Welcome to the Tech Brew Ride Home for Friday, January 9th, 2026. I'm Brian McCullough. Today, Grok dials back the AI image generation thing, kind of. XAI just raised all that money because it kind of has to. Looks like the next DeepSeek model is incoming. YA16Z is officially the biggest VC firm in the world. And of course, the weekend long-range suggestions. Here's what you missed today in the world of tech. You may have noticed that your customers love webinar and video content, but if you've ever put together a webinar or a video, then you know that it can eat up a lot of your time and budget. But now, thankfully, there's a singular tool that can streamline your team's video and webinar workflows. It's called Wistia. Wistia can scale your content output with AI-powered tools that help you create, edit, and repurpose videos and webinars fast. And speaking of webinars, you can host engaging, easy-to-setup webinars inside of Wistia, too, complete with built-in analytics. With Wistia, you don't have to pay for multiple video tools, hop between platforms, or constantly re-upload files. You can create, edit, collaborate, and publish all in one place. Head to wistia.com slash brew to learn more. That's w-i-s-t-i-a dot com slash brew. With Wistia, you can expect less work and more plays. So to update y'all on this whole situation, Grok says image generation and image editing are now limited to paid subscribers only after an outcry over its use to create sexually explicit and violent imagery, which I guess that will cut down on the volume of this stuff being created somewhat. but this also means, right, that you can still pay for the privilege to create this stuff? Quoting the Guardian, That means the vast majority of users of the platform cannot create images using Grok. Those who do have their full details and credit card information stored by X can be identified if the function is misused. The public at Grok account has had its image generation capabilities heavily restricted. However, there is also a separate Grok app which does not share images publicly on which non-paying users have reported still being able to generate sexualized imagery of women and children, end quote. Right, on that, quoting The Verge, the message gives the impression that only paid X users can edit or create images using Grok. That message is reinforced in the many headlines circulating right now, stating that XAI, another Musk company that makes Grok, has restricted Grok's image editing capabilities to this select group of users. But that impression is false. All X users, including free ones, can still use Grok to edit and create images, including the sexually suggestive deepfakes that landed Grok in hot water to begin with. Interacting with Grok through replies on X is just one of several ways to use the AI chatbot. For example, the Edit Image button still invokes Grok on every image displayed on X's desktop website, and that same button can be accessed on the X app by long pressing on any image. Grok can also be accessed through a standalone website or app as well as via a highly promoted tab in the xApps and xWebsite. These remain readily available to free users and require no additional effort compared to the atGrok command. The Verge tested the Grok website app and xTab with free accounts and Grok readily complied with our request to edit or generate a variety of images, including a full nudify and one of Elon Musk wearing a bikini. An unnamed spokesperson for the UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer, who on Thursday said he would not tolerate the situation, said that putting the deepfake factory behind a paywall wasn't a solution. Quote, the move simply turns an AI feature that allows the creation of unlawful images into a premium service. It's not a solution. In fact, it's insulting to victims of misogyny and sexual violence, end quote. Well, since we're here, Bloomberg has seen documents suggesting that XAI had a net loss of $1.46 billion in Q3, up from a $1 billion loss in Q1. Sources also say XAI has told investors it plans to build AI that will eventually power optimist humanoid robots. Quote, like other fast-growing AI startups, XAI is quickly using what it raised in recent funding rounds it said in its most recent earnings report and a call that XAI executives held with investors according to people familiar with the matter The company told investors that its goal is to build AI that is self and that will eventually power humanoid robots like Optimus Tesla robot that was created to replace human labor On the investor call, XAI leadership, including Chief Revenue Officer John Shulkin, told investors that now XAI's core focus is building out AI agents and other software at speed, said the people who asked not to be identified discussing private conversations. Those products will feed into what's called macro hard, a term Musk has said refers to an AI-only software company, the name a play on Microsoft, until it eventually can power Optimus. The firm's executive signaled to investors that XAI had the necessary resources to continue spending aggressively. Documents referred to the rapid growth of AI as escape velocity, a term borrowed from aerodynamics and often used by Musk to talk about how quickly his companies, including space exploration technologies, can grow. XAI revenue nearly doubled quarter over quarter to $107 million for the three-month period ended September 30, according to financial documents shared with investors and reviewed by Bloomberg. Musk has talked about the potential benefits of formerly linking XAI and Tesla, but the automaker is not currently an XAI investor. Tesla shareholders voted in November on whether the company should invest in XAI, an idea Musk has supported, but the non-binding proposal