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The following is the feed for Thursday, January 15, 2026

1) New AI models are starting to crack high-level math problems | TechCrunch

by Russell Brandom | techcrunch.com | Thursday, January 15, 2026

Selected Quotes: "AI tools have become ubiquitous in mathematics, from formalization-oriented LLMs like Harmonic’s Aristotle to literature review tools like OpenAI’s deep research...It’s a long way from AI systems being able to do math without human intervention, but it’s clear that there’s an important role for large models to play...Formalization doesn’t require use of AI or even computers, but a new crop of automated tools have made the process far easier."

*Source: https://techcrunch.com/2026/01/14/ai-models-are-starting-to-crack-high-level-math-problems/

2) New What’s Emerging in Financial AI: From Foundation Models to Compliance-as-Code - Gradient Flow

by Ben Lorica | gradientflow.com | Thursday, January 15, 2026

Selected Quotes: "Financial analysis will transition from text-heavy Large Language Models (LLMs) to Multimodal Financial Foundation Models (MFFMs) capable of ingesting interleaved data streams...Generative models are now used to create multimodal datasets that mimic proprietary distributions — preserving the statistical properties of sensitive data without exposing underlying records...With strict regulatory constraints on data sharing, the focus is turning toward adapting LLMs for financial tasks without exposing sensitive information to third-party providers."

*Source: https://gradientflow.com/whats-emerging-in-financial-ai-from-foundation-models-to-compliance-as-code/

3) What you need to know — and do — about AI inferencing

www.cio.com | Wednesday, January 14, 2026

Selected Quotes: "A number of providers offer inference server software, and this pathway to inference bridges some of the gaps in the DIY and IaaS models...Deploying inference servers and applications involves hardware orchestration, networking and storage management and the need to optimize for both performance and cost...There are endless use cases for inferencing in enterprise applications, but I find it useful to explain the impact of inference in terms of applications in healthcare and finance."

*Source: https://www.cio.com/article/4116328/what-you-need-to-know-and-do-about-ai-inferencing.html

4) AI hallucination: The math behind the beautiful lies by chatbots – Firstpost

www.firstpost.com | Wednesday, January 14, 2026

Selected Quotes: "As AI seeps deeper into workplaces, schools, and daily life, the potential for misinformation wrapped in perfect grammar is growing into one of technology’s defining threats...The research found that the very mechanism by which language models operate, predicting each word in a sentence one after another, based on probability, makes them prone to inaccuracies...What seemed like a one-off embarrassment quickly became a symbol of a much deeper problem: artificial intelligence systems that can’t always tell fact from fiction."

*Source: https://www.firstpost.com/tech/ai-hallucination-the-maths-behind-the-beautiful-lies-by-chatbots-ws-e-13968515.html

5) Beyond the hype: 4 critical misconceptions derailing enterprise AI adoption

www.cio.com | Wednesday, January 14, 2026

Selected Quotes: "Critically, organizations must adopt data democratization concepts that make quality data accessible across organizational boundaries while maintaining appropriate governance and security controls...The infrastructure must support not only centralized data engineering teams but also distributed business users who can access, understand and utilize data for AI-driven decision-making...This disconnect reveals executives’ tendency to overestimate data readiness while underinvesting in the governance, integration and quality management that AI systems require."

*Source: https://www.cio.com/article/4116299/beyond-the-hype-4-critical-misconceptions-derailing-enterprise-ai-adoption.html

6) How AI Helps Reduce False Alarms in Security Systems

opendatascience.com | Wednesday, January 14, 2026

Selected Quotes: "Over time, frequent false positives create alarm fatigue, highlighting a trust collapse dynamic where, after three or four false alarms, people may stop trusting them altogether...Object recognition, acoustic classification, sensor fusion, anomaly detection, and predictive modeling help eliminate false positives while preserving detection sensitivity...Data fusion is also a core data science problem, aligning heterogeneous streams, handling missingness and learning decision rules."

