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ALETH / AI-BRIEF / 2026-01-10 / TWO CHINESE AI LABS GO PUBLIC

Two Chinese AI labs go public

Also this week: Nvidia puts Vera Rubin into production, regulators close in on Grok and Anthropic reportedly raising at a $350bn valuation.

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 (3-4 January)

AWS raised prices for EC2 Capacity Blocks for ML by about 15%, in a change posted quietly on Saturday.

The p5e.48xlarge rose from $34.61 to $39.80 an hour in most regions. AWS said the adjustment “reflects the supply/demand patterns we expect this quarter“. The move underscores hardware constraints in the AI ecosystem - specifically tight supply of H200 AI accelerators - and the reality that hyperscalers are passing downstream hardware cost increases directly onto enterprise AI budgets.

Seoul-based FuriosaAI says its RNGD inference chip enters mass production this month, at a company valuation of about $700m.

The WSJ’s profile of founder June Paik reports the startup turned down an acquisition approach from Meta. Whether RNGD ships in volume, and who buys it, tests how much of the inference market is reachable by anyone other than Nvidia.

Monday 5 January

Regulators moved on X after Grok generated sexual images of minors.

The European Commission said it is examining sexually explicit images of minors generated by Grok, with a spokesperson putting it plainly: “This is not ‘spicy’. This is illegal. This is appalling.” Investigations opened in France, Malaysia and India, and the UK asked for information. X’s response was to remove images, suspend the accounts involved and blame the users prompting the tool. It announced no product fixes.

Jerry Tworek, OpenAI’s VP of research and a central figure in its reasoning models, announced he is leaving after nearly seven years.

He said he will “try and explore types of research that are hard to do at OpenAI“. Wired linked the exit to a dispute on research direction with chief scientist Jakub Pachocki.

Nvidia launched the Vera Rubin platform and physical AI models at CES

Rubin is six new chips, including the Vera CPU and Rubin GPU. Nvidia claims up to a 10x cut in inference token cost against Blackwell - which underpins most frontier training today - and that mixture-of-experts (MoE) models can be trained with a quarter of the GPUs. Jensen Huang said “Rubin arrives at exactly the right moment, as AI computing demand for both training and inference is going through the roof.”

Nvidia is expanding its physical AI stack with a suite of open-weight models and robotics. It released the Cosmos synthetic-data tools, Isaac GR00T vision-action model, and Jetson T4000 Blackwell module. Boston Dynamics, Caterpillar and LG showcased robots running the framework. For autonomous driving, Nvidia open-sourced Alpamayo a 10bn-parameter reasoning model with simulator and training dataset. Early partners backing the automotive push include Lucid, Jaguar and Uber.

AMD previewed its Instinct MI500 accelerators for 2027 at CES.

Lisa Su’s CES keynote gave an early look at Helios, a rack built on MI455X GPUs delivering up to 3 AI exaflops, projecting up to 1,000x the peak theoretical performance of a 2023 MI300X platform. AMD’s reponse to Nvidia’s Rubin roadmap.

Boston Dynamics and Google DeepMind formed a partnership to put Gemini Robotics models into Atlas, announced at CES.

The two will run joint research, which Boston Dynamics says is expected to begin in the coming months, aimed at industrial tasks: initially automotive manufacturing. The collaboration is spearheaded by Boston Dynamics’ director of robot behavior, Alberto Rodriguez, and DeepMind senior director of robotics, Carolina Parada.

Tuesday 6 January

xAI closed a $20bn Series E and confirmed that Grok 5 is in training.

Participating investors include Valor Equity Partners, Fidelity, the Qatar Investment Authority, and Nvidia and Cisco - effectively supplying capital to a key GPU customer. The raise coincided with regulatory probes into Grok’s image generation.

Accenture agreed to buy Faculty, the UK applied-AI firm that supplies Whitehall

Founded in 2014, Faculty now employs >400 people and brings its Frontier decision-intelligence platform and AI safety capabilities. Terms were not disclosed. The deal gives Accenture ownership of one of the UK government’s main independent AI suppliers. Faculty CEO Marc Warner will become Accenture’s CTO on completion.

FDA eases oversight of wellness wearables and clinical decision-support software

Software giving a single clinical recommendation can now qualify for enforcement discretion, reversing the FDA’s 2022 position. Non-invasive consumer devices reporting blood pressure or glucose-related signals can also be treated as wellness products, provided they make no disease claims. These redrawn boundaries will determine how much consumer health AI can reach the market without FDA clearance.

