Thoughts on Tech News of Note - Week Ending 1-9-2026

• CES 2026
• AI Giants Make Money and Buy Energy
• Grok on Lockdown

Happy New Year! (let's hope)

CES 2026

Of course, it is entirely unsurprising that CES was full of AI this year. The world is increasingly full of AI-powered tools and gadgets. If you were to ask an AI-powered chatbot what the theme of CES was this year, you might get an answer that includes the words “physical AI”. This is because many companies presented devices that use AI to perform some kind of physical task such as emptying your dishwasher or driving your car. CES has routinely been a show full of robots eager to vacuum your carpets, mow your lawn, and patrol your home, but each year the robots ratchet it up a level or two. Now the vacuuming robots have arms and legs and can possibly climb stairs. (Whether or not they can descend them, I’m unsure but it might be fun to watch.) Self-driving technology is being pushed as a feature by even more companies, including Nvidia, which is promising swift advancement to level 3 driving, probably well before any regulator is really willing to allow regular people to put it to practical use. More useful to many of us would be robots that would indeed do commonly despised household chores such as laundry, washing dishes, and cleaning the bathroom. Sadly, I haven’t seen much evidence that we’re really anywhere near that beautiful, automated world yet. Plenty of companies showed off robots that can dance and perform acrobatics, but I didn’t see any that could effectively and efficiently strip my bed and put the sheets in the wash. That’s really all I want from a household robot: take off the dirty bedding, put on clean bedding, and put the dirty bedding in the washing machine. I’ll even accept that I’ll have to unload the washing machine and load the dryer myself. These are relatively simple tasks for a human, but I imagine we’re still pretty far off from a robot doing them. So for now, we must be satisfied with robots accomplishing useful tasks mainly via remote control or doing only very simple tasks a young child could manage. Useful teenage robots are still science fiction.

I watched the AMD keynote livestream because I’d never seen or heard Lisa Su present and I was curious what Jensen Huang’s cousin is like. She came across as very competent and knowledgeable of her company’s product lines and initiatives and had a purposeful presence that I wouldn’t call warm or engaging but I also wouldn’t call cold and detached. She seemed to me like a leader that would be fair but would not be easily pushed around or bamboozled by smoke and mirrors. She wasn’t trying to be a rock star; she didn’t try to dazzle or confuse with a lot of jargon. She brought out other leaders and asked them to share their experiences using AMD hardware and outline their vision for their role in the future of technology. The presentation covered a lot of ground from the newest chips and platforms AMD has to offer to the progress being made in language and vision models, robotics, space, and medicine. As AMD isn’t a company I have followed closely, despite my last two PC purchases being powered by their chips, I was happy to see that they have their tentacles in so many industries. AMD has been a strong brand for many years, but Lisa has been leading and expanding their reach and it’s impressive to see.

Of course, as a gadget girl, I took notice of the coverage of the Clicks Communicator and new Qi charging keyboard, the Samsung Z Trifold, and the TCL A1 Note NXTPAPER that I probably unfortunately backed on Kickstarter. I want to buy the Clicks Communicator, and I wish I still had my HTC/T-Mobile Dash to compare to it, but at least I do still have a Palm Pre lying around here somewhere if I succumb to the temptation to pre-order one. I did pre-order the Qi charging keyboard, though.

AI Giants Make Money and Buy Energy

I also shouldn’t be surprised that xAI was able to raise $20B this week, beating out Anthropic’s $10B. xAI is aiming to build a data center in Mississippi. I have so many conflicting feelings about this fact. I’m sure MS needs more jobs, probably more so than many other states, so that’s an encouraging bit. But MS is a red state with a black population of well over 30% and I can imagine that the data center will likely be built in an area where that 30% lives and might be negatively impacted by the environmental challenges data centers tend to present to their neighborhoods. It appears that this new site will be across the river from Memphis, where xAI already has a significant presence. As with data centers elsewhere, there are complex pros and cons to navigate. Additional tech jobs and increased property tax revenue is surely seen as a benefit to the area, but there have been disputes about the effects of gas turbines used to power the data center and the resulting impact on air quality. Having another site nearby will probably attract new and supporting businesses, but it will be difficult to calculate the net positive/negative impacts overall, especially without good quality data on air quality and any resulting health issues. So perhaps it isn’t all that terrible that many companies are ever increasingly turning to nuclear energy to power their centers. Meta signed new agreements this week with three nuclear energy companies. These are long-term commitments of up to 20 years. These are massive commitments as well; the TerraPower deal is expected to generate up to 690 megawatts of capacity, which is said to be sufficient to power a midsize city. When these outlets say, “midsize city”, I always wonder what they mean. Kansas City? Minneapolis? Peoria, IL? Ultimately though, it is probably better for everyone if more companies seek to provide their own power arrangements rather than competing with local residents and other companies for power. Perhaps these deals will help to keep electricity costs stable in the communities near these centers. But the key word here is “ultimately” as it will take years for these reactors to be built and start supplying power. In the meantime, many struggles are ahead.

Grok on Lockdown

I have never used Grok. I have an account on X/Twitter, but I haven’t posted on it in more than a year and logged in only recently to check it when my husband suggested that something was trending online, but I wasn’t seeing anything about it on Mastodon or Bluesky. Nevertheless, I know Grok is a popular tool (Lisa Su even mentioned it in her keynote) and has been growing its user base in spite of or perhaps because of the famous man behind it. I have used Microsoft’s CoPilot, Google’s Gemini/Veo, and Perplexity to generate images and videos. I’ve used these tools to help me create visuals for business purposes - logo ideas, blog post images, marketing video snippets, etc. I’ve been surprised multiple times over how useful these tools can be for someone like me with no visual artistic ability and no money to pay a professional to create something for me. Most of the time, something sufficiently non-ugly is enough for my meager purposes. And these AI tools have over-delivered almost every time. But I haven’t used the tools extensively. I’ve created probably fewer than 10 images and videos over the past year. I don’t post much to social media, so I don’t have a constant need for new images to share there. And most of the time when I’m taking photos, there’s little to no desire to doctor them up with the many available tools out there to make them look like whatever my tired brain can conceive. So although I’m again not surprised that these tools are being used to create the worst possible imagery, I am somewhat surprised that this story has blown up to the extent that it has and the company’s response to the blowback. Perhaps if it was any other company there would be more societal pushback and that company would have responded with a more conciliatory tone. But this is xAI and they don’t seem to have any conciliatory tendencies. It’s always deny, deflect, blame. (hmm, that reminds me of something) Even now, nothing has really been fixed. They took the step of disabling image and video generation for free users, but that’s not a fix. It’s more or less keeping the water on at a trickle rather than at full force. And while many nations around the world have expressed extreme discontent with xAI over this incident, none of the stories in my news feeds or websites I visit have referenced anyone from the US government expressing anything. The only mention I saw when wading through countless stories on Minnesota, Venezuela, Greenland, and December unemployment numbers was a reference to a letter that some senators had sent to Apple and Google, urging them to remove the app from their stores. This isn’t a fix either, and not only because the web exists. People already have those apps installed. Unless Apple and Google remove them from devices - and they’re not going to do that, at least not in the US - the problem remains.

I was really struck by this closing line in a story on USA Today about a woman who found that her pictures had been altered and shared on X:

“For now, Wallersteiner is still on X, but is questioning that choice. "X has become an increasingly hateful platform that is not a brilliant place to be for women," she says.”

Has it just now become that? How much worse does it have to be to push you all the way off the platform?

2026 is going to be quite a year, isn't it?