*Source: https://opendatascience.com/how-ai-helps-reduce-false-alarms-in-security-systems/

7) India ‘Talks’ The AI Walk

by Ankush Das | inc42.com | Wednesday, January 14, 2026

Selected Quotes: "Stay ahead with the latest news, funding, startup financials, & governments policies on the hottest tech industries in the Indian startup ecosystem...Learn from India’s top 1% of D2C founders & experts through actionable insights, proven strategies and tactics on how to launch a successful D2C Brand in 6 weeks...Voice AI systems are already helping businesses detect missed upsell opportunities, guide users through complex onboarding flows, and convert conversations into operational indicators."

*Source: https://inc42.com/features/india-talks-the-ai-walk/

8) Why is Pentagon embracing Elon Musk’s controversial AI Grok? – Firstpost

www.firstpost.com | Wednesday, January 14, 2026

Selected Quotes: "Hegseth said the Department of Defense would make extensive amounts of military and intelligence data available to AI systems...Speaking from SpaceX’s headquarters in Texas on Monday, Hegseth said the military would soon rely on advanced commercial AI systems across its digital infrastructure...”Italy’s data protection authority said the use of AI to create non-consensual deepfake images could amount to serious privacy violations and, in some cases, criminal offenses."

*Source: https://www.firstpost.com/explainers/why-pentagon-embracing-elon-musk-grok-ai-13968634.html

9) McKinsey Asks Graduates to Use AI Chatbot in Recruitment Process

opendatascience.com | Wednesday, January 14, 2026

Selected Quotes: "In the AI portion, candidates typically receive a business scenario similar to real consulting work, then use Lilli to explore information, test ideas, and refine insights...McKinsey is asking some graduate candidates to collaborate with an internal AI chatbot during final-round interviews...As CaseBasix puts it, candidates are expected to “prompt the AI, review its output, and apply judgment to produce a clear and structured response."

*Source: https://opendatascience.com/mckinsey-asks-graduates-to-use-ai-chatbot-in-recruitment-process/

10) Topic Modeling Techniques for 2026: Seeded Modeling, LLM Integration, and Data Summaries | Towards Data Science

by Petr Koráb | towardsdatascience.com | Wednesday, January 14, 2026

Selected Quotes: "What if you could condition a topic model to only extract relevant topics to your data question? This is precisely what seeded topic modelling is used for...Seeded KeyNMF topic model combines text prompts with the latest topic model to concentrate modelling on a certain problem...It is, in many aspects, very similar to older topic models, as it formulates topic discovery in terms of matrix factorization."

*Source: https://towardsdatascience.com/topic-modeling-techniques-for-2026-seeded-modeling-llm-integration-and-data-summaries/

11) What Is a Knowledge Graph — and Why It Matters | Towards Data Science

by Steve Hedden | towardsdatascience.com | Wednesday, January 14, 2026

Selected Quotes: "Knowledge graphs facilitate good data governance by connecting domain knowledge to knowledge about the organization itself, such as business processes, org structure, ownership, roles, and policies...Financial services firms, like those in healthcare, rely on knowledge graph approaches to support enterprise data governance...How has healthcare made this progress? And why does healthcare continue to attract disproportionate investment in AI today? It’s not simply better data; it’s better structure around knowledge."

*Source: https://towardsdatascience.com/what-is-a-knowledge-graph-and-why-it-matters/

12) I listened to earbuds with Bose's AI noise cancelling, and can't go back to regular ANC

www.zdnet.com | Wednesday, January 14, 2026

Selected Quotes: "There's another way your earbuds use AI that isn't as exciting to talk about, but when it's done well, it's incredibly valuable: AI-powered adaptive noise cancellation...Traditional active noise cancellation (ANC) uses microphones to detect the noises in your environment and deploy an equal-but-opposite frequency to cancel the noise...Adaptive active noise cancellation utilizes trained algorithms to classify, predict, and cancel external noises, adjusting to the varying volume levels in your environment."

