Nvidia strikes largest deal in company history

Good morning, AI enthusiasts. Hope you had a comfortable holiday — and as expected, there was no shortage of AI news over our week-long break.

It was a very sweet one for Jensen Huang, with Nvidia dropping $20B to license Groq’s speedy AI chips, while also bringing the creator of Google’s rival TPUs on board in the method.

In today’s AI rundown:

• Nvidia licenses Groq tech in $20B deal

• The Rundown Roundtable: Our AI use cases

• Perform real-time market research using Grok

• Z.ai’s GLM-4.7 tops open-source benchmarks

• 4 recent AI tools, community workflows, and more

LATEST DEVELOPMENTS

NVIDIA & GROQ

💰 Nvidia licenses Groq tech in $20B deal

The Rundown: Nvidia just struck a licensing deal reportedly price $20B with AI chip startup Groq, with the corporate’s CEO and president also joining the chip giant to assist integrate and scale the tech.

The small print:

• The deal targets Groq’s LPU chips, which focus on running AI models quickly and cheaply — claiming 10x speed at a fraction of GPU energy use.

• Groq was valued at $6.9B just 3 months ago after raising $750M from investors like BlackRock, Samsung, and Cisco.

• Groq CEO Jonathan Ross and President Sunny Madra will join Nvidia because the startup continues independently under CFO Simon Edwards.

• Ross previously helped create Google’s TPU chips before founding Groq in 2016, with the $20B deal becoming the most important in Nvidia’s history.

Why it matters: Groq’s Ross left Google after helping create the TPU chips that now compete directly with Nvidia’s GPUs — and a decade later, Nvidia is bringing him back into the fold. As custom silicon from Google and Amazon chip away at its lead, Nvidia seems to now be playing defense by stockpiling the talent behind it.

TOGETHER WITH WEIGHTS & BIASES

📙 Practitioner’s guide to post-training LLMs with RL

The Rundown: Have to get caught up quickly on the best way to post-train LLMs on agentic tasks using reinforcement learning (RL)? This practitioner’s guide covers RL’s origins, advantages teams can realize by incorporating RL for post-training, and the best way to start.

Get the guide to learn:

• The role of RL in post-training agents and the way it compares to SFT

• How LoRA makes fine-tuning more efficient

• Key advantages and use cases of RL in production workloads

• Using Serverless RL from Weights & Biases to kickstart your RL jobs in minutes

Download the Practitioner’s guide to reinforcement learning.

THE RUNDOWN ROUNDTABLE

💡 The Rundown Roundtable: Our AI use cases

The Rundown: The Rundown Roundtable is a weekly feature through which we poll members of The Rundown staff about how we use AI in our work and every day lives.

Jennifer, Tech & Robotics Author: I live in Europe, but I like using American recipes for Christmas cookies and a few desserts. So I paste recipes into ChatGPT and ask it to convert all of the measurements from cups to grams and ounces to milliliters, etc. I used to do that all manually, which took literally perpetually.

Shubham, Editor: I skipped the expensive travel agency playbook and planned my Singapore–Malaysia trip for these holidays with ChatGPT as an alternative — with a broad layout at first after which detailed versions day-by-day. It mapped out complete plans, transport routes, ticket logic, food options (preferred Indian), and pacing without pushing generic packages or wasting time on filler attractions.

Jason, Developer: ChatGPT helped me find an ideal Magic: The Gathering card for $50 with historical significance for my brother, who’s into that thing. He loved it. I got to pretend like I did a bunch of research when it actually took 15 seconds. Win-win.

AI TRAINING

🧪 Perform real-time market research using Grok

The Rundown: On this tutorial, you’ll learn the best way to track Twitter trends and news stories from the last 24 hours with xAI’s Grok, then automate every day research memos in Notion using Make for any trend or competitor.

Step-by-step:

1. Copy the Notion Database Template, then go to console.x.ai, create an API key, and fund your xAI account with a minimum of $5

2. Download the Make blueprint file, log in to Make.com, create a brand new scenario, click the three dots → Import Blueprint, upload the JSON file, and save

3. Connect accounts: click the xAI Module 2 and add your API key, then click the Notion Module 3 and authorize access to your page from step 1

4. Arrange the webhook: copy the webhook URL from Make’s Webhook Module 1, go to Notion, click the lightning bolt → “Webhook trigger on recent,” replace the URL, and set it to trigger when Status = “Start Research”

5. Test by making a recent database row, filling out Research Topic, Date, Industry/Competitor, and Sources, then setting Status to “Start Research”

Pro tip: Arrange a trigger that creates a brand new research memo on the identical topic every day. You possibly can send the webhook from this trigger, or manually flip it on to save lots of tokens.

