AI lab announcements, 12–18 January 2026

23 announcements from 10 labs, first-party only

OpenAI

OpenAI· 18 Jan

A business that scales with the value of intelligence

OpenAI's business model is described as scaling with intelligence, covering subscriptions, API, ads, commerce, and compute, driven by ChatGPT adoption.

OpenAIAvailability change· 16 Jan

Introducing ChatGPT Go, now available worldwide

ChatGPT Go is now available worldwide, expanding access to GPT-5.2 Instant with higher usage limits and longer memory.

OpenAIAvailability change· 16 Jan

Our approach to advertising and expanding access to ChatGPT

OpenAI plans to test advertising in the U.S. for ChatGPT's free and Go tiers to expand affordable access to AI worldwide, while protecting privacy, trust, and answer quality.

OpenAICompany news· 15 Jan

Investing in Merge Labs

OpenAI is investing in Merge Labs to support new brain computer interfaces that bridge biological and artificial intelligence.

OpenAI· 15 Jan

Strengthening the U.S. AI supply chain through domestic manufacturing

OpenAI launches a new RFP to strengthen the U.S. AI supply chain by accelerating domestic manufacturing, creating jobs, and scaling AI infrastructure.

OpenAIPartnership· 14 Jan

OpenAI partners with Cerebras

OpenAI announces a partnership with Cerebras to add 750MW of high-speed AI compute, aiming to reduce inference latency and improve ChatGPT speed for real-time AI workloads.

OpenAI· 13 Jan

Zenken boosts a lean sales team with ChatGPT Enterprise

OpenAI published a customer story about Zenken using ChatGPT Enterprise to improve sales performance, reduce preparation time, and increase proposal success rates.

Google Research

Google ResearchResearch paper· 15 Jan

Unlocking health insights: Estimating advanced walking metrics with smartwatches

Google Research published a blog post introducing a deep learning model for estimating spatio-temporal gait metrics (e.g., walking speed, step length) from smartwatch IMU data.

Google ResearchResearch paper· 13 Jan

Hard-braking events as indicators of road segment crash risk

Google Research establishes a positive association between hard-braking events (HBEs) collected via Android Auto and actual road segment crash rates, suggesting HBEs can be used as leading measures…

Google ResearchModel update· 13 Jan

Next generation medical image interpretation with MedGemma 1.5 and medical speech to text with MedASR

Google Research announces MedGemma 1.5 4B, an update to the open MedGemma model with improved support for high-dimensional medical imaging (CT, MRI, histopathology), longitudinal imaging, anatomical…

Google ResearchResearch paper· 13 Jan

Dynamic surface codes open new avenues for quantum error correction

Google Quantum AI announces the experimental demonstration of dynamic surface codes for quantum error correction, presenting three new circuit types (hexagonal, walking, iSWAP) that reduce couplers,…

Google ResearchModel update· 12 Jan

NeuralGCM harnesses AI to better simulate long-range global precipitation

Google Research describes an update to NeuralGCM, a hybrid atmospheric model that combines physics-based modeling with a neural network.

ElevenLabs

ElevenLabsCapability change· 15 Jan

MasterClass brings AI instructors to life with ElevenLabs

MasterClass is using ElevenLabs to create AI instructors.

ElevenLabsPartnership· 14 Jan

Deutsche Telekom and ElevenLabs announce partnership

Deutsche Telekom and ElevenLabs announce a partnership.

Google DeepMind

Google DeepMindResearch paper· 16 Jan

D4RT: Teaching AI to see the world in four dimensions

Google DeepMind announces D4RT, a method for unified, efficient 4D reconstruction and tracking that is up to 300x faster than prior methods.

Google DeepMindModel update· 13 Jan

Veo 3.1 Ingredients to Video: More consistency, creativity and control

Veo update generates lively, dynamic clips and supports vertical video generation.

Together AI

Together AIPartnership· 13 Jan

Learn how Cursor partnered with Together AI to deliver real-time, low-latency inference at scale

Cursor and Together AI partner to deliver real-time, low-latency inference for Cursor's AI coding platform using NVIDIA Blackwell GPUs, custom kernels, and a quantization pipeline to enable fast…

Together AIStory of the week· 12 Jan

Inside multi-node training: How to scale model training across GPU clusters

This article is a technical guide explaining multi-node GPU training, covering parallelism strategies, network interconnects, checkpointing, and practical steps for scaling model training across GPU…

Baidu

BaiduModel update· 15 Jan

ERNIE-5.0 Tops LMArena Text Leaderboard as No.1 Chinese Model!

ERNIE-5.0-0110 ranked first among Chinese models and eighth globally on the LMArena Text leaderboard, and second globally on Math. The model is no longer labeled as Preview.

Cursor

CursorCapability change· 16 Jan

CLI Agent Modes and Cloud Handoff

Cursor CLI adds Plan mode and Ask mode for interactive planning and code exploration, introduces Handoff to Cloud Agents to continue conversations on web or mobile, provides word-level inline diffs,…

Hugging Face

Hugging FaceDeveloper tool· 15 Jan

Open Responses: What you need to know

Hugging Face announces Open Responses, an open inference standard based on OpenAI's Responses API, designed for agentic workloads and structured streaming.

Sakana AI

Sakana AIResearch paper· 18 Jan

RePo: Language Models with Context Re-Positioning

Sakana AI announces RePo, a method that allows language models to dynamically reorganize their context by learning to assign positions based on content relevance, improving robustness on noisy…

Z.ai

Z.aiNew model· 14 Jan

GLM-Image

Z.ai announced the launch of GLM-Image, a new image generation model built on a multimodal architecture and trained on domestic chips, combining autoregressive semantic understanding with…