NewsPodLM Daily Podcast 29 Jan 2026

SoftBank Eyes Record Investment in OpenAI

SoftBank Group is in discussions to invest an additional thirty billion dollars in OpenAI, which would push the AI company's valuation to approximately eight hundred and thirty billion dollars. This comes just months after SoftBank completed a forty one billion dollar investment giving it an eleven percent stake. The funding round could raise up to one hundred billion dollars total, with Amazon and Nvidia also reportedly in talks to participate.

Yann LeCun Exits Meta After Clash with Zuckerberg

After more than a decade as Meta's chief AI scientist, Yann LeCun has left the company to launch Advanced Machine Intelligence Labs, targeting a three billion dollar valuation. LeCun cited frustration with being forced to report to Alexandr Wang, the former Scale AI CEO who now leads Meta's Superintelligence Labs after a fourteen billion dollar acquisition deal. LeCun maintains that large language models are a dead end for achieving superintelligence and is betting on world models trained on video and spatial data.

Google Search Defaults to Gemini 3

Google has made Gemini 3 the default model for AI Overviews globally, now reaching over two billion users monthly. The upgrade brings conversational follow-up capabilities directly from search results, allowing users to seamlessly transition into AI Mode for deeper exploration. Gemini 3 can dynamically create visual layouts with interactive tools and simulations tailored to each query.

NeurIPS Papers Found to Contain Over One Hundred Hallucinated Citations

AI detection company GPTZero scanned all four thousand eight hundred and forty one papers accepted at NeurIPS twenty twenty five and found over one hundred confirmed hallucinated citations across fifty one papers. These fabricated references, including fake author names and non-existent journals, survived peer review at one of the world's most prestigious AI conferences. The finding highlights growing concerns about AI-generated content infiltrating scientific literature.

AI2 Releases Open Source Coding Agents

The Allen Institute for AI has released SERA, an open-source coding agent family that solves fifty four point two percent of SWE-Bench Verified problems. The breakthrough allows anyone to train their own coding agent for about four hundred dollars, making AI coding assistance accessible to researchers and smaller organisations. The models are optimised for integration with Claude Code out of the box.

Moonshot AI Launches Kimi K2.5 with Agent Swarm

Chinese AI company Moonshot AI has released Kimi K2.5, a multimodal model capable of self-directing swarms of up to one hundred sub-agents across fifteen hundred coordinated tool calls. The open-weight model was trained on fifteen trillion vision-language tokens and can understand screenshots, designs, and generate code from visual specifications.