🗄️ NVIDIA Moves Toward Full Servers: NVIDIA may ship fully built L10 Vera Rubin compute trays, shifting design work from ODMs and tightening its control of AI hardware margins.

🏗️ Microsoft Builds 700-Mile AI Superfactory: Microsoft linked its Atlanta and Wisconsin sites into a unified NVIDIA-powered cluster with hundreds of thousands of Blackwell GPUs.

➖ OpenAI Tames ChatGPT’s Em-Dash Habit: OpenAI says a new update lets users reliably block em dashes through custom instructions, giving writers finer control.

💸 OpenAI Has Paid Microsoft $865M in 2025: Leaked docs show OpenAI paid Microsoft $493.8M in 2024 and $865.8M through Q3 2025 under a 20% revenue-sharing deal.

📖 Databricks Co-Founder Urges Open AI Race: Ali Ghodsi argues the U.S. must back open-source AI to stay ahead of China. He warns closed models risk falling behind in innovation and trust.

🗫 ChatGPT Tests Regional Group Chats: OpenAI launched a pilot group-chat feature in Japan, New Zealand, South Korea, and Taiwan, letting up to 20 users collaborate as it explores more social, shared AI experiences.

🚘 Foreign Carmakers Win China AI Approval (Paywall): China has approved Tesla, Volvo, and Mercedes-Benz as the first foreign carmakers to deploy generative AI chatbots in vehicles, clearing them to offer in-car AI assistants under the country’s new regulations.

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GPT-5.1 gets faster, chattier, and smarter with better personality, tighter instruction-following, adaptive reasoning, and major accuracy boosts.

The Economist argues that a sharp fall in U.S. equities—now at valuations last seen in the dot-com era—could trigger an unusual recession rooted in collapsing household wealth. With stocks making up 21% of U.S. household assets and AI-linked gains driving nearly half the past year’s wealth increase, a dot-com-scale drop would cut net worth by an estimated 8%.

That hit could trim consumer spending by roughly 1.6% of GDP, enough to push an already-soft labor market into recession. The shock would spill into Europe and China, strain indebted governments, and intensify protectionist pressures as trade imbalances widen. Even the dollar’s haven status looks less certain amid political volatility and a potential reshaping of Federal Reserve oversight. → Continue reading here. (Paywall)

A Chinese company, CHIPX, has unveiled what it calls the world’s first scalable, “industrial-grade” optical quantum computing chip, claiming performance up to 1,000× faster than NVIDIA GPUs on AI workloads, according to the South China Morning Post. The photonic chip integrates more than 1,000 optical components on a 6-inch wafer and can reportedly be deployed in two weeks—far quicker than traditional quantum systems.

Production remains limited: facilities are making about 12,000 wafers a year, each yielding roughly 350 chips. While technical details and real-world benchmarks remain unclear, the announcement highlights China’s push to commercialize quantum hardware as U.S. firms, including NVIDIA, invest heavily in similar optical and co-packaged technologies. → Read the full article here.

Thirty-year-old eBay is rolling out a slate of AI features to regain relevance in a crowded e-commerce market, introducing five tools this year including AI shipping estimates, a seller assistant, and a natural-language shopping bot. CEO Jamie Iannone says the company’s decades of listing data and 134 million buyers give it an edge as it modernizes the platform. Early signals are positive: eBay’s stock is up 75% since 2020, September-quarter revenue rose 9% to $2.8 billion, and gross merchandise volume grew 10% year-over-year.

The company is targeting the “accidental entrepreneurs” who emerged during the pandemic, using AI to simplify listings and boost sales in core categories like car parts and collectibles. Competition remains intense, but eBay is betting AI will help both power users and newcomers find and sell items more easily. → Read the full article here.

Rabbit, maker of the R1 AI companion, is facing internal turmoil as several employees say they haven’t been paid since July, prompting a small strike that began in October, according to Tom’s Guide. CEO Jesse Lyu acknowledged significant cash flow problems after a planned India launch collapsed due to regulatory issues, derailing expected revenue.

The company has also been late paying contractors for much of the year but says a legally binding funding round is set to close “in the coming weeks.” Despite the setback—and reviews that branded the R1 “barely reviewable”—Rabbit insists it will deliver new AI hardware in 2026. → Read the full paper here.

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Matthew Berman & The Forward Future Team

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