01-31-Daily AI News Daily

AI News Daily 2026/1/31

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Today’s Highlights

Google Genie 3 open beta for text-to-image virtual world generation, US Ultra users only
Baidu PaddleOCR-VL tops charts, first to achieve irregular box positioning, surpasses GPT-5.2
ByteDance, Alibaba, DeepSeek intensively release models for Lunar New Year, vying for 1.4 billion users
SenseTime open-sources MARS, surpasses Gemini, first dynamic visual reasoning VLM
Amazon plans to invest $50 billion in OpenAI, setting new AI investment record, shifting cloud computing landscape

Product & Feature Updates

1. Google Genie 3 is now in open beta! Google DeepMind has unleashed an experimental prototype of Project Genie (AI News) , letting users craft their own virtual worlds. How cool is that?! You can generate environments from text and images, customize perspectives for flying, driving, or walking, and even download exploration videos. Right now, it’s exclusively for US Ultra users aged 18 and up.
2. Google Maps is leveling up with Gemini voice navigation! Pedestrian and cycling navigation now has full Gemini integration (AI News) , enabling users to voice query real-time traffic updates. Cyclists can get info without even looking at their screens – how convenient! You can also verbally dictate late notifications via text. This feature is rolling out globally on iOS and Android as part of Google’s ongoing unified AI assistant strategy. Keep an eye out for it!
   
   
3. Tencent Yuanbaopai’s internal test has been revealed! This new platform integrates social features with QQ Music and Tencent Video (AI News) resource libraries. For the first time ever, WeChat and QQ friends can be pulled into the same group. Plus, the AI can generate memes and even proactively throw out conversational starters – pretty neat! Pony Ma plans to invest 1 billion RMB in red packets for promotion. It’s still in the internal testing phase, so stay tuned for more!
   
   
4. Baidu’s PaddleOCR-VL-1.5 is now open source! This 0.9B parameter model has topped the OmniDocBench (AI News) leaderboard, making waves! It’s the first in the world to achieve irregular bounding box positioning, meaning it can stably parse even skewed documents – talk about a breakthrough! It outperforms DeepSeek-OCR2 and GPT-5.2 and supports multiple languages, including Tibetan and Bengali. Seriously impressive!
5. Heads up: ChatGPT’s older models are retiring soon! On February 13th, GPT-4o, 4.1, and o4-mini (AI News) will be decommissioned. Don’t sweat it too much, though – API ports will still be available. Users should prepare for migration in advance. OpenAI is rapidly accelerating model iteration, with new generation models ready to take over. Get ready for what’s next!
   
   

Cutting-Edge Research

1. The LLM-in-Sandbox paradigm has officially dropped! A joint research effort by Renmin University, Microsoft, and Tsinghua (AI News) now lets models freely explore within a sandbox environment. This setup has led to significant improvements across multiple domains, including math, physics, and chemistry – super impressive! It also slashes long text token consumption by 8 times and works without any extra training. A Python package is already open source, supporting mainstream inference backends. Pretty cool, right?
2. SenseTime has open-sourced its MARS multimodal model! SenseNova-MARS (AI News) has crushed it, scoring 69.74 and surpassing Gemini-3-Pro. This bad boy is the first agentic VLM to support dynamic visual reasoning, autonomously calling image cropping and text search tools. Both 8B and 32B versions are open source, and the technical report is already up on arXiv. What a win!
3. New AI coding efficiency research is out from Anthropic! A randomized controlled trial (AI News) published by Anthropic shows that AI assistance doesn’t necessarily speed things up for everyone. Beginners’ conceptual understanding and debugging abilities can actually take a hit. Interestingly, seasoned developers seem to benefit more. The study used the GPT-4o model, and its implications at an organizational level are worth paying attention to. Something to think about!

Industry Outlook & Social Impact

1. It’s the Lunar New Year AI battle royale between ByteDance, Alibaba, and DeepSeek! These three giants are gearing up for intensive new model releases (AI News) – it’s going to be wild! ByteDance is unleashing its Doubao 2.0 “trident,” while Alibaba’s Qwen 3.5 is integrating payment and e-commerce. DeepSeek V4’s coding capabilities are astonishing. The fierce battle for the 1.4 billion user entry points is officially underway. Let the games begin!
   
