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Data Points

Readers’ highest hopes for AI in 2026, Part Two: A special New Year’s issue of Data Points

Usually, Data Points brings you the latest AI news, tools, models, and research in brief. But in today’s special New Year’s 2026 edition, you’ll find something different: a collection of our readers’ highest hopes for AI in 2026.

Urban street scene with diverse people walking, using smartphones, and a small robot, showcasing technology in daily life.

Data Points

Readers’ highest hopes for AI in 2026, Part One: A special New Year’s issue of Data Points

Usually, Data Points brings you the latest AI news, tools, models, and research in brief. But in today’s special New Year’s 2026 edition, you’ll find something different: a collection of our readers’ highest hopes for AI in 2026.

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Business

China’s AI Chip Industry Takes Root: China banned GPUs and TPUs from U.S. manufacturers to promote domestic chips

The United States government’s effort to deprive China of AI computing power backfired as China turned the tables and banned U.S.-designed chips.

Mice on a laptop keyboard explore, with code on screen; background features festive lights, presents.

Machine Learning Research

Agents Write Code Faster, Cheaper: Software developers used more versatile AI-powered tools to write code

Coding apps moved beyond autofill-style code completion to agentic systems that manage a wide range of software development tasks.

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Business

Data-Center Buildout Goes Big: AI’s growth spurred infrastructure investment worldwide

Top AI companies announced plans to build data centers that are projected to burn through trillions of dollars and gigawatts of electricity in the next few years.

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AI Careers

Big AI Lures Talent With Huge Pay: Meta’s hiring spree raised compensation for top AI engineers and executives

Leading AI companies fought a ferocious war for talent, luring top talent from competitors with levels of compensation more commonly associated with pro sports.

Snowman in Thinker pose on snowy landscape, with a person building it.

Machine Learning Research

Thinking Models Solve Bigger Problems: Reasoning models, beginning with OpenAI’s o1 and DeepSeek’s R1, transformed the industry

Think step by step. Explain your reasoning. Work backwards from the answer. As 2025 began, models executed these reasoning strategies only when prompted. Now most new large language models do it as a matter of course, improving performance across a wide range of tasks.

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Letters

How to Gain New Skills and Sharpen Old Ones: Give yourself a gift this holiday season by taking courses, building projects, and (maybe) reading papers.

Another year of rapid AI advances has created more opportunities than ever for anyone — including those just entering the field — to build software.

The Batch Newsletter

During Bay Area blackout, Waymo conks out: Meta’s Segment Anything family adds audio

GPT-5.2 Codex, OpenAI’s new agentic coding model. Qwen’s image layer segmentation model. A2UI, an open Google project to help agents build apps. Training robots to learn from human actions.

Engineering lab with multiple screens showing 3D mechanical designs, researchers working with advanced software.

Data Points

Gemini 3 Flash delivers fast, low-cost reasoning: Tencent’s video world model maintains scenes and geometries

GPT’s leaderboard-topping Image 1.5. Qwen’s 30B long-context reasoning model. iRobot’s bankruptcy and planned acquisition. Microsoft’s Voxel 3D generation model.

A robot examines a graph showing a rising trend in "amazingness" from 2015 to 2025

Letters

Large Language Models Are General — But Not _That_ General: Current progress in AI is piecemeal and laborious. Unforeseen breakthroughs may drive future progress, but the trend of improvement is incremental.

As amazing as LLMs are, improving their knowledge today involves a more piecemeal process than is widely appreciated.

Readers’ highest hopes for AI in 2026, Part Two: A special New Year’s issue of Data Points

Readers’ highest hopes for AI in 2026, Part One: A special New Year’s issue of Data Points

China’s AI Chip Industry Takes Root: China banned GPUs and TPUs from U.S. manufacturers to promote domestic chips

Agents Write Code Faster, Cheaper: Software developers used more versatile AI-powered tools to write code

Data-Center Buildout Goes Big: AI’s growth spurred infrastructure investment worldwide

Big AI Lures Talent With Huge Pay: Meta’s hiring spree raised compensation for top AI engineers and executives

Thinking Models Solve Bigger Problems: Reasoning models, beginning with OpenAI’s o1 and DeepSeek’s R1, transformed the industry

How to Gain New Skills and Sharpen Old Ones: Give yourself a gift this holiday season by taking courses, building projects, and (maybe) reading papers.

Top Stories of 2025! Big AI Poaches Talent, Reasoning Models Boost Performance, Agents Write Code, Data Centers Drive GDP, China Turns the Tables

During Bay Area blackout, Waymo conks out: Meta’s Segment Anything family adds audio

Gemini 3 Flash delivers fast, low-cost reasoning: Tencent’s video world model maintains scenes and geometries

Large Language Models Are General — But Not _That_ General: Current progress in AI is piecemeal and laborious. Unforeseen breakthroughs may drive future progress, but the trend of improvement is incremental.