OpenAI IPO? Grok-SpaceX Merger? The AI IPO Race Heats Up
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The AI Daily Brief: Artificial Intelligence News and Analysis
29 min
2 speakers
3 chapters
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What recent developments are shaping the AI race as of January 2026?
Today on the AI Daily Brief, OpenAI IPO, SpaceX-XAI merger, a bunch of stories that help us understand the state of the AI race as we head into February.
Before that in the headlines, you can finally play with Google's Genie 3 world model. The AI Daily Brief is a daily podcast and video about the most important news and discussions in AI. All right, friends, quick announcements before we dive in.
First of all, thank you to today's sponsors, KPMG, Section, Zencoder, and Superintelligent. To get an ad-free version of the show, go to patreon.com slash ai daily brief, or you can subscribe on Apple Podcasts. To learn about sponsoring the show, send us a note at sponsors at ai daily brief.ai. And while you are on aiDailyBrief.ai, I would so appreciate it if you would fill out our AI usage pulse survey. The TLDR here is that I think everyone is trying to start benchmarking themselves and actually understand with data, not just anecdotes, how others are using AI. To help with that, we're trying to do a lot more original research, a lot more data collection. And one piece of that is these monthly usage pulse surveys.
It's going to ask you questions like which AI models did you use this month? What use case categories were most valuable? How often do you use it? It should take you about two minutes. Like I said, you can find that at ai-dailybrief.ai. There'll be a couple of different links to it, and I would so appreciate it if you would take the time to fill that out. I'll just be leaving it up for a few days, probably till about the middle of next week, and anyone who fills it out will get the first read results about a week before we share it more broadly. Thanks in advance for your help. Now with that said, let's talk some world models. Welcome back to the AI Daily Brief Headlines Edition, all the daily AI news you need in around five minutes.
One of the things that we talked about throughout 2025, but especially towards the end of the year, was the idea of world models. World models are, in some ways, a fundamentally different approach for getting to the next level of AI. World models have a deep understanding of the physics of the world around them, which allows them to do things that LLMs can't. Last year, one of the most impressive demos we got was the research preview of Genie 3. That came in August. That preview was circulated among a fairly tight group of researchers, but we still got to see some fairly breathtaking videos. Genie 3 is capable of generating playable 3D worlds, allowing the users to navigate through the scene with the mouse and arrow keys.
Even back in the preview, the quality was fairly astounding, and it seemed like DeepMind was making rapid progress on world models. Well, now the model is fully available to the public, rolling out first to Gemini Ultra subscribers. It's still a research preview, but people can now start playing around and creating their own generated worlds for the first time. Jay Peters from The Verge used it to generate a string of worlds that resembled popular Nintendo games, including Mario 64, Metroid Prime, and Legend of Zelda. Rebecca Bell-Anne of TechCrunch used it to create a marshmallow castle in a claymation style. You better believe that I am an ultra subscriber, and thankfully this was a model where when they said a certain category of subscribers had access to it, they actually did.
The first thing I generated was a neon cyberpunk world set in the 2060s, but where there were no humans, only animals. I wanted a flying squirrel character, and the thing that you're seeing bounce around your screen now is that. The way that it works is you use text to describe your environment as well as your character, and then it's off to the races. The second world I created was an alternative multiverse Earth world, but where we actually got things like flying cars in a 1960s retro-future aesthetic. The character I plopped down was a time traveler from the 1990s. Lastly, it being the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence and the birth of America, I of course had to do a bleak winter scene of late 1776.
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