ThursdAI - The top AI news from the past week
ThursdAI - Jan 1 2026 - Will Brown Interview + Nvidia buys Groq, Meta buys Manus, Qwen Image 2412 & Alex New Year greetings
· Summarized
Key takeaways
- Major AI acquisitions including Meta's purchase of Manus.ai and NVIDIA's acquisition of Groq highlight ongoing consolidation in the industry.
- The interview with Will Brown emphasizes the significance of RL environments in AI training and model development.
- The episode reflects on the past year's achievements in AI while setting an enthusiastic tone for advancements in 2026.
Summary
Introduction and New Year Reflections
Host Alex Volko kicks off the episode by welcoming listeners into the new year and reflecting on the past year in AI. He highlights the importance of consistency and shares his gratitude towards guests and co-hosts who have contributed to the show. Despite recording during a quiet week due to the holidays, he prepares to offer a recap of recent significant AI news.
Latest AI Acquisitions and Developments
Alex discusses the latest major acquisitions in the AI space, including Meta's purchase of Manus.ai and NVIDIA's acquisition of Groq for $20 billion. He emphasizes the strategic significance of these acquisitions and shares insights on the expected impacts on the industry. Alex also mentions Tencent's and Alibaba's new technological contributions, such as the HY-MT1.5 translation models and Qwen-Image-2512 respectively.
Interview with Will Brown
The episode features an in-depth interview with Will Brown from Prime Intellect. Will shares his thoughts on Reinforcement Learning (RL) environments and their applications, touching on innovations in AI models like ChatGPT-5.1. The conversation dives into how models learn through feedback mechanisms and the importance of structured data in training, as well as the dynamics of creativity in AI.
Closing Thoughts and Future Outlook
Alex wraps up the episode by expressing optimism for the new year and reiterates his commitment to keep listeners informed about AI advancements. He hints at exciting developments to come in the show, promising a live episode next week.
Sponsors
- Prime Intellect · Will is a researcher at Prime Intellect (big fans on WandB btw!) and is very known on X as a hot takes ML person, often going viral for tons of memes!
- Tencent · Tencent open-sources HY-MT1.5 translation models with 1.8B edge-deployable and 7B cloud variants supporting 33 languages.
- Alibaba · Alibaba’s Qwen-Image-2512 drops on New Year’s Eve as strongest open-source text-to-image model, topping AI Arena with photorealistic humans and sharper textures.
Show notes
Hey all,
Happy new year! This is Alex, writing to you for the very fresh start of this year, it’s 2026 already, can you believe it?
There was no live stream today, I figured the cohosts deserve a break and honestly it was a very slow week. Even the chinese labs who don’t really celebrate X-mas and new years didn’t come out with a banger AFAIK.
ThursdAI - AI moves fast, we’re here to make sure you never miss a thing! Subscribe :)
Tho I thought it was an incredible opportunity to finally post the Will Brow interview I recorded in November during the AI Engineer conference.
Will is a researcher at Prime Intellect (big fans on WandB btw!) and is very known on X as a hot takes ML person, often going viral for tons of memes!
Will is the creator and maintainer of the Verifiers library (Github) and his talk at AI Engineer was all about RL Environments (what they are, you can hear in the interview, I asked him!)
TL;DR last week of 2025 in AI
Besides this, my job here is to keep you up to date, and honestly this was very easy this week, as… almost nothing has happened, but here we go:
Meta buys Manus
The year ended with 2 huge acquisitions / aquihires. First we got the news from Alex Wang that Meta has bought Manus.ai which is an agentic AI startup we covered back in March for an undisclosed amount (folks claim $2-3B)
The most interesting thing here is that Manus is a Chinese company, and this deal requires very specific severance from Chinese operations.
Jensen goes on a new years spending spree, Nvidia buys Groq (not GROK) for $20B
Groq which we covered often here, and are great friends, is going to NVIDIA, in a… very interesting acqui-hire, which is a “non binding license” + most of Groq top employees apparently are going to NVIDIA. Jonathan Ross the CEO of Groq, was the co-creator of the TPU chips at Google before founding Groq, so this seems like a very strategic aquihire for NVIDIA! Congrats to our friends from Groq on this amazing news for the new year!
Tencent open-sources HY-MT1.5 translation models with 1.8B edge-deployable and 7B cloud variants supporting 33 languages (X, HF, HF, GitHub)
It seems that everyone’s is trying to de-throne whisper and this latest attempt from Tencent is a interesting one. a 1.8B and 7B translation models with very interesting stats.
Alibaba’s Qwen-Image-2512 drops on New Year’s Eve as strongest open-source text-to-image model, topping AI Arena with photorealistic humans and sharper textures (X, HF, Arxiv)
Our friends in Tongyi decided to give is a new years present in the form of an updated Qwen-image, with much improved realism
That’s it folks, this was a quick one, hopefully you all had an amazing new year celebration, and are gearing up to an eventful and crazy 2026.
I wish you all happiness, excitement and energy to keep up with everything in the new year, and will make sure that we’re here to keep you up to date as always!
P.S - I got a little news of my own this yesterday, not related to AI. She said yes 🎉
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