defaults lie, populations shift, and time does not behave the way we expect. The post Why Your ML Model Works in Training But Fails i...

• Deepgram raises $130M at $1.3B valuation and buys a YC AI startup: Deepgram is raising its Series C round at a $1.3 billion valuation....

• AITech Interview with Snehal Patel, Chief Product Officer, Vectra AI: How AI-native intelligence removes friction from detection, investigation, and response, turning security insight into decisive action. Snehal, as Chief Product Officer at Vectra AI, what drew you to ...

• CallTrackingMetrics Rebrands to CTM: Conversation analytics leader unveils new identity alongside enterprise-grade AI capabilities and strategic product expansion CallTrackingMetrics, a global conversation analytics company, today announ...

• How to Maximize Claude Code Effectiveness: Learn how to get the most out of agentic coding The post How to Maximize Claude Code Effectiveness appeared first on Towards Data Science....

• Converge Bio raises $25M, backed by Bessemer and execs from Meta, OpenAI, Wiz: AI drug discovery startup Converge Bio raised $25 million in a Series A led by Bessemer Venture Partners, with additional backing from executives at Meta, OpenAI, and Wiz....

• Northwestern Medicine Selects Tempus to Expand Genomic Testing: Collaboration will focus on the oncology patient population Northwestern Medicine and Tempus AI, Inc. (NASDAQ: TEM) are collaborating to expand access to genomic testing for Northwestern Medicine canc...

• Ditto Joins Zebra Technologies’ PartnerConnect Program: Aiming to Eliminate Downtime in Enterprise Mobile Operations Ditto, the pioneer in edge computing and peer-to-peer data synchronization, maker of the industry-leading edge-native mobile database that ...

• How to Read a Machine Learning Research Paper in 2026: When I first started reading machine learning research papers, I honestly thought something was wrong with me....

• AI News Weekly - Issue #459: Is Elon Musk the worst in Tech? - Jan 13th 2026: Welcome

    The AI Colossus: Decoding Musk's Omnipresent Influence in everything AI 
    Apparently Elon Musk has been elected worst person in tech as reported by AI Scientist Gary Marc...
  

• 40 Prompt Engineering Questions (With Interview-Ready Answers): Prompt engineering isn’t about creating elaborate prompts. It’s about developing the judgment to choose the right structure, logic, and level of control for a given task. This article gives you 40 sce...

• Getting Started with XGBoost: A Beginner-Friendly Tutorial: Among all the tools that a data scientist has, it is difficult to find one that has received a reputation as an effective and trustworthy tool like XGBoost. It was even mentioned in the winning soluti...

• Everfox Appoints Dave Wajsgras as Chairman and Chief Executive Officer: Experienced Technology and Defense Executive to Lead Next Stage of Growth Everfox, the trusted high assurance cybersecurity company, today announced the appointment of Dave Wajsgras as Chairman and Ch...

• Contextual Intelligence Becomes the New Standard For Exceptional CX in 2026: APAC consumers call for explainable, transparent AI as over three-quarters register higher demands compared to a year ago Zendesk releases today its 2026 Customer Experience (CX) Trends report, reveal...

• Comment on arXiv:2511.21731v1: Identifying Quantum Structure in AI Language: Evidence for Evolutionary Convergence of Human and Artificial Cognition: arXiv:2601.06104v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: This note is a friendly technical check of arXiv:2511.21731v1. I highlight a few places where the manuscript's interpretation of (i) the reported CHSH/...

• Dynamic Intelligence Ceilings: Measuring Long-Horizon Limits of Planning and Creativity in Artificial Systems: arXiv:2601.06102v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Recent advances in artificial intelligence have produced systems capable of remarkable performance across a wide range of tasks. These gains, however, ...

• Automatic Question Generation for Intuitive Learning Utilizing Causal Graph Guided Chain of Thought Reasoning: arXiv:2601.06098v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Intuitive learning is crucial for developing deep conceptual understanding, especially in STEM education, where students often struggle with abstract a...

• The Hessian of tall-skinny networks is easy to invert: arXiv:2601.06096v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We describe an exact algorithm for solving linear systems $Hx=b$ where $H$ is the Hessian of a deep net. The method computes Hessian-inverse-vector pro...

• Meta-backed Hupo finds growth after pivot to AI sales coaching from mental wellness: Hupo, backed by Meta, pivoted from mental wellness to AI sales coaching for banks and insurers, and secured a $10M Series A led by DST Global...

• Hands-on with Bee, Amazon’s latest AI wearable: We tried Amazon's new AI wearable Bee. It's not for pro users yet, but more features are expected this year....

• Google AI Releases Universal Commerce Protocol (UCP): An Open-Source Standard Designed to Power the Next Generation of Agentic Commerce: Can AI shopping agents move beyond sending product links and actually complete trusted purchases end to end inside a chat? Universal Commerce Protocol...
• Tree-Preconditioned Differentiable Optimization and Axioms as Layers: arXiv:2601.06036v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: This paper introduces a differentiable framework that embeds the axiomatic structure of Random Utilit...
• CrossTrafficLLM: A Human-Centric Framework for Interpretable Traffic Intelligence via Large Language Model: arXiv:2601.06042v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: While accurate traffic forecasting is vital for Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS), effectively...
• Enabling Long FFT Convolutions on Memory-Constrained FPGAs via Chunking: arXiv:2601.06065v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: The need for long-context reasoning has led to alternative neural network architectures besides Trans...
• Filtering Beats Fine Tuning: A Bayesian Kalman View of In Context Learning in LLMs: arXiv:2601.06100v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We present a theory-first framework that interprets inference-time adaptation in large language model...
• "They parted illusions -- they parted disclaim marinade": Misalignment as structural fidelity in LLMs: arXiv:2601.06047v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: The prevailing technical literature in AI Safety interprets scheming and sandbagging behaviors in lar...
• From RLHF to Direct Alignment: A Theoretical Unification of Preference Learning for Large Language Models: arXiv:2601.06108v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Aligning large language models (LLMs) with human preferences has become essential for safe and benefi...

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