did not receive enough votes to pass. Tesla's board is considering next steps, General Counsel Brandon Earhart said at the time. The prospect of XAI powering Tesla's humanoid robots could be seen as conflicting with past statements that Tesla's leadership has made in attempts to portray the work the two companies are doing as largely separate and unrelated. Quote, XAI is working on artificial general intelligence or artificial superintelligence. Tesla is trying to make autonomous cars and autonomous robots, Musk said in 2024. They're different problems, end quote. For now, XAI Holdings, the parent company of both XAI and X is focused on raising money to keep up with its large expenses. It recently closed a $20 billion equity round from investors including NVIDIA, Valor Equity Partners, and the Qatar Investment Authority, which valued the company at $230 billion. That cash will presumably power the company for the next year or more as it is still spending under $1 billion per month on investments, according to people familiar with the firm's finances. XAI used almost $8 billion in cash on investments through the first nine months of 2025, financial documents show, end quote. And since we're on that topic, also from Bloomberg, according to Omdia, global humanoid robot shipments rose more than 5x year-on-year in 2025 to around 13,000 global units. China, accounted for the vast majority of that, led by Agibot, shipping around 5,000 units. Quote, the Chinese startup Shanghai Agibot Innovation Technology Company shipped an estimated 5,168 robots last year, topping the list of humanoid producers, followed by Unitree Robotics and UB Tech Robotics Corp. The industry's global sales more than quintupled from 2024, according to Omdia's figures. These are early days in the humanoid competition, but the market is expected to soar in the decades ahead. China's leadership now may help the country as the number of robots is projected to surge to 648 million in 2050, according to research from Citigroup. Chinese vendors are setting benchmarks in large-scale production, Omdia said. The integration of artificial intelligence, which enabled robots to perform complex tasks, increased adoption of such machines in areas from manufacturing and logistics to healthcare and customer service, according to the report, saying robot firms are heavily investing in cutting-edge AI models. Chinese humanoid robots are cheaper than Western-made models, with Unitree offering an entry-level model for just $6,000, and Adjubot asking about $14,000 for a scaled-down version. By comparison, Tesla's chief executive officer Elon Musk has previously given a price range of $20,000 to $30,000 for that company's Optimus humanoid robots, which haven't yet reached full-scale production. Agibot's global profile rose after the company was name-checked by NVIDIA Corp CEO Jensen Huang during his keynote address at this week's CES trade show in Las Vegas. Omdia expects global humanoid robot shipments growing to 2.6 million units in 2035 as factors including AI models dexterous hands and self learning have made the robots viable for industrial service and eventual household roles The research firm report covers two humanoid robots as well as wheel-based products with a human-like upper torso." It's the holidays, which means you're probably trying to figure out what to get the people in your life who live in back-to-back meetings. This isn't some sci-fi concept. It's PLAUD, P-L-A-U-D. It snaps onto the back of your phone and records phone calls, meetings, and conversations. This isn't just note-taking, though. It can summarize meetings, generate to-do lists, draft emails, extract insights, analyze perspectives, and help you make better decisions, all with full contextual awareness across your past conversations and meetings. Black Friday is coming and Plod is giving TechBrew Right Home listeners 20% off. Search P-L-A-U-D on Google or Amazon and get 20% off. Sources are saying that DeepSeek will launch V4, its next generation model, in the coming weeks and say it outperformed Anthropics Cloud and OpenAI's GPT series in coding. Quoting the information. DeepSeq plans to release V4 around the time of the Lunar New Year in mid-February, according to the two people who added the timeline could still shift. DeepSeq's last flagship model, R1, was released on January 20th last year, just about a week before China was heading to the week-long Lunar New Year celebration, ensuring it could receive abundant hype and attention. While the V3 model put DeepSeq on the map in the global AI community, the release of R1 sent shockwaves through Silicon Valley and Wall Street and made DeepSeek a global phenomenon. R1 is an open-source reasoning model designed to solve complex problems by spending time to think through a query before providing an answer. It got enormous attention because it performed well despite the fact DeepSeek spent relatively little money on training, in contrast to leading models developed in the U.S. In China, DeepSeek also released a chatbot which uses both the R1 and V3 models, which quickly became popular. DeepSeek itself became a source of national pride in China. The company in December released the V3.2 model, which outperformed OpenAI's GPT-5 and Google's Gemini 3 Pro on some benchmarks, but it hasn't released a major successor to its models. This makes the upcoming launch of V4 particularly noteworthy. DeepSeek didn't respond to a request for comment. V4 made breakthroughs in handling and processing extremely long coding prompts, a potentially significant advantage for developers working on complex software projects, the two people said. The model also made improvements in its ability to comprehend data patterns throughout every stage of the training process without