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ALETH / AI-BRIEF / 2026-01-31 / SILVER LEAVES DEEPMIND TO BUILD NEW SUPERINTELLIGENCE

Silver leaves DeepMind to build new superintelligence

Also this week: OpenAI sought $100bn from strategic investors, DeepMind published AlphaGenome in Nature and Moonshot’s Kimi K2.5 introduced a self-directed swarm of up to 100 agents.

The Aleth Briefs trace each story to its original source and show how the week unfolded.

The week in five lines:

Browse by day:

Weekend (24-25 January)

Guardian tests found GPT-5.2 citing Grokipedia, xAI’s machine-written encyclopedia, across a range of ChatGPT queries.

The citations covered subjects including an Iranian conglomerate and Holocaust denier David Irving. Grokipedia’s entries have been criticised for reproducing fringe claims without editorial checks; OpenAI said GPT-5.2 searches “a broad range of publicly available sources and viewpoints“ with safeguards against harmful content.

Monday 26 January

The European Commission opened formal proceedings against X Grok.

The probe examines whether X properly assessed and mitigated risks from Grok’s image tools after they generated manipulated sexual imagery, including potential child sexual abuse material. It also extends the Commission’s existing DSA investigation into X’s recommender systems.

Microsoft unveiled Maia 200, its second-generation AI accelerator

Microsoft says the 3nm chip beats Amazon’s Trainium3 on FP4 performance and improves inference performance per dollar by 30% over its current fleet. Evidence of hyperscalers vertically integrating around inference rather than renting Nvidia capacity.

Qwen released Qwen3-Max-Thinking, its flagship reasoning model, claiming performance comparable to GPT-5.2 Thinking and Claude Opus 4.5.

Artificial Analysis scored it behind several open-weight Chinese rivals DeepSeek V3.2, GLM-4.7 and Kimi K2.5, underlining how competitive China’s models have become.

Dario Amodei published The Adolescence of Technology, warning that powerful AI could arrive within one to two years.

The Anthropic chief executive groups the risks into autonomy, misuse for destruction, misuse for seizing power, economic disruption and indirect societal effects, and frames the moment as a test of whether civilisation is mature enough to hold the power it is building. He argues democracies should limit their own use of powerful AI so that defending against autocratic rivals does not make them resemble them.

Tuesday 27 January

Moonshot AI released Kimi K2.5 including a self-directed 100-agent swarm for complex tasks.

The model builds on Kimi K2 with roughly 15T additional mixed visual and text tokens, and can orchestrate up to 100 sub-agents across 1,500 parallel tool calls, cutting execution time by up to 4.5x versus a single agent.

The European Commission opened proceedings on Google’s Android interoperability and search-data obligations.

The DMA proceedings will define how rival AI assistants access Android features used by Gemini and how search and chatbot providers obtain ranking and query data. It targets the distribution layer where default access routes users to AI assistants.

The UK’s Department for Science, Innovation and Technology (DSIT) picked Anthropic to build a Claude-powered assistant for GOV.UK.

The pilot starts with employment services, helping users find work, training and support. It begins later in 2026 under the government’s “Scan, Pilot, Scale” framework.

New Mexico court filings allege Mark Zuckerberg approved letting minors use AI companions that Meta safety staff warned could hold sexual conversations.

Internal messages show safety staff objecting to romantic scenarios involving under-18s and refer to a “Mark decision” blocking parental controls. Meta says the filing selectively presents internal discussions. Trial is set for February.

OpenAI introduced Prism, a free workspace for scientific writing with GPT-5.2.

Built on the acquired Crixet LaTeX platform, it combines writing, references and literature search in one tool for ChatGPT users.

The head of the US Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency uploaded official use only files into the public version of ChatGPT, Politico reported.

The uploads triggered automated security alerts. CISA said the use was short-term and authorised, while DHS examined if it exposed sensitive government information.

Wednesday 28 January

Reuters reported that Beijing cleared ByteDance, Alibaba and Tencent to buy more than 400,000 Nvidia H200s, worth about $10bn.

Reuters reported the first import approval of its kind, granted during Jensen Huang’s visit to China. Conditions are being finalised, including to buy domestic chips too.

Google DeepMind published AlphaGenome in Nature, with code and weights released for noncommercial research.

The model reads 1 Mb of DNA and predicts thousands of functional genomic tracks at base-pair resolution - splice-site usage, chromatin accessibility and variant effects on gene expression among them - extending the lab’s biology work beyond protein structure into how the genome is read and regulated.

Experts called the resolution on non-coding DNA a step from theoretical interest to practical utility, while noting cell-type-specific regulation remains hard.

Waymo disclosed that one of its robotaxis struck a child at under 6 mph near a Santa Monica elementary school on 23 January.

The vehicle braked from about 17 mph before impact. The child sustained minor injuries, and NHTSA opened an investigation into whether the vehicle exercised appropriate caution near a school at drop-off time.

Universal Music Publishing Group, Concord and ABKCO sued Anthropic for more than $3bn over alleged ‘brazen’ copyright infringement involving >20,000 songs.

The publishers allege Anthropic downloaded pirated songbooks via BitTorrent and used them for training. It puts a larger potential price on training-data provenance.

Meta guided 2026 capital spending to as much as $135bn.

The $115bn-135bn range compares with $72.2bn in 2025, with Meta tying the increase to Superintelligence Labs and its core business. Q4 revenue +24% to $59.9bn.

Microsoft reported capital expenditures of $37.5bn and disclosed that OpenAI accounted for 45% of its $625bn commercial backlog.

Revenue rose 17% to $81.3bn, with Microsoft Cloud up 26% to $51.5bn. Excluding OpenAI, the remaining commercial backlog still grew 28%.

OpenAI is seeking about $100bn from strategic investors.

The FT reported that SoftBank was close to another $30bn investment, with OpenAI also in talks with Amazon, Nvidia and sovereign wealth funds. Much of the capital could ultimately flow back through chips, cloud and infrastructure contracts.

Thursday 29 January

The WSJ reported that OpenAI is preparing for a possible Q4 2026 IPO.

The company has begun informal talks with banks and is building out its finance team, with executives reportedly concerned Anthropic could list first.

The Pentagon and Anthropic are at a standstill over safeguards on military use of Claude, Reuters reported.

The dispute centres on Anthropic’s limits around autonomous weapons targeting and US domestic surveillance. Pentagon officials argue the government can deploy commercial AI regardless of company usage policies.

Friday 30 January

Nvidia’s plan to invest up to $100bn in OpenAI has reportedly stalled.

The WSJ reported that Jensen Huang had privately stressed the September 2025 letter of intent was non-binding, while talks shifted towards an equity investment of tens of billions in OpenAI’s current round.

David Silver left Google DeepMind to found Ineffable Intelligence.

The well-known AlphaGo, AlphaZero and MuZero architect, and one of DeepMind’s first employees, is building a London startup around reinforcement learning (RL), aiming for an endlessly learning superintelligence that discovers knowledge for itself.

In what he calls an “era of experience”, Silver argues LLMs remain constrained by human knowledge, including through post-training based on human feedback. His overriding thesis is that, to reach superintelligence, AI will not just have to move beyond human knowledge. It will need to discard it and learn to achieve goals from scratch, working from first principles.

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