Good morning. It's Friday, January 30, and we're covering AI pressure on smartphones, coding agents, Google’s virtual worlds, and more.

First time reading? Join 600k+ people keeping up with the future of tech: Sign up here. If you liked this email, share it with a friend. And as always, we’d love your feedback: [email protected]

🌍 Google Opens Project Genie World Builder
Google AI has opened access to Project Genie, a prototype that turns text prompts into interactive virtual worlds. The tool is now available to Google AI Ultra subscribers in the U.S. aged 18 and over. Project Genie combines the Genie 3 world model with Gemini’s reasoning and Nano Banana’s design tools. Google says early testers created entirely new interactive environments using the system.

💰 Big Tech Eyes Massive OpenAI Investment
NVIDIA, Microsoft, and Amazon are in talks to invest up to $60 billion in OpenAI, according to The Information. NVIDIA could contribute as much as $30 billion, while Amazon may invest more than $20 billion and Microsoft under $10 billion. Reuters could not independently verify the report, and the companies declined to comment.

🚀 Musk’s SpaceX Explores Merger With Tesla or xAI
SpaceX is reportedly evaluating potential merger talks with Tesla Inc. as well as with Musk’s artificial intelligence venture xAI. The discussions are preliminary and come as SpaceX prepares for a planned initial public offering in 2026. The proposed consolidation aims to forge a vertically integrated empire spanning orbital compute, autonomous robotics, and neural chatbots.

📉 Sora App Loses Momentum
Following its spectacular October 2025 mobile debut, OpenAI’s Sora app is facing significant user retention headwinds. Appfigures data shows installs fell 32% in December and 45% in January. Competition from Google and Meta, plus tighter copyright restrictions, has dampened growth. Sora maintains a base of 9.6 million total downloads, yet its App Store ranking has plummeted to No. 101

Before Amazon, eBay, or even secure payment systems, someone made the very first online sale. But what was it, and who clicked “buy” before it was cool?

Stick around for the answer! 👇️

👉 Watch on X or YouTube.

Samsung Electronics reported a record fourth-quarter operating profit of 20.1 trillion won ($65.6 billion in revenue), more than tripling year over year and beating analyst estimates, as a global memory chip shortage pushed prices higher. The surge was driven by strong demand for high-bandwidth memory (HBM) used in artificial intelligence servers, particularly from data center customers.

Results topped Samsung’s own guidance and surpassed its previous profit record set in 2018. Executives warned, however, that rising component costs could pressure its smartphone and display businesses even as memory profits expand. → Continue reading here.

The Economist reports that the iPhone-centric smartphone era is facing its first real structural challenge as AI-first devices from OpenAI, Meta, and Amazon push alternatives to screen-based computing. For two decades, Apple hardware and Google’s Android software have defined access to the digital world. Now AI assistants, smart glasses, and screen-light devices propose a different interaction model. Analysts caution that smartphones are unlikely to disappear anytime soon; instead, AI is more likely to reshape where value accrues within the existing ecosystem.

The Apple–Google duopoly is under pressure, but the numbers show inertia: roughly 250 million iPhones were sold in 2025 versus about 15 million smart-glasses users globally. OpenAI and Jony Ive are working on a new AI device, Meta is accelerating smart-glasses development, and Amazon is extending Alexa+ across speakers, glasses, and earbuds. Smartphone shipments are projected to fall about 6% in 2026, driven by higher memory-chip costs and competition from AI chips. → Read the full article here. (Paywall)

Former OpenAI researcher Andrej Karpathy says recent gains in AI coding agents have fundamentally changed how he writes software, shifting from mostly manual coding to mostly directing models in plain English. In a series of notes shared on X, Karpathy describes agents like Claude and Codex as crossing a “threshold of coherence” around December 2025, enabling large, sustained code changes with minimal human input.

He cautions that the tools still make subtle conceptual errors and require close supervision, especially for production code. Still, he argues the net productivity and creative gains make it difficult to imagine returning to fully manual programming. → Read the full article here.

📈 Meta Beats Earnings, Doubles Down on AI: Meta posted $40.1B in Q4 2025 revenue (+25% YoY) and beat profit forecasts. Shares jumped 15% as it pledged major 2026 capex to expand AI infrastructure.

👩‍⚖️ Music Publishers Seek $3B From Anthropic: Major music publishers led by Concord and Universal are suing Anthropic, alleging it illegally downloaded over 20,000 copyrighted works.

🍎 Apple Acquires Audio AI Startup Q.ai: Known for advanced audio and silent speech AI, in a deal reportedly worth up to $2 billion. The move aims to enhance Apple’s voice-driven products like Siri, AirPods, and Vision Pro.

🦿 Tesla Drops Models, Bets on AI: Revenue fell 3% in 2025 as Tesla ends Model S and X to build Optimus robots, invests $2bn in xAI, and shifts beyond EVs.

🙅‍♂️ DuckDuckGo Users Reject AI Search: A poll of 175,000 voters found 90% want no AI, prompting DuckDuckGo to launch opt-in and opt-out search versions amid Big Tech’s AI push.

💵 UK Weighs Basic Income for AI Shock: Minister Jason Stockwood says universal basic income is being discussed as AI disrupts jobs and UK employment weakens.

Sort of. In the early 1970s, long before the Web existed, Stanford students used ARPANET (a precursor to the internet) to arrange a transaction with their MIT counterparts. The “product”? A small amount of marijuana.

Now, to be clear, this wasn’t an e-commerce platform—it was more like a message board where the deal was coordinated, not fulfilled. Still, it’s widely recognized as the first online sale. So yes, technically, the internet’s first commercial use involved college students and cannabis.

❤️ Love Forward Future? Share your referral link with friends and colleagues to unlock exclusive perks! 👉 Get your link here.
🧑‍💻The AI-Fluent Job Board: Hire talent that understands AI. Find jobs that actually value your AI skills. → Learn more.

Thanks for reading today’s newsletter. See you next time!
Matthew Berman & The Forward Future Team

🧑‍🚀 🧑‍🚀 🧑‍🚀 🧑‍🚀 🧑‍🚀