*Source: https://www.zdnet.com/article/bose-quietcomfort-ultra-earbuds-2-hands-on/

13) A Google VP explains why ads make sense in AI search but not Gemini — yet

www.businessinsider.com | Wednesday, January 14, 2026

Selected Quotes: "Google's testing of ads in AI Mode isn't as far along and presents more challenges when trying to convert the traditional search ads playbook for the AI era...Google VP of global ads, Dan Taylor, said the company is focused on bringing ads to AI Overviews and AI Mode...What Google has learned from ads in AI search so farTaylor said that more than 80% of Google's advertisers are currently using some form of AI-powered search functionality."

*Source: https://www.businessinsider.com/google-vp-says-ads-arent-coming-to-gemini-yet-why-2026-1

14) JD Sports brings AI shopping

by Ana-Maria Stanciuc | thenextweb.com | Wednesday, January 14, 2026

Selected Quotes: "Commercetools and Stripe emphasize that all payment and fulfillment data still flow through JD’s systems – the retailer retains control over inventory, pricing, and customer experience...Retailers must ensure that payments remain secure, that inventory and pricing are accurate in real time, and that the brand experience doesn’t dissolve into a generic AI response...Stripe handles the payment and fraud protection, while commercetools’ AI Hub keeps JD’s product data, pricing and availability in sync across all AI channels."

*Source: https://thenextweb.com/news/jd-sports-brings-ai-shopping

15) From humanoid robots to agentic AI, I learned what retail insiders are buzzing about at a major industry conference

www.businessinsider.com | Wednesday, January 14, 2026

Selected Quotes: "Each year, the National Retail Federation, a leading industry trade group, hosts one of the industry's largest conferences, known as Retail's Big Show...True Religion's chief marketing officer, Kristen D'Arcy, who moderated the panel, said shoppers are craving authenticity in the world of AI-generated content, and it's making them more discerning...Young people seem to still crave some of the old-school fundamentals that define retail: quality, customer service, and in-store experiences."

*Source: https://www.businessinsider.com/what-retail-leaders-said-ai-more-at-nrf-big-show-2026-1

16) Signal's Founder Turns His Attention to AI's Privacy Problem

by Bruce Gil | gizmodo.com | Wednesday, January 14, 2026

Selected Quotes: "Confer, an open source chatbot, encrypts both prompts and responses so companies and advertisers can’t access user data...All of this is done to keep users’ data secure, and not, as Marlinspike puts it, sent to “a data lake specifically designed for extracting meaning and context...Prompts are encrypted on a user’s computer or phone and sent to Confer’s servers in that form, then decrypted only in a secure data environment to generate a response."

*Source: https://gizmodo.com/signals-founder-turns-his-attention-to-ais-privacy-problem-2000709897

17) AI PCs to gain speed, cut cloud costs — and help workers upskill

www.computerworld.com | Tuesday, January 13, 2026

Selected Quotes: "And users can create their own offline agentic workflows by combining multiple AI tools and models, said Namee Oberst, co-founder of AI software company LLMware...While it’s taken some time for AI chips to reach maturity, the enabling software and models are coming together at the right time, Darren Oberst said...Data security is critical for companies, which are investigating on-site or edge AI processing to mitigate risks and other concerns related to sending data to the cloud, Noskey said."

*Source: https://www.computerworld.com/article/4115620/ai-pcs-to-gain-speed-cut-cloud-costs-and-help-workers-upskill.html

18) Slack launches revamped Slackbot AI assistant

www.computerworld.com | Tuesday, January 13, 2026

Selected Quotes: "Slackbot then turned the feedback into a product brief and a sprint plan, creating canvas documents with information for the engineering team, he said...This means it immediately has knowledge of a user’s work life, with access to conversation and files, as well as enterprise data from connected sources...“Since Slack is often integrated across a large number of enterprise applications, it a logical choice to create an enterprise search that lives within the flow of work."

