What investment is rudimentary for billionaires but ‘revolutionary’ for 70,571+ investors entering 2026?

Imagine this. You open your phone to an alert. It says, “you spent $236,000,000 more this month than you did last month.”

If you were the top bidder at Sotheby’s fall auctions, it could be reality.

Sounds crazy, right? But when the ultra-wealthy spend staggering amounts on blue-chip art, it’s not just for decoration.

The scarcity of these treasured artworks has helped drive their prices, in exceptional cases, to thin-air heights, without moving in lockstep with other asset classes.

The contemporary and post war segments have even outpaced the S&P 500 overall since 1995.*

Now, over 70,000 people have invested $1.2 billion+ across 500 iconic artworks featuring Banksy, Basquiat, Picasso, and more.

How? You don’t need Medici money to invest in multimillion dollar artworks with Masterworks.

Thousands of members have gotten annualized net returns like 14.6%, 17.6%, and 17.8% from 26 sales to date.

Explore offerings

_{*Based on Masterworks data. Past performance is not indicative of future returns. Important Reg A disclosures: masterworks.com/cd}

Today:

• Manus Brings Autonomous AI Agents to Telegram

• Alibaba Releases Qwen 3.5 with 1-Million Token Context Window

• Disney and Paramount Hit ByteDance with Legal Action Over "Seedance" Video App

• Pentagon Threatens to Cancel Anthropic Contract Following Maduro Operation

• OpenAI Introduces "Lockdown Mode" to Prevent Data Exfiltration

Manus just launched Manus Agents on Telegram.

This isn't just another chatbot that summarizes text. It’s a full-blown agent that lives in your chat app. You can connect it to your account via a QR code, and suddenly you have an assistant that can execute multi-step tasks, access tools, and actually do work for you while you’re on the go.

What makes this cool is the autonomy. It has persistent memory (so it remembers your preferences) and can plan out complex workflows—like researching a topic, writing a report, and sending it off—all from a simple text command. It feels like we’re finally moving from "talking to AI" to "teaming up with AI."

Alibaba dropped a monster model while we were sleeping 🐉

The open-source community is buzzing right now. Alibaba just released Qwen 3.5, and the specs are serious.

They’ve released a 397B parameter open-weight model, which is a massive contribution to the community. But the real head-turner is the "Plus" version, which boasts a context window of up to 1 million tokens.

The team is positioning this as a huge leap in reasoning, coding, and—fittingly—agentic capabilities. It uses a fancy "hybