Monday, January 26, 2026

📹 90% of People Can’t Tell Real Video From AI

͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏

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📹 90% of People Can’t Tell Real Video From AI

Plus: ChatGPT’s Lead Is Shrinking as Gemini Surges

Yaro Celis

Jan 26

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Gemini is quickly closing the gap with ChatGPT. Backed by Google’s massive distribution, it may only be weeks to challenge the top spot. Plus, AI-generated video is now so realistic that only ~10% of viewers can tell it apart from real footage. At the same time, AI is fundamentally changing how R&D is done, with faster cycles, lower costs, and fewer humans in the loop.

More on this today. Stay curious.

ChatGPT’s Lead Is Shrinking as Gemini Surges
90% of People Can’t Tell Real Video From AI
🧰 AI Tools
AI Is Rewriting Product Development
📚Learning Corner - Coding

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📰 AI News and Trends

Louisville, Kentucky, joins a growing number of cities bringing AI to permitting. The town also appointed its first-ever chief AI officer.
Micron broke snowy winter ground in New York on Friday to begin building a chip fab that promises to bring up to 50k jobs and much-needed computer memory production to the US.
OpenAI is asking steep prices for early ChatGPT ads that could be hard to scale up.
Apple plans to unveil a Gemini-powered Siri assistant in February, leveraging Google's AI models to enhance task completion using user data.
Meta paused teens’ access to AI characters as it prepares a new version with parental controls.

Other Tech News

CBP Wants AI-Powered ‘Quantum Sensors’ for Finding Fentanyl in Cars.
The U.S. wants 40% of chips made onshore. But quietly, the equipment that makes those chips is moving offshore fast. This gap matters as much as the chips themselves.
Chinese companies like WeRide, Baidu, and Pony.ai are scaling robotaxi fleets across the Gulf while US Waymo and Cruise focus on domestic markets.
Substack Launches TV App. Creators, Subscribers Decry It As “Veering Away From The Written Word.”
Big Tech is facing multiple high-profile social media addiction lawsuits. Meta, TikTok, and YouTube will face parents’ accusations in court this week.
Amazon will begin a round of about 14,000 layoffs next week, affecting thousands of corporate employees, to help reduce management layers and bureaucracy. Bringing the total number of laid-off employees to as many as 30,000 in the last 6 months.
Netflix has agreed to buy Warner Bros. Discovery's studio and streaming business in an all-cash deal for $27.75 a share.

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Customers at risk before they cancel
Which products actually drive churn
How much revenue could be recovered every month

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Subscription risk alerts
Failed payment recovery tracking
Client lifetime value & tenure

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90% of People Can’t Tell Real Video From AI

AI video has crossed a major realism threshold. In a controlled study by Runway, 1,043 participants watched 20 short videos (10 real, 10 AI-generated) and nnly 9.5% (99 people) could reliably tell real from AI. Overall detection accuracy was 57.1%—barely above random guessing (50%).

Where AI fooled people the most, viewers were in Animals & architecture videos, where detection fell below chance (45–47%), meaning people often thought AI videos were real. Humans (faces, hands, actions) are slightly easier to detect as models are creating more realistic human features, especially when looked closely, but still weak at 58–65% accuracy.

AI video quality has improved exponentially since early 2023. What once took minutes to generate blurry clips and hands with 6-8 fingers now produces near-indistinguishable 5-second videos. The industry has hit a tipping point in terms of detection alone. But it also changes the way videos and even movie studios create footage. The technology will continue to become more powerful, fast and more realistic, to the point that entire high-quality movies will be created with powerful prompts. The winner may be the best storytellers with great imagination who know what people need emotionally.

Video authenticity is officially broken. In the AI era, “seeing is believing” no longer applies, and trust will have to be engineered, not assumed.

📚Learning Corner

Coding

Best practices for coding with agents
How to write a good spec for AI agents

AI Is Rewriting Product Development

Manufacturers are using AI to compress weeks or months of R&D into days and unlock solutions humans wouldn’t normally try.

PPG used deterministic AI (physics + chemistry, not chatbots) to design a fast-drying automotive clear coat.
- Dry time dropped from ~30 minutes to ~5 minutes when heated at 140°F.
- Air-dry time fell to <1 hour vs ~2 hours for competitors.
- Result: higher body-shop throughput and real commercial sales.
Procter & Gamble uses AI to generate new scents for soaps, detergents, and home fragrances.
Mars cut development time 40% on a redesigned gum bottle and saved 246 tons of plastic.
3M applied AI to optimize a sanding disc for better dust capture and grinding performance. Its CTO calls AI a “fourth expert” in the lab.
Startups and suppliers like Citrine Informatics report customers shrinking product development cycles from weeks to days, optimizing multiple properties at once (strength, weight, cost, sustainability).

AI seems to be quietly becoming a core R&D engine in chemicals, materials, and manufacturing, driving faster launches, lower costs, and sustainability gains.

ChatGPT’s Lead Is Shrinking as Gemini Surges

The AI traffic race is tightening fast.

ChatGPT fell to 64.6% global traffic share in January 2026, down from 86.6% a year ago (–22 pts). This is the first time below 65% since 2023, per Similarweb.
Gemini jumped to 22% share, up from 5.3% last January, a +315% increase YoY.
Grok overtook DeepSeek for the first time (3.5% vs 3.3%).
Claude held at 2.1%; Perplexity slipped to 1.9%; Microsoft Copilot fell to 1.1%.

Why Gemini is winning

Google embedded Gemini across Search, Gmail, Workspace, and Android, driving massive distribution.
Monthly users jumped from 450M to 650M in 2025.
The new Google-Apple partnership positions Gemini models inside Apple Intelligence later this year.

Still, ChatGPT dominates influence

ChatGPT drove 1.6B outbound website visits (Sep–Nov 2025) vs 287M from Gemini.
AI-referred traffic converts ~11× better than search (1.66% vs 0.15%), though it’s still <1% of total web traffic for most sites.

Big picture

The AI market is fragmenting fast.
ChatGPT remains the largest player, but distribution, not model quality alone, is now the decisive weapon.
For marketers and publishers, “optimize for Google” is no longer enough; AI platform–specific strategies are now mandatory.

🧰 AI Tools of The Day

Explore our AI Guides — From coding to photography and beyond, find step-by-step tips to put AI to work for you.

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Wednesday, January 21, 2026

The AI Shopping Wars, big Tech’s Race to Become Your Personal Buyer

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The AI Shopping Wars, big Tech’s Race to Become Your Personal Buyer

Plus: The AI Shopping Wars, big Tech’s Race to Become Your Personal Buyer

Yaro Celis

Jan 21

READ IN APP

This year’s Davos gathering and the 2026 outlook reveal a global economy in a state of “nervous acceleration.” The official stages are focused on the $3 trillion to $5 trillion potential of agentic commerce, and the private hallways are filled with anxiety over Trump and the shifting geopolitical power of AI. This acceleration means that companies like xAI are pushing Human Emulators, but Google’s Enterprise Surge shows a different pattern. Let’s dive in and stay curious.

Davos has AI on Stage, Trump in the Wings
🧰 AI Tools - Master Agentic Commerce
xAI’s Human Emulators Vs. Google’s Enterprise Surge
📚Learning Corner - AI Agents in LangChain & CrewAI
The AI Shopping Wars, big Tech’s Race to Become Your Personal Buyer

Subscribe today and get 60% off for a year, free access to our 1,500+ AI tools database, and a complimentary 30-minute personalized consulting session to help you supercharge your AI strategy. Act now as it expires in 3 days…

Get 60% off for 1 year

📰 AI News and Trends

Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei equated Washington’s decision to allow Nvidia to manufacture AI chips for China with “selling nuclear weapons to North Korea.”
Amazon Could Open Up to AI Shopping Agents (read article below)
Gen Z women in China are all in on digital companionship, even setting up dates with real-world versions of their AI boyfriends.
Physical AI takes robots to a new level. Combining autonomy with hardware that moves objects in the physical world using sensors to perceive their surroundings.

Other Tech News

Amazon CEO says Trump tariffs are driving prices up
The US is looking to Australia and Africa for minerals in an attempt to sidestep Chinese restrictions.
The first commercial space station, Haven-1, is now undergoing assembly for launch
Moderna, Merck Report Positive Results From Cancer-Vaccine Study.
The 233-year-old NYSE doesn’t want to find itself outmoded in a rapidly changing fintech landscape. It recently invested $2 billion in prediction platform Polymarket to develop future tokenization initiatives.
Looming water supply ‘bankruptcy’ puts billions at risk (Not Tech, but very important in all aspects of life, especially if water is being overly utilized and prioritized for data centers’ purposes)

This year’s Davos gathering and the 2026 outlook reveal a global economy in a state of “nervous acceleration.” At the World Economic Forum, the “tech capture” of the global economy is complete; the Promenade is now a wall of tech “houses” (Palantir, Cloudflare, C3.ai).

The Bottom Line: Corporations like Saudi Aramco are reporting $3B–$5B in cost savings through AI efficiency.
The Political Shadow: While CEOs talk about “scaling,” the real conversation is about the White House. Governor Gavin Newsom and other leaders are openly clashing over Trump’s “law of the jungle” approach to global alliances and his push for an “AI Revolution” that prioritizes American dominance at any cost.

Agentic Commerce is the 2026 North Star

We are moving past chatbots to Agents that Act:

Visa and Mastercard are racing to build the authentication layers needed for AI agents to shop, book vacations, and manage groceries autonomously.
The White House is branding this as a new Industrial Revolution, but polls shows 66% of Americans still fear these agents will lead to massive job losses.

The DeepSeek Moment & The Rise of China

A major trend for 2026 is the “Silicon Valley pivot” to Chinese open-source models.

After the success of DeepSeek’s R1, U.S. startups are increasingly building on Chinese models like Alibaba’s Qwen because they are open, customizable, and often perform as well as “closed” U.S. models from OpenAI or Google.
Trump’s December executive order aims to neuter state-level AI safety laws (like California’s). This sets up a massive legal showdown between federal “light-touch” regulation and states trying to prevent AI-related harms.

The 2026 Trend to Watch: “Scientific LLMs”

Keep an eye on AlphaEvolve and similar systems. We are entering an era where LLMs aren’t just writing emails; they are discovering new mathematical algorithms and power-saving techniques for data centers. Scientific discovery is being systematized into an iterative, algorithmic process.

📚Learning Corner

DeepLearning.AI: AI Agents in LangChain & CrewAI

This is a free (or low-cost) short course taught by industry leaders. It moves you past “prompting” and teaches you how to give an AI a tool (like a browser or a credit card) and a goal.
What you’ll learn: How to design “loops” where an AI checks its own work, how to handle “hallucinations” in commerce, and how to connect an LLM to the live internet.

xAI’s Human Emulators Vs. Google’s Enterprise Surge

While AI giants promise a white-collar revolution, the reality on the ground is a mix of surreal technical “hiccups” and strategic shifts. At xAI, the push to replace staff with “human emulators” has led to bizarre internal confusion: these AI agents appear on company org charts and have even “hallucinated” physical presence, inviting human coworkers to meetings at non-existent desks. Beyond these comedic glitches, xAI faces a fundamental “missing manual” problem, where developers struggle to automate tasks because human employees often forget to mention the dozens of intuitive, “invisible” steps they take to get work done. To scale this ambitious “Macrohard” project, xAI is even considering tapping into the idle compute power of charging Teslas.

Meanwhile, Google is finding its footing by capturing the “builder” market rather than the casual office worker. While corporate adoption of its enterprise chatbots remains a hurdle, usage of the Gemini API by developers doubled in just five months. This surge is a major win for Google Cloud, as the exclusivity of Gemini forces developers onto their platform, finally providing a credible threat to the cloud dominance of Microsoft and Amazon.

While xAI attempts to emulate the messy nuance of human labor, Google is successfully cementing itself as the preferred engine for the next generation of AI-powered software.

🧰 AI Tools of The Day

Agentic Commerce

Skyvern - (Browser-Based Agents) Uses computer vision and LLMs to navigate websites exactly like a human would. It can go to a site it has never seen before, find a product, add it to a cart, and navigate through the checkout process.
MultiOn - A browser extension and API that acts as a “remote control” for the web. You can give it a high-level command like, “Find the best deal on a 10x12 wool rug and buy it,” and it will execute the search and transaction across multiple tabs.
CrewAI - Multi-Agent Orchestration allows you to build a team of agents (one agent to research prices, one to check reviews, and one to handle the booking). Agents can “talk” to each other to complete a complex commercial goal.
Stripe Agent Toolkit - Tools to allow AI agents to handle money securely. Allows developers to give agents “virtual cards” with spending limits so they can make purchases without having full access to a bank account.
Google Shopping Graph API (via Gemini) - Gemini’s API to access their Shopping Graph. Gives agents access to real-time inventory, pricing, and “deals” from billions of product listings across the web.

The AI Shopping Wars

Big Tech’s Race to Become Your Personal Buyer

A new front has opened in the AI arms race: Agentic Commerce. Industry giants are no longer content just showing you links; they want to handle the entire transaction from “search” to “buy,” effectively turning themselves into the interface for all global retail.

Major players playbook:

Amazon’s Bold Annexation: Amazon’s new AI assistant, Rufus, has been caught scraping independent sites to fulfill orders. Through a “Buy for me” feature, Amazon-powered bots browse external sites, check inventory, and handle payments, even for merchants who never signed up for Amazon. It’s a brazen move to keep users inside the Amazon ecosystem, even when the product isn’t in their warehouse.
Google & OpenAI’s Partnership Play: While Amazon is “annexing” stores, Google and OpenAI are “inviting” them. Google is co-developing the Universal Commerce Protocol, an open standard to pull products from Shopify, Etsy, and Walmart directly into its AI. Meanwhile, OpenAI is partnering with Shopify to monetize its massive user base by allowing seamless in-chat shopping.
The Death of the “Storefront”: The endgame for all three is a world where customers never leave their chat interface.