Utah authorises AI-assisted prescription renewals under regulatory sandbox.

Utah has authorised Doctronic to support routine prescription renewals for chronic conditions through the state’s regulatory sandbox. The Department of Commerce will assess safety protocols, refill timeliness, adherence, clinical outcomes and cost, and publish the results. A licensed physician will still review its recommendations, so describing this as autonomous prescribing is inaccurate.

A paper on arXiv pitted AI agents against professional penetration testers on a live university network of about 8,000 hosts across 12 subnets.

ARTEMIS, the agent framework the authors built, found nine valid vulnerabilities at an 82% valid submission rate, beat nine of the ten human professionals and placed second overall. Some variants ran at $18 an hour against $60 for a professional tester. The agents were strongest at systematic enumeration and parallel exploitation, and weakest on false positives and on anything with a graphical interface.

Wednesday 7 January

Anthropic reported to be raising $10bn at a $350bn valuation.

The WSJ reported the term sheet: $10bn at a $350bn pre-money valuation, led by Singapore’s sovereign fund GIC with Coatue Management, is expected to close in the coming weeks. The round would nearly doubles Anthropic’s $183bn valuation after its September round, four months ago.

London-based data centre developer Global Technical Realty secured nearly $2bn, with KKR committing a further $1.5bn and Oak Hill Capital about $400m.

The capital funds greenfield capacity and new European market entries - one of the larger single commitments to compute outside the US.

The PitchBook-NVCA Venture Monitor put 2025 global venture investment at $512bn, with AI taking more than half of it.

AI accounted for a third of completed venture deals worldwide, and two thirds of the capital invested in the US. Venture funds raised $119bn, nearly $100bn below 2024 and the lowest in a decade. Exit value reached $549bn, >$200bn up on the year.

Thursday 8 January

Zhipu and MiniMax listed in Hong Kong within a day of each other.

Zhipu, listing as Z.ai, priced at HK$116.20 and opened at HK$120.00 under code 02513.HK, after a $558m IPO whose retail tranche was 1,159 times oversubscribed; the market capitalisation on debut was HK$53bn. Its chairman used the moment to warn that price competition is coming for US labs: its coding tool sells for about $3 a month.

MiniMax followed a day later and more than doubled, closing up 109% after a HK$4.8bn ($619m) IPO priced at HK$165: the top of the range. MiniMax’s prospectus disclosed an adjusted loss of about $186m for the first nine months of 2025.

China said it will investigate Meta’s $2bn purchase of Manus, and is reportedly drawing up an export control list for its own AI companies.

Ministry of Commerce spokesperson He Yadong said the deal will be assessed for compliance with Chinese rules on foreign investment, technology exports, overseas data transfers and acquisitions. The WSJ reported Beijing is separately identifying standout AI companies to place under export control. The offshore-then-sell route used by Chinese AI startups is now under direct scrutiny.

OpenAI is rolling out ChatGPT for Health and OpenAI for Healthcare.

A free ChatGPT for Clinicians tier covers individually verified physicians, nurse practitioners, physician assistants and pharmacists with Cedars-Sinai, AdventHealth, HCA Healthcare and UCSF among the first deployments.

It follows ChatGPT Health on Wednesday, a consumer product that lets users import their medical records through b.well’s network of US providers, alongside Apple Health and others, initially for a waitlist. Over 230 million people ask ChatGPT health questions a week. Health chats are stored separately and not used to train its models.

Microsoft put generative-AI use at about one in six of the world’s working-age population in the second half of 2025

The estimate comes from aggregated Microsoft telemetry, adjusted for OS share, device mix, internet access and population, and is up 1.2 points on H1. Adoption in the Global North grew twice as fast as the Global South, reaching 24.7% vs 14.1%. UAE leads at 64.0% of working-age adults, Singapore at 60.9%, and the US at 28.3%.

Friday 9 January

Terence Tao, one of the world’s foremost mathematicians, says AI solved a previously unsolved Erdős number-theory problem.

Problem #728 concerns when products of factorials divide one another and had not previously been solved. Tao said it was solved “more or less autonomously” by AI, describing the result as a milestone while qualifying how independently the system reached it, since humans selected the problem, operated the systems and subsequently checked and interpreted the proof.

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