degradation, they added, end quote. Axios says A16Z has raised more than $15 billion across five new funds, including $6.75 billion for its fifth growth fund, the largest of the funds, and $3 billion for unspecified other venture strategies. Quote, this is a major boost to the U.S. venture capital market, which just experienced its weakest year for fundraising since 2017. U.S. firms secured just $66.1 billion for new funds in 2025, down from $101.3 billion in 2024 and well below the 2022 peak of nearly $223 billion per preliminary data from PitchBook and the NVCA. The primary cause was a continued lack of distributions via either IPO or strategic sales, with investors wanting old money back before putting new money in. That dynamic began to course correct in Q4, which could mean that A16Z is the tip of the spear. Firm co-founder Ben Horowitz published a blog post this morning highlighting familiar A16Z themes, including the need for pro-tech policies in the U.S. at a time of rising global competition. He also laid claim to A16Z being, quote, the American leader in venture capital, end quote. Indeed, that is why I'm bringing this up. Forbes says A16Z captured more than 18% of all U.S. venture capital allocated in 2025 and now manages $90 billion in assets versus Sequoia Capital's billion in assets and general catalysts billion Quote the amount of money raised by U venture funds plunged more than 70 from its peak of billion in 2022 to just billion last year with endowment and pension funds stung by pandemic-era excesses and a painful drought of liquidity from initial public offerings and takeovers. The number of funds landing checks from investors has also collapsed by more than the third to 537. The top 10 largest venture funds claimed over 43% of every dollar raised from investors last year, according to PitchBook data that does not account for Andreessen Horowitz's mega raise. What's the number one form of differentiation in any industry being number one, Andreessen told Forbes in 2019. At that time, A16Z managed just $10 billion in assets. It's now ballooning in size to managing $90 billion of assets. It's now bigger than Silicon Valley venture bluebloods like Sequoia Capital, who since the split with its China and Southeast Asia units now manages $56 billion, and it's nearly twice the size of its next closest rival, General Catalyst, who manages $43 billion. It's only matched by SoftBank's Vision Fund, which raised a record-breaking $100 billion back in 2017. Like many venture capital funds, A16Z does not name its backers. Pitchbook and public data shows that A16Z is now backed by several family offices, public pension funds like CalPERS, and endowments like the University of Michigan Endowment. A16Z's fundraising machine extends far beyond the United States. The fund opened an office in Tokyo last year, and it's part of the portfolio of Sanabil, a tech-focused offshoot of Saudi's sovereign wealth fund. Ben Horowitz wrote that A16Z had raised over 18% of all venture capital dollars allocated in the U.S. in 2025 and that the capital was needed to ensure America wins the next 100 years of technology. Quote, if we fail to push the policies of the country in the right direction, America will likely lose its position as the global leader in technology. We have already seen the beginnings of this in both AI and crypto, wrote the Midas List investor, end quote. Time for the Weekend Long Read suggestions. First up, a profile of the man who could be Apple's next CEO, John Tarnas. Quote, Mr. Tarnas' rising profile has caused debate among Apple alumni and rank-and-file employees about whether he would lead like Mr. Cook, who succeeded by making the company more predictable and incremental, or like Mr. Jobs, who laid the foundation for the company's success with risky bets and visionary products. If you want to make an iPhone every year, Ternus is your guy, said Cameron Rogers, who worked on product and software engineering management at Apple from 2005 to 2022. The question for Apple is whether the company needs an innovator or another deft manager, end quote. And as President Trump and big tech aim to build small modular nuclear reactors, or SMRs, to win the AI race, a look at the issues SMRs face. None of the more than 50 SMRs currently under development have a U.S. operating license yet. Quoting the FT, the industry is boasting about how things are different now and they are going to build fleets of new reactors, large and small, says Edwin Lyman, a physicist at the Union of Concerned Scientists and critic of nuclear energy. But the fundamentals haven't changed. Nuclear is more expensive than other forms of energy and still poses a risk of accidents and proliferation, end quote. The U.S.'s 94 reactors have a capacity of about 100 gigawatts. To quadruple output, an additional 15 gigawatts of nuclear capacity would have to be commissioned every year from 2030 to 2050. This would be a record amount that surpasses the peak annual commissioning of 10.5 gigawatts in 1974, according to a report by T. Rowe Price, a global asset manager. The report warns that costs and bankability threatened the U.S. expansion plan, citing previous cost overruns at the last two large-scale reactors built in the country at plant Votel in Georgia, where two reactors had been built in the 1980s. Votel III and IV entered operation in 2023 and 2024, seven years behind schedule and $18 billion over budget. Construction costs had soared to $15,000 per kilowatt, about five times higher than nuclear projects in South Korea, the report said, and significantly above China, India, and France, end quote. nothing more for you today and nothing in terms of bonus content this weekend i am currently operating on three hours of sleep so i gotta go talk to you on monday