   
2. Tesla’s Robotaxi data is stirring up controversy! Claims that its accident rate is three times higher than human drivers have sparked fierce community questioning (AI News) . Critics are slamming the 500,000-mile sample size as too small, noting discrepancies between NHTSA standards and police statistics. Plus, there’s a lack of safety driver intervention logs. Many are calling for more transparent data disclosure. Time for some answers, Tesla!
3. Anthropic is getting sued by music giants! Universal Concord Alliance is claiming $3 billion (AI News) , setting a new record for copyright cases. Anthropic is accused of illegally downloading 20,000 songs, with prosecutors alleging data acquisition through torrent piracy. This comes after already paying $1.5 billion in settlement fees. The CEO has been listed as a co-defendant. Ouch!
4. Tencent Hunyuan is beefing up its team with Pang Tianyu! This direct Ph.D. student from Tsinghua University is joining the Hunyuan Multimodal Team (AI News) to lead reinforcement learning efforts. Pang has previously won the Microsoft Scholar and Nvidia Pioneer awards and has published multiple first-author papers at top conferences. Hunyuan’s open-source models have already exceeded 5 million downloads, and Pony Ma continues to emphasize a steady and stable strategy. Pretty solid!
5. Amazon is eyeing a whopping $50 billion investment in OpenAI! Major negotiations (AI News) are currently underway, signaling a massive push by tech giants into the AI arena. This investment scale would set a new industry record, with OpenAI’s valuation continuously skyrocketing. This move could seriously shake up the cloud computing competitive landscape. Big money, big changes!

Top Open Source Projects

1. LobeHub is an agent collaboration platform you need to check out! This ⭐71.4k open source project (AI News) aims to create the ultimate work-life space. It features multi-agent collaborative design teams, where agents become the basic units of work interaction. The platform is currently elevating agent capabilities to new levels, supporting the creation of personalized agent teammates. Super handy!
2. Meet whatsapp-web.js, a neat messaging library! This ⭐20.8k NodeJS client (AI News) connects directly to WhatsApp Web. Developers can quickly build automated applications, supporting message sending/receiving and group management. It’s essentially a browser application interface wrapper. The community activity for this project continues to climb. Pretty cool for automation!
3. NewPipe is a lightweight frontend for free streaming! This ⭐36.8k Android app (AI News) offers a truly free streaming experience, requiring no Google services framework. It supports platforms like YouTube and is designed with privacy protection in mind. The open-source community keeps it going strong. A solid choice for privacy lovers!
4. Check out playwright-cli, a powerful automation tool from Microsoft! This ⭐1.8k Microsoft product (AI News) is a command-line powerhouse. It records and generates Playwright code, supports selector inspection and screenshots, and boosts automation testing efficiency. A must-have toolset for developers, for real!

Social Media Buzz

1. Unlock Clawdbot’s potential! Group control with Clawdbot (AI News) is super simple. After integrating with over 10,000 data sources, its features are just blowing up! It can monitor stocks 24/7 and provides real-time responses in Feishu groups. The Teamo platform offers zero-deployment and is ready to use out-of-the-box. Talk about easy peasy!
2. Thinking about moats in the AI era? When commoditization is inevitable, four moats (AI News) become even more crucial. Loyal users are the number one factor, and capital, traffic, and content are all indispensable. Legal protection is also becoming a key barrier. It’s time to really ponder your core advantages. Think smart!
3. The Agent Trace specification is here! Cursor initiated this AI code attribution tracking standard (AI News) , co-developed with Cloudflare and Vercel. It helps distinguish between human and AI code contributions, recording model information in JSON format and working hand-in-hand with Git. Super important for transparency!
   
   
4. Let’s talk about the AI code review controversy. The scenario dictates whether an architecture review (AI News) is needed. Demo “toy” applications can be treated as black boxes, but for projects with high security and performance requirements, you gotta be cautious. Long-term maintenance projects absolutely need human oversight. Seriously, talking about toxicity without considering the dose is just BS!
5. Time to dissect the essence of knowledge payment! AI is transferring expert know-how to the masses, allowing capital to earn a price difference (AI News) . So, search more, absorb more info, and distill AI knowledge through hands-on learning. Form your own independent judgments and keep that wallet shut! Otherwise, you’ll just end up as a paid sucker. Stay savvy!

AI News Daily: Voice Edition

🎙️ Xiaoyuzhou	📹 Douyin
Laisheng Xiaojiuguan	Self-Media Account