Meta acquired Manus, a Singapore-based AI agent startup, for more than $2 billion on December 30. Manus launched in spring 2025 and reached $100 million in annual recurring revenue by December, making it one of the fastest-growing AI applications. Meta has invested heavily in building its own AI models such as Llama and Meta AI, but these internal efforts apparently moved too slowly for Zuckerberg. Rather than wait for internal teams to build agent capabilities, Meta purchase

SK Telecom, which is also South Korea’s leading mobile operator, announced the release of A.X K1 on December 28. It is a 519-billion-parameter AI model trained by a consortium of South Korean companies as part of the government's "Sovereign AI Foundation Model" project.  The model represents Korea's ambition to become a top-three global AI power alongside the United States and China. The advancement is more geopolitical than technical. At 519 billion parameters, A.X K1 is com

China has released new draft regulations aimed specifically at governing artificial intelligence systems that mimic human communication patterns.  The rules represent the first major regulatory framework that addresses the behavioral and psychological impacts of interactive AI systems. The requirements are as follows: AI service providers must actively identify users' emotional states and monitor for signs of dependence on the service. If users display extreme emotions or add

Image on Unsplash Researchers at the Indian Institute of Technology Delhi recently launched AILA (Artificially Intelligent Lab Assistant), an AI system that conducts scientific experiments with minimal human intervention.  The team demonstrated the system controlling an Atomic Force Microscope, which is a highly complex nanotechnology instrument, where it made real-time decisions during experiments and analysed results without manual supervision. AILA operates through a simpl

Image on Unsplash Nvidia announced that it is acquiring Groq (not Grok), an AI accelerator company founded in 2016 by former Google TPU engineers, for approximately $20 billion. It is Nvidia's largest acquisition ever. Groq built specialized hardware designed specifically for AI inference, which is the process of running trained models on new data. While everyone focuses on training the biggest models, Groq focused on running them efficiently at scale. The company built chips

Image on Unsplash Fujitsu announced on 24th December the development of Kozuchi Physical AI 1.0, a framework integrating physical and agentic AI. The technology combines NVIDIA's software stack with Fujitsu's own systems to automate confidential business workflows. But the more significant announcement came the same day. The University of Tokyo and Fujitsu launched a trial starting in January 2026 to shift computational workloads between regional data centers based on real-ti

Image generated with Gemini Making Science, a global digital acceleration consultancy, announced on December 23 the launch of AWAKE Venture Studio. The model is designed to identify, prototype and scale both internal proprietary AI solutions and independent AI-native startups. The studio operates from centers in Chicago, Madrid and Tbilisi. The company claims to have achieved a 2x acceleration in tech feature development through its internal integration of AI agents. One star

Image generated with Gemini Digantara announced that it's pivoting from space debris tracking to missile detection. The Indian startup launched its first commercial surveillance satellite called SCOT in January 2025 and now plans to launch 15 more satellites by 2026-27 specifically for tracking missiles and early warning systems. CEO Anirudh Sharma explained the logic behind this. The company's expertise came from monitoring fast moving space objects in low Earth orbit. That

Image on Unsplash Adobe announced on December 16 that Firefly is now offering unlimited video generation. This removes the friction points that used to slow down AI video creation. No more credits, generation limits, and waiting periods between attempts. Earlier this year, OpenAI released Sora 2, Google expanded Veo 3, and a handful of Chinese companies built models that can generate multi-minute videos with solid continuity. The video generation market has suddenly matured t

Image on Unsplash Tata Consultancy Services announced that it has upgraded TCS BaNCS, its core banking platform, with a new tool called AI Compass. The tool lets banks build and use their own AI agents without writing code. Banks have been waiting for tools that let them implement AI without infrastructure investment or hiring specialized teams. TCS BaNCS AI Compass addresses that directly. It includes pre-built agents for common banking use cases, machine learning capabiliti