Daily AI Recap: Feb 01, 2026

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

• AI layoffs or ‘AI-washing’?: How many of the companies with recent layoffs are just using AI as an excuse?...
• Why Tether’s CEO is everywhere right now: For years, Tether's CEO avoided the United States, watching from offshore as regulators circled and prosecutors investigated. Those days are over....
• India offers zero taxes through 2047 to lure global AI workloads: New Delhi's latest move comes as Amazon, Google, and Microsoft expand data center investments in India....
• Bye-bye corporate conglomerates. Hello personal conglomerates.: Elon Musk's reported merging of SpaceX, xAI, and Tesla harkens back to the heyday of General Electric — or maybe the robber barons of the Gilded Age....
• Distributed Reinforcement Learning for Scalable High-Performance Policy Optimization: Leveraging massive parallelism, asynchronous updates, and multi-machine training to match and exceed human-level performance The post Distributed Reinforcement Learning for Scalable High-Performance P...
• “Existential risk” – Why scientists are racing to define consciousness: Scientists warn that rapid advances in AI and neurotechnology are outpacing our understanding of consciousness, creating serious ethical risks. New research argues that developing scientific tests for...
• Gradient Boosting vs AdaBoost vs XGBoost vs CatBoost vs LightGBM: Finding the Best Gradient Boosting Method: One of the best-performing algorithms in machine learning is the boosting algorithm. These are characterised by good predictive abilities and accuracy. All the methods of gradient boosting are based o...

• #490 – State of AI in 2026: LLMs, Coding, Scaling Laws, China, Agents, GPUs, AGI: Nathan Lambert and Sebastian Raschka are machine learning researchers, engineers, and educators. Nathan is the post-training lead at the Allen Institu...
• RobCo Raises $100 Mn to Scale Its Autonomous Industrial Robotics Platform: Lightspeed and Lingotto, an investment management company owned by Exor, lead new investment round as RobCo expands physical AI-driven robotics RobCo,...
• Indonesia ‘conditionally’ lifts ban on Grok: Indonesia has followed Malaysia and the Philippines in lifting a ban on xAI’s chatbot Grok....

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