Episode
ThursdAI - Jan 1 2026 - Will Brown Interview + Nvidia buys Groq, Meta buys Manus, Qwen Image 2412 & Alex New Year greetings
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- Jan 1, 2026
- Duration seconds
- 1782
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Summary
Hey all, Happy new year! This is Alex, writing to you for the very fresh start of this year, it’s 2026 already, can you believe it? There was no live stream today, I figured the cohosts deserve a break and honestly it was a very slow week. Even the chinese labs who don’t really celebrate X-mas and new years didn’t come out with a banger AFAIK. ThursdAI - AI moves fast, we’re here to make sure you never miss a thing! Subscribe :) Tho I thought it was an incredible opportunity to finally post the Will Brow interview I recorded in November during the AI Engineer conference. Will is a researcher at Prime Intellect (big fans on WandB btw!) and is very known on X as a hot takes ML person, often going viral for tons of memes! Will is the creator and maintainer of the Verifiers library ( Github ) and his talk at AI Engineer was all about RL Environments (what they are, you can hear in the interview, I asked him!) TL;DR last week of 2025 in AI Besides this, my job here is to keep you up to date, and honestly this was very easy this week, as… almost nothing has happened, but here we go: Meta buys Manus The year ended with 2 huge acquisitions / aquihires. First we got the news from Alex Wang that Meta has bought Manus.ai which is an agentic AI startup we covered back in March for an undisclosed amount (folks claim $2-3B) The most interesting thing here is that Manus is a Chinese company, and this deal requires very specific severance from Chinese operations. Jensen goes on a new years spending spree, Nvidia buys Groq (not GROK) for $20B Groq which we covered often here, and are great friends, is going to NVIDIA, in a… very interesting acqui-hire, which is a “non binding license” + most of Groq top employees apparently are going to NVIDIA. Jonathan Ross the CEO of Groq, was the co…