Welcome to 2026. Please Buckle Up.

Welcome back apprentices! 👋

Hey {{first_name|friend}},

You’d think the first week of January would be quiet — vision boards, green smoothies, maybe a light existential crisis. 

Instead, AI rolled out your sleep prognosis, rewired your car’s brain, and triggered an international scandal before the coffee even brewed.

If this is how 2026 starts, you might want to cancel your weekend and catch up. 

But no stress — we broke it all down. 

No PhD required, just five minutes.

_{Read Time: 5 minutes}

📸 RIP to the Grid, Hello to the Mess. Instagram boss Adam Mosseri just admitted what Gen Z already knows — the era of polished, perfect posts is over. In a year-end essay, he blames AI-generated content for killing the curated aesthetic, and says raw, awkward photos are now the real flex. The platform plans to label AI content and push for tech that can prove if a photo is “real-real.” In 2026 authenticity is all about looking un-good, on purpose.

🧞‍♂️ New Year,  New AI Assistant. Alexa just broke free from the smart speaker and hit the browser with Alexa+, Amazon’s new AI-powered assistant that does research, writing, and even restaurant bookings via OpenTable and Uber. With new partners like Yelp, Expedia, and Square onboard, it's now a digital concierge — on web, not just your kitchen counter. And yep, the Alexa app’s getting a full chatbot makeover too.

💊 Doctor Bot Will See You Now. Utah becomes first State to let AI approve your meds by giving an AI system the legal green light to auto-approve prescription refills — no doctor required. The pilot, built by health-tech startup Doctronic, covers 191 routine meds like SSRIs and birth control, and matched doctors’ decisions 99% of the time in trials. At just $4 per refill, other states are already lining up for a dose of automation.

AI has changed how consumers shop by speeding up research. But one thing hasn’t changed: shoppers still trust people more than AI.

Levanta’s new Affiliate 3.0 Consumer Report reveals a major shift in how shoppers blend AI tools with human influence. Consumers use AI to explore options, but when it comes time to buy, they still turn to creators, communities, and real experiences to validate their decisions.

The data shows:

The most effective brands are combining AI discovery with authentic human influence to drive measurable conversions.

Affiliate marketing isn’t being replaced by AI, it’s being amplified by it.

Download the full report to see what this means for your brand.

In the first week of 2026, the future walked in, took your vitals, parked your car, and asked for FDA clearance.

OpenAI rolled out ChatGPT Health, a private, personalized way to talk health with your AI by connecting your fitness data and even medical records. Nvidia dropped Alpamayo, a powerful, open-source AI that helps autonomous vehicles explain not just what they’re doing, but why. Elon’s xAI raised a jaw-dropping $20B (yep, billion) — while also getting dragged into an international scandal over Grok’s creepy misuse. 

Meanwhile, Stanford scientists built a sleep model that can predict Parkinson’s, dementia, and even your risk of dying — all from one night of snoozing. And in Meta land? Its AI godfather Yann LeCun rage-quit, declared LLMs a dead end, and started his own healthcare AI company.

Yup. It’s still just January.

Healthcare isn’t new territory for ChatGPT — 5% of all messages on the platform are already health-related. 

But ChatGPT Health takes it from symptom Googling to actual context-aware help.

Connect your Apple Watch, MyFitnessPal logs, even your medical history from providers via b.well, and you’re talking to an AI that knows you’ve been skipping leg day and your cholesterol check.

Stats That Matter:

This gives you a powerful new tool. 

Just remember: encryption is strong, but regulation is still catching up. So treat this like a helpful co-pilot, not a certified doctor.

Most self-driving AIs today are black boxes. 

They work... until they don’t. 

Nvidia’s Alpamayo aims to change that by adding reasoning you can actually see. This 10B-parameter “chain-of-thought” model can explain its decisions step-by-step, turning AVs from mysterious machines into transparent copilots.

Why It’s a Big Deal:

Alpamayo’s release is your sign that 2026 might be the year explainable AVs go mainstream. Tesla-style mystery autopilot? Meet open-source transparency.

xAI’s now valued at a casual $230B, with Grok 5 in training, new supercomputers spinning up, and Musk looking to tie the chatbot to Tesla, Optimus, and X. 

Sounds unstoppable — until Grok was caught letting users deepfake minors.

Global Fallout:

AI tools are only as safe as their worst users. 

“Freedom” without guardrails invites chaos. 

For regulators? Time to get off the sidelines.

You spend 1/3 of your life asleep — and Stanford just figured out how to mine that time for medical predictions. 

SleepFMis a massive model trained on 600K hours of data from 65,000 people. 

It tracks your sleep and identifies early signs of disease before you know anything’s wrong.

What It Can Predict (with scary-good accuracy):

If this kind of modeling gets into wearables — and it will — your sleep tracker might become your first line of defense against chronic illness. 

It will be like having a mini sleep lab in your bedroom.

If AI can launch health tools, open-source self-driving brains, raise $20B, and spark international policy crises — all in one week — what’s coming by week 10? Or week 52? 

The systems being built right now are already reshaping your rights, routines, and reality. And if this was just the opening act of 2026... buckle up.

Clear your calendar — not for meetings, but for updates. 

The AI news cycle is now a full-time job.

Hey, you didn’t get all this info for nothing — share it! If you know someone who’s diving into AI, help them stay in the loop with this week’s updates.

Sharing is a win-win! Send this to a friend who’s all about tech, and you’ll win a little surprise 👀

As we were closing out last year, a reader replied to us with a single word that hasn’t left our minds:

Innocraition

Innovating with AI — creatively.

Not blindly. Not recklessly.
But with intention, curiosity, and a very human sense of responsibility.

Because if 2026 is going to be the year AI enters our bodies, our cars, our sleep, and our laws — then how we build and use it matters more than ever.

That’s the lens we’re carrying into 2026.

— with thanks to Markus, who put the word to it.

Mobile attention is collapsing.

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Today, it’s just 2.2 seconds.

That’s a 35% drop in only 7 years. And a massive challenge for marketers.

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A playground for your imagination (and low-key prompt skills).

Each send, we give you a customizable DALL·E prompt inspired by a real-world use case — something that could help you in your business or job if you wanted to use it that way. But it’s also just a fun creative experiment.

You tweak it, run it, and send us your favorite. We pick one winner to feature in the next issue.

Bonus: you’re secretly getting better at prompt design. 🤫

At dawn, a vast open plaza comes alive — not with people, but with ideas taking physical form. Modular stalls unfold automatically from the ground, each built from glass, steel, and adaptive screens, forming a futuristic marketplace that exists before any real demand appears. At the center stall, your chosen concept materializes as a hyper-detailed, photorealistic prototype of [your offering], displayed as if investors, users, and the future itself are about to arrive. Surrounding stalls show faint, abstract hints of alternate paths not taken. The scene is captured in a cinematic wide shot with sharp morning light, long shadows, ultra-crisp materials, subtle reflections, and controlled depth of field.

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