PRESENTED BY RETOOL

🏆 Can AI actually ship production apps?

The Rundown: Retool’s Holiday Shipping Spree challenges you to construct an actual, deployable app using AI-assisted development — and compete for a 12 months of Retool Business plus hundreds in builder gear.

Here’s how it really works:

• Get a free month of Retool Business with unlimited AI prompting credits

• Construct production-ready apps using natural language with AI AppGen

• Win a MacBook Air, Apple Studio Display, AirPods Max, and more

Enter the competition by Jan. 8.

Z AI

🇨🇳 Z.ai’s GLM-4.7 tops open-source benchmarks

The Rundown: Chinese AI startup Z.ai just released GLM-4.7, a coding-focused model that tops benchmarks for open-source systems and matches models from top Western rivals — launching just days before its expected Hong Kong listing.

The small print:

• GLM-4.7 achieves a 73.8% on SWE-bench, making Z AI the primary Chinese lab to interrupt 70% on the real-world coding benchmark.

• 4.7 surpasses open rival DeepSeek-V3.2 across a variety of agentic, reasoning, and coding benchmarks, also topping Kimi K2 and Claude Sonnet 4.5.

• Z open-sourced the model weights on Hugging Face, with GLM-4.7 also available to make use of with coding agents like Claude Code.

• The Alibaba-backed startup passed Hong Kong IPO hearings last weekend, with a raise of $300M expected next month.

Why it matters: China continues to release highly competitive open-source models at a pace that’s hard to disregard. With those firms also getting an injection of funding and potentially opening access to more advanced AI chips, 2026 often is the 12 months we see a Chinese frontier-level open release catch the highest Western leaders.

QUICK HITS

🛠️ Trending AI Tools

• 🤖 GLM-4.7 – Z.ai’s recent SOTA open-source model

• 🚀 MiMo-V2-Flash – Xiaomi’s powerful open-weights reasoning model

• ⚙️ GPT-5.2-Codex – OpenAI’s recent top agentic coding model

• 🔊 SAM Audio – Meta’s model to separate sounds using text prompts

📰 The whole lot else in AI today

Honeycomb examines how accurate AI Agents really have to be. Read the blog to learn why speed, iteration, and self-correction matter greater than perfection.*

AI evaluation firm METR posted a brand new evaluation of Claude Opus 4.5, finding it able to tasks requiring nearly 5 hours of labor — the longest duration of any model so far.

Cursor announced the acquisition of code review platform Graphite, with plans to integrate the tool into its AI-powered code editor.

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman posted a job listing for a ‘Head of Preparedness’ to plan for and secure increasingly advanced models, including “systems that may self-improve”.

Alibaba-backed MiniMax released M2.1, a model with powerful capabilities across quite a lot of programming languages and for mobile and web app development.

Poetiq published an evaluation of its system on the ARC-AGI-2 benchmark running GPT 5.2 X-High, surpassing 70% and scoring the best of any model by around 15%.

*Sponsored Listing

COMMUNITY

🤝 Community AI workflows

Every newsletter, we showcase how a reader is using AI to work smarter, save time, or make life easier.

Today’s workflow comes from reader Mike in Appleton, WI:

“I’m using Windsurf to code a listing tracking app for a non-profit organization. I’m donating my time, and am a back-end developer who only dabbled in front-end development until 2023, when OpenAI released ChatGPT. I can now code skilled full-stack apps in days as an alternative of months. This is admittedly a game-changer to all of us devs that only dreamed of making these things without having to spend months and even years getting on top of things.”

How do you employ AI? Tell us here.

🎓 Highlights: News, Guides & Events

• Read our last AI newsletter: AI giants join forces on Genesis Mission

• Read our last Tech newsletter: OpenAI eyes $830B mega-valuation

• Read our last Robotics newsletter: Top 5 robotics trends this 12 months

• Today’s AI tool guide: Perform real-time market research using Grok

• Watch our last live workshop: NotebookLM for Work

See you soon,

Rowan, Joey, Zach, Shubham, and Jennifer — the humans behind The Rundown