*Source: https://www.computerworld.com/article/4116253/slack-launches-revamped-slackbot-ai-assistant.html

19) Emerging AI patterns in finance (what to watch in 2026) - Gradient Flow

by Ben Lorica | gradientflow.com | Tuesday, January 13, 2026

*Source: https://gradientflow.com/emerging-ai-patterns-in-finance-what-to-watch-in-2026/

20) AI Skills

by Alexandru Stan | thenextweb.com | Tuesday, January 13, 2026

Selected Quotes: "If models represent intelligence and agents represent coordination, Skills are where AI becomes operational and valuable in the real world...Bigger models, faster models, smarter models...Models perform analysis and reasoning at each step, and the Skill delivers a structured outcome such as a recommendation, report, decision, or document."

*Source: https://thenextweb.com/news/ai-skills

21) Converge Bio raises $25M, backed by Bessemer and execs from Meta, OpenAI, Wiz | TechCrunch

by Kate Park | techcrunch.com | Tuesday, January 13, 2026

Selected Quotes: "Large language models are gaining attention in drug discovery for their ability to analyze biological sequences and suggest new molecules, but challenges like hallucinations and accuracy remain...The startup has already introduced three discrete AI systems: one for antibody design, one for protein yield optimization, and one for biomarker and target discovery...In practice, Converge trains generative models on DNA, RNA, and protein sequences then plugs them into pharma and biotech’s workflows to speed up drug development."

*Source: https://techcrunch.com/2026/01/13/ai-drug-discovery-startup-converge-bio-pulls-in-25m-from-bessemer-and-execs-from-meta-openai-and-wiz/

22) A Timely Pivot: How GenAI Allowed SpeakX To Find A New Edtech Mission

by Ankush Das | inc42.com | Tuesday, January 13, 2026

Selected Quotes: "Stay ahead with the latest news, funding, startup financials, & governments policies on the hottest tech industries in the Indian startup ecosystem...Learn from India’s top 1% of D2C founders & experts through actionable insights, proven strategies and tactics on how to launch a successful D2C Brand in 6 weeks...Learn from India's top 1% D2C founders and experts through actionable insights, proven strategies and tactics on how to 10X your D2C brand."

*Source: https://inc42.com/startups/a-timely-pivot-how-genai-allowed-speakx-to-find-a-new-edtech-mission/

23) Can Google save Apple AI? Gemini to power a new, personalized Siri

www.zdnet.com | Tuesday, January 13, 2026

Selected Quotes: "Also: How to remove Copilot AI from Windows 11 today"The next generation of Apple Foundation Models will be based on Google's Gemini models and cloud technology," the companies said...Also: How I used ChatGPT's $20 Plus plan to fix a nightmare bug - fastThe new features and skills on Siri's to-do list all sound interesting and potentially useful...When to expect the new SiriReports about the new and improved assistant, known as LLM Siri, began to appear in late 2024."

*Source: https://www.zdnet.com/article/gemini-apple-intelligence-siri-upgrade/

24) CES showed me why Chinese tech companies feel so optimistic

www.technologyreview.com | Tuesday, January 13, 2026

Selected Quotes: "CES, the Consumer Electronics Show, is the world’s biggest tech show, where companies launch new gadgets and announce new developments, and it happens every January...Beyond flexing dynamic movements like these there were also impressive showcases of dexterity: Robots could be seen folding paper pinwheels, doing laundry, playing piano, and even making latte art...Chinese exhibitors accounted for nearly a quarter of all companies at the show, and in pockets like AI hardware and robotics, China’s presence felt especially dominant."

*Source: https://www.technologyreview.com/2026/01/12/1131193/ces-showed-me-why-chinese-tech-companies-feel-so-optimistic/

25) The Download: sodium-ion batteries and China’s bright tech future

www.technologyreview.com | Tuesday, January 13, 2026

Selected Quotes: "CES, the Consumer Electronics Show, is the world’s biggest tech show, where companies launch new gadgets and announce new developments, and it happens every January...By transforming random noise into coherent patterns, diffusion models can generate new images, videos, or speech, guided by text prompts or other input data...” —A user on social media platform RedNote explains why a new app called ‘Are you dead’ has become popular in China, Business Insider reports."

*Source: https://www.technologyreview.com/2026/01/13/1131245/the-download-sodium-ion-batteries-and-chinas-bright-tech-future/