Weekly AI News - Jan 16, 2026

This week, the hosts contrast the massive scale of AI investment—highlighted by the $1 billion NVIDIA-Eli Lilly "drug factory" and Meta’s gigawatt-scale compute plans—with a critical bottleneck: a shortage of 100,000 electricians and plumbers needed to build the infrastructure. In geopolitics, they discuss the shrinking gap between East and West, citing DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis’s claim that China is only months behind, a reality confirmed by Zhipu AI training a top-tier model entirely on domestic Huawei chips On the practical front, the episode covers a "dead simple" double-prompting trick that boosts LLM accuracy by up to 76% and Google’s opt-in "Personal Intelligence" for Gemini, which mines user data for hyper-personalized answers. Finally, the hosts explore the tension between safety and risk, reviewing new US-EU principles for AI in medicine while warning of the sector’s growing militarization. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.