Hollywood calls it bootlegging. Investors say $6.5 billion. MiniMax built the top Chinese AI app in America—then Disney sued. With 70% of revenue overseas, the startup tests whether Chinese AI can scale while depending on Western courts.
San Francisco | January 9, 2026 CES 2026 wraps today in Las Vegas, and the floor plan told the story before
Chinese manufacturers shipped 39% of global humanoid robots in 2025. Tesla shipped 1%. At CES 2026, the gap between American roadmaps and Chinese products defined the exhibition floor. The supply chain tells a story pricing alone can't explain.
San Francisco | January 9, 2026
CES 2026 wraps today in Las Vegas, and the floor plan told the story before the demos started. TCL claimed Samsung's anchor position. Chinese companies ran 21 of the 38 humanoid robot booths. AgiBot alone shipped 5,168 units last year. Tesla, Figure, and Agility combined? 450. The gap isn't closing.
Back in Boston, a different kind of bet. The executive overseeing OpenAI's rollout at Boston Children's Hospital told Bloomberg an AI adverse event is "very likely." Then he signed the contract anyway.
China builds the robots. America builds the pitch decks. Hospitals gamble with patients who never got a vote.
Stay curious,
Marcus Schuler
CES 2026 closes today. TCL owns the anchor position Samsung held for twenty years. Chinese companies dominate the humanoid floor. The numbers aren't close.
AgiBot shipped 5,168 humanoid robots in 2025, grabbing 39 percent of global volume. Unitree took 32 percent with 4,200 units. Tesla's Optimus? One percent. Add Tesla, Figure AI, and Agility Robotics together: 450 units total. One Chinese startup outshipped America's top three combined by a factor of eleven.
Pricing explains part of it. Unitree's entry model runs $6,000. AgiBot charges $14,000. Tesla floats $20,000 to $30,000 for Optimus, but those units aren't shipping. The supply chain explains the rest. Chinese actuators cost $28. Imported equivalents run $280. A 90 percent cost collapse that no tariff can erase.
Europe sent 300 companies. China sent 942. Samsung retreated to a private suite at the Wynn. The floor plan told the truth.
Why This Matters:
Marcus Schuler
Boston Children's Hospital is rolling out OpenAI's healthcare product. The executive overseeing the deployment expects it to hurt someone.
John Brownstein leads innovation at Boston Children's. He's the one signing off on the AI integration. He's also the one telling Bloomberg he's "worried about the potential of an AI adverse event that could set the whole field back."
Then he added: "I think it's very likely we'll see it."
That's not a critic. That's the buyer. A senior executive at one of America's top pediatric institutions is binding his hospital to technology he predicts will probably injure a patient.
The calculation is institutional, not clinical. The benefits accrue to the organization. The risks land on families who had no say in the matter.
Why This Matters:
Robert Brown
Prompt:
Children's-book illustration on a clean white background, featuring a tiny ladybug and a friendly sea turtle kissing each other warmly. Very simple, iconic shapes with a slightly abstract feel. Thick playful crayon lines and soft watercolor fills, child-like proportions, expressive loving and happy faces. Floating hearts, stars, and gentle confetti shapes emphasize affection. Vibrant but clean color palette. Crayon + watercolor mixed texture, visible hand-drawn strokes, no realism. Light, airy, imaginative, charming, full of wonder.
AI is great at agreeing with you. These prompts make it useful instead.
The Devil's Advocate
"You are a skeptical but fair board member. I'm about to make a decision: [describe decision]. Your job is to find the three weakest points in my reasoning and explain what I might be missing. Don't be polite. Be useful."
The Negotiation Sparring Partner
"I want to practice negotiating [specific ask]. You will play my counterpart and push back realistically. After each exchange, grade my response A-F using negotiation science and explain what I did well or poorly. Start with a moderate scenario. Make it harder if I do well."
The Pre-Mortem
"Imagine it's one year from now and [project/decision] has completely failed. Write a post-mortem explaining the three most likely reasons it went wrong. Be specific and uncomfortable."
The pattern: stop asking AI to validate. Start asking it to challenge.
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Tutorial:
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The venture capital firm behind early bets on Airbnb and Coinbase closed more than $15 billion in new capital. The haul includes $6.75 billion for its fifth growth fund and $3 billion for unspecified "other venture strategies."
