The popular AI framework Virtuals Protocol will host an in-person meet-up in Hong Kong on Friday, January 17.

According to Politico, eight people familiar with the discussions disclosed that despite tech firms warning the move could dash the U.S.' hopes of maintaining its dominance in the artificial intelligence space, the Trump administration is still weighing a new round of comprehensive tariffs on semiconductors.

Beating AI News Flash: Before its official public launch, and with no revenue or user metrics disclosed, personal AI assistant Instinct has secured a $2.5 billion valuation from Silicon Valley venture capitalists. The company is raising roughly $250 million in funding, co-led by Benchmark and Index Ventures. Upon completion of this round, its total funding will reach around $350 million. The pace of its valuation surge is staggering: when Sarah Guo and Greenoaks’ Neil Mehta participated in its early funding rounds, Instinct’s valuation was just over $100 million. In early August, Kleiner Perkins led a $75 million Series A round, pushing its valuation to more than $500 million. Just a few weeks later, Benchmark and Index Ventures led a new round at a $2.5 billion valuation, marking another roughly 5x jump in value. Why the rush? A key reason is that many Silicon Valley investors were among the first to test Instinct, and they have since become its most active advocates. Some have dubbed it the "consumer version of OpenClaw". Investor Jesse Middleton was more direct, saying he tested Hermes, OpenClaw, Tasklet, and Grok Bot, and ultimately found Instinct to be the best. It hasn’t invented a new agent model; its edge lies in hiding all complex configurations from users. Users only need to send text messages or make calls to let the AI operate their computers, manage emails, book flights, and complete transactions. What really excites VCs is that OpenClaw has already proven there is demand for personal agents, yet no clear winner has emerged in the market. Instinct has surged in popularity precisely during this gap. Instinct is currently in an invite-only, free testing phase, with no public revenue or user metrics. At least based on public information, the $2.5 billion valuation is hard to justify with current business metrics. Capital is now betting on whether it can become the next personal AI gateway.

Beating AI Express Insight: Lody announces open-sourcing its CLI and local desktop client under the Apache 2.0 license. It is not a new coding agent, but rather adds a shared workspace layer on top of existing agents, compatible with Claude Code, Codex, Kimi, OpenCode and others. Teams can share sessions, view runtime status and code changes, and assign tasks from mobile or web to computers or servers. When multiple agents work simultaneously, different sessions can be placed in separate Git worktrees to avoid conflicts from concurrent code edits by different agents. Agents can also create, read and resume other sessions; a primary agent can split debugging, implementation and testing into multiple sub-sessions for parallel execution. However, not the entire Lody suite is open-sourced this time. The public repository explicitly excludes the hosted backend, deployment configurations, billing systems, and source code for web and mobile apps. Cross-device collaboration currently still relies on Lody’s hosted sync service, and end-to-end encryption is not yet supported. The official’s next step is to continue advancing toward a local-first approach, gradually making sessions, documents, tasks and historical decisions part of project contexts fully controlled by teams.

According to GMGN market data, meme coins on the BSC chain saw unusual price movements this afternoon. Leading tokens "Niu Lai" and MarsCoin have rallied over 20% in the past two hours. Specifically, "Niu Lai" currently has a market capitalization of $62 million, with a 24-hour gain of 51.75%; MarsCoin boasts a current market cap of $43.24 million, and a 24-hour increase of 16.89%.

Justin Sun stated at Hong Kong’s "Bitcoin Asia 2026" conference that quantum threats pose a widespread risk to blockchain technology and the entire global financial system, with traditional banks including JPMorgan also facing such risks. However, due to the Bitcoin community’s high level of decentralization—encompassing multiple participants such as miners, exchanges, and WBTC—reaching consensus on anti-quantum measures would take a long time. Sun also noted that TRON has been developing anti-quantum mechanisms over the past year; it released an anti-quantum address scheme in the first half of this year, which has been deployed on the testnet, and plans to upgrade its entire network to an anti-quantum mainstream cryptocurrency network by the end of this year.

According to market sources, Kioxia and SanDisk plan to invest $31 billion in Japan to expand their memory factories.