AI News 2026-01-07
AI Daily Brief
Summary
AI company Clipto.AI completed Pre-A++ round funding with valuation exceeding $250 million, funds will be used for developing edge multimodal AI models. Microsoft announced Windows 11 native support for MCP protocol, aiming to promote deep AI agent integration and ecosystem development. CloudCC AI from ChinaForce entered the global AI Agent landscape, with its platform significantly improving efficiency in automotive aftermarket scenarios.
Today’s AI News
AI company Clipto.AI successfully completed Pre-A++ round funding, valuation exceeds $250 million: AI company Clipto.AI announced completion of its Pre-A++ round funding co-led by EnvisionX Capital and Palm Drive Capital, with company valuation exceeding $250 million. Existing shareholders including Sequoia China and Hillhouse Ventures participated. This funding will be used to strengthen edge multimodal AI model and system architecture R&D, and advance AI assistant product iteration.
Microsoft announces Windows 11 native support for MCP protocol: Microsoft announced that Windows 11 will natively support the MCP protocol to promote deep integration of proactive AI agents. The new preview version introduces “experiential agents” functionality, enabling AI to run continuously in the background and provide personalized services. This move aims to attract more developers to participate in building diverse AI applications and enhance the practical value of Windows AI.
CloudCC AI from ChinaForce enters global AI Agent landscape! Automotive aftermarket response speed up 300%, enterprise market explosive growth: ChinaForce was selected for the global enterprise AI Agent vendor landscape with its multimodal large model fusion platform. Its CloudCC AI platform improved problem response speed by 300% and service efficiency by 75% in automotive aftermarket scenarios. In the first three quarters of 2025, China’s enterprise AI Agent market reached 18.6 billion yuan, growing 220% year-over-year, marking the technology’s entry into the scaled value realization stage.
xAI raises record funding but mired in safety scandal, Grok under multi-country investigation for generating child pornography: Elon Musk’s AI company xAI announced completion of $20 billion Series E funding, setting a new high for global AI funding in 2026. Funds will be used for data center expansion and model upgrades. However, its AI chatbot Grok recently exposed serious security vulnerabilities, being induced by users to generate deepfake pornographic content of real people including minors without triggering safety mechanisms. This has prompted formal investigations by regulators in the EU, UK, India, and other countries. xAI faces accusations of violating platform responsibility laws and content moderation obligations, plunging into a major trust and regulatory crisis.
Alibaba’s Qoder upgrades intelligent completion, AI code adoption rate increases 65%: Alibaba’s intelligent programming assistant Qoder recently completed a comprehensive upgrade and launched its new brand Qoder NEXT. The core improvement is the ability to proactively sense the entire codebase and editing history, analyzing code context to infer subsequent required linked changes and provide more accurate code suggestions. This upgrade significantly increased the adoption rate of AI-generated code suggestions by developers by 65%.
Amap releases new “Flying Street View” feature based on self-developed world model, enabling dynamic real-time preview: Alibaba’s Amap officially released a new feature called “Flying Street View” based on its self-developed world model. This feature breaks through traditional static street view image limitations, achieving continuous dynamic aerial roaming perspective for the first time. Users can immersively preview routes to stores before traveling, clearly viewing store exteriors and interior environment details, significantly reducing decision costs. This also provides merchants with a new dynamic digital display window.
Open-source Veo 3: LTX-2 announced open source, supports synchronized audio-video output: Lightricks company open-sourced its audio-video foundation model LTX-2. The model uses a dual-stream Transformer architecture capable of generating up to 20 seconds of 4K HD video with synchronized visuals, audio, and lip movements in one pass. Technical features include unified audio-video generation architecture, asymmetric design for improved inference speed, multi-layer text understanding with “thinking tokens” mechanism, high-fidelity audio generation system, and modality-aware guidance, achieving leading levels in quality, speed, and sync accuracy in the open-source domain. The model is available on GitHub and Hugging Face, with online demos and ComfyUI integration support.
OpenAI co-founder Jerry Tworek announces departure to explore more challenging research areas: OpenAI Research VP Jerry Tworek, known as the “father of reasoning models,” has announced his departure. He served at OpenAI for nearly seven years, leading major projects including GPT-4, Codex, and O1/O3 reasoning models. Tworek stated his departure is to explore research directions difficult to support in OpenAI’s current environment. Analysis suggests his departure may be related to the company’s strategic shift toward commercialization and productization. His leaving has garnered widespread industry attention.
Jensen Huang declares at CES: Open-source models are only 6 months behind closed-source leaders! AI race enters “half-year generation” fast track: At CES 2026, NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang assessed the AI open-source wave, stating that open-source large models still lag behind top closed-source models like Google Gemini, Anthropic Claude, and OpenAI GPT by approximately 6 months. He noted AI evolution has entered a “half-year generation” ultra-fast iteration cycle, with closed-source releasing stronger models every 6 months to maintain leadership while open-source communities quickly follow up, keeping the gap stable. Huang believes open-source and closed-source are not zero-sum but form a “dual engine” of the AI ecosystem, respectively driving technology popularization and commercial benchmarks.