😺 OpenAI and Jony Ive's AI device is a pen?!

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• OpenAI developed two new screenless AI devices.

• ChatGPT web traffic share dropped below 70%, Gemini climbed to ~20%.

• ByteDance planned $14B spend on NVIDIA AI chips in 2026.

• ACCA will halt remote exams on from March 2026 due to AI cheating.

• The pen device, developed with former Apple design chief Jony Ive, will transcribe handwritten notes directly to ChatGPT and enable voice conversations with the AI.

• Think of it like a smart pen that turns your scribbles into structured digital notes while you chat with an AI assistant about what you're writing.

• Designed as a “third core device“ alongside your laptop and phone that can be carried in pockets or placed on desks.

• There’s actually three concepts under evaluation, with the pen likely launching first, followed by a portable “to-go“ audio device.

• None will be earphones or traditional wearables… these are entirely new form factors.

• All three are supposed to be “elegantly simple“ and “playful“ according to Ive, and should provide a calmer experience than smartphones (w/o all the apps and constant notifications iIm guessing).

• More natural speech patterns (no more robotic pauses).

• Faster response times, as currently, audio lags behind text-based models.

• Real-time interruption handling so you can actually interrupt the AI mid-sentence, like a real conversation.

• Better accuracy, matching text-based model performance.

The “12 tiny experiments” Prompt

Propose 12 small experiments I can try this year (one per month) focused on fun, learning, creativity, or relationships. 
Each experiment must cost under $50 and take under 2 hours to start.
Include a clear starting step and what success looks like. 
Then ask me which to keep, tweak or drop before we finalize the list. 

1. *Agent Bricks: High-quality AI agents on your data. Spot-checking doesn’t scale. Build reliable agents with built-in evaluation based on your data and your goals. See how Agent Bricks works.

2. LongCat-Video-Avatar generates expressive audio-driven character animation, including long video continuation.

3. Dedalus Labs gives you one endpoint to deploy an agent that can call tools (MCP servers), so you can wire up actions like “read from GitHub” or “send a Slack message” without building the plumbing yourself.

4. Design Arena lets you run head-to-head design battles and vote on winners so you can see what “wins” in real user taste (and climb the leaderboard).

5. Chatterbox is open-source TTS (with Turbo) that supports tags like [laugh] and [cough] for more realistic voice agents (Turbo version is optimized for low-latency speech).

6. VibeVoice-Realtime streams speech with low first-audio latency so agents can talk while the LLM thinks.

1. Similarweb said ChatGPT’s share of genAI web traffic dipped below 70% over the past year while Gemini climbed toward ~20% (and Grok kept gaining).

2. ChatGPT ads were reportedly tested as sponsored units alongside answers, likely to blur into recommendations and shopping flows, meaning transparency could be minimal with ads harder to recognize, especially for vulnerable users.

3. Mistral appeared to be testing a workflow builder + connectors for repeatable multi-step automations.

4. UK accounting org ACCA said it will largely halt remote exams from March 2026 after AI-assisted cheating got too hard to police.

5. IDC warned PC shipments could drop in 2026 as RAM pricing spikes and supply stays tight.

   1. Related: NPR reported AI’s memory-chip demand could push up prices for consumer devices.

6. ByteDance reportedly planned to spend ~$14B on Nvidia AI chips in 2026.

7. VCs predicted enterprises would spend more on AI in 2026 while cutting vendor sprawl as pilots consolidate into a few default platforms.

1. OpusClip CEO Young Zhao shared how he built $215M AI company from $0 without VC funding.

2. A single superconductor produced the quantum junction effect for the first time, breaking physics assumptions.

3. Steve Yegge explains “vibe coding” and argues that today's AI coding tools like Claude Code aren't truly it yet, because real vibe coding means contributing zero latency and zero manual actions while the AI handles everything from implementation to debugging to production.

4. Sankalp's guide to Claude Code 2.0 shares lessons from actually using coding agents in production, including how to structure projects, when agents fail, and what makes the difference between frustration and 10x productivity.

5. A linguist explains why everyone sounds like ChatGPT now in a TED talk examining how AI language patterns are seeping into human writing and speech, creating a feedback loop where people train on AI outputs that were trained on human outputs.

6. The UK AI Security Institute released its Frontier AI Trends Report, tracking compute scaling, model capabilities, safety developments, and deployment patterns across the industry with government-backed analysis of where AI progress is actually headed.

7. This piece on the 70% productivity myth argued AI gains often feel huge but don’t show up in real throughput because teams don’t measure the metrics that really matter: cycle time, rework, and output (plus defect rates and developer satisfaction).

8. Microsoft researcher Zeyuan Allen-Zhu launched a tutorial series on the “Physics of Language Models,“ teaching how large-scale training results are often artifacts of noise rather than real model capabilities, and demonstrating how to design synthetic pretraining playgrounds that expose architectural truths using 100M-parameter models instead of wasting resources on unreliable 8B-parameter runs.

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