Snowflake announced its intent to acquire Observe, a monitoring platform built natively on Snowflake's database infrastructure. The deal brings observability capabilities in-house and tightens the company's grip on enterprise data workflows.
Elon Musk's AI company plans to build a third data center in the Memphis area, this one called MACROHARDRR in Southaven, Mississippi. Governor Tate Reeves announced the investment, which expands xAI's regional compute footprint significantly.
The Nvidia-backed cloud provider is in advanced talks with Mubadala Capital to raise more than $350 million before going public in the second half of 2026. Lambda rents access to AI chips and counts Nvidia itself as a customer.
Chinese generative AI startup MiniMax surged on its first trading day after raising $619 million in its IPO. The company priced shares at roughly $21.17, with strong demand reflecting continued appetite for AI plays in Asia.
Meta signed a 20-year agreement with Vistra for over 2,600 megawatts of nuclear energy and committed to support new reactor projects from TerraPower and Oklo. The deal ranks among the largest corporate nuclear commitments ever.
X announced it will limit Grok's image tools to paying subscribers following criticism over sexually explicit and violent imagery. The platform faced regulatory threats before making the change.
Musk's AI startup reported a $1.46 billion quarterly loss, up from $1 billion in Q1, as data center spending accelerates. The company told investors it plans to develop AI systems for Tesla's humanoid robot.
Meta tapped Bill McGinley, the former top lawyer for Musk's Department of Government Efficiency, as a lobbyist according to new government filings. McGinley is a veteran Republican operative with Trump administration ties.
Financial filings show X's UK revenue fell from £69 million to £29 million in 2024 as advertisers continued fleeing over content concerns. Pre-tax profits collapsed from £2.2 million to £767,000.
Nvidia appointed Alison Wagonfeld, currently VP of Marketing at Google Cloud, as its first CMO. She reports directly to Jensen Huang, signaling the chip maker's push to expand brand visibility.
Seattle-based Spangle AI closed a $15 million Series A led by NewRoad Capital at a $100 million valuation. The company builds AI tools that generate customized storefronts for online retailers in real-time.
Total stablecoin volumes rose 72% year-over-year to $33 trillion, with Circle's USDC leading at $18.3 trillion versus Tether's $13.3 trillion. The sector benefited from favorable crypto policies under the Trump administration.
Millennials continue turning to the stripped-down classifieds site for jobs, housing, and human connection. Wired reports users prefer its straightforward approach over AI-driven alternatives that dominate modern platforms.
Abridge wants to make clinical documentation disappear. The Pittsburgh company builds ambient AI that listens to doctor-patient conversations and writes the notes. 🏥
Founders
Dr. Shivdev Rao started Abridge in 2018 after watching clinicians drown in paperwork. Pittsburgh roots matter here. The city sits at the intersection of medicine and machine learning. In 2023, ML researcher Zachary Lipton joined as Chief Scientific Officer, adding academic credibility to the product push.
Product
An ambient scribe that captures conversations, filters out small talk, and drafts structured clinical notes with evidence links back to the transcript. The integration story is the product story. Abridge plugs into Epic, which means clinicians edit and sign in the same place they already work. Multilingual support and medical terminology handling round out the pitch.
Competition
Brutal. Microsoft Nuance owns the legacy dictation market. Ambience and Suki chase the same ambient opportunity. Epic itself keeps adding AI capabilities. The real threat: if EHR vendors bundle a "good enough" scribe, they can undercut pricing and simplify procurement. Abridge bets it can win on accuracy and traceability.
Financing 💰
$250M in February 2025, then $300M Series E in June 2025 at a $5.3B valuation. Elad Gil and IVP co-led. Andreessen Horowitz in the mix. Four months between raises signals investor urgency around the category.
Future ⭐⭐⭐⭐
Abridge has momentum, capital, and the right integrations. The risk is commoditization. If ambient scribing becomes table stakes, differentiation shifts to accuracy, specialty handling, and analytics. The witty irony: Abridge wins by becoming invisible. If clinicians stop noticing documentation, that's the goal. 🩺
San Francisco | January 8, 2026 OpenAI launched a healthcare product that connects to 2.2 million providers. The catch: by
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Las Vegas | January 6, 2025 Four AI CEOs stood on stage at CES to praise their chip supplier. Not their
San Francisco | December 17 Amazon is negotiating a $10 billion stake in OpenAI that would push the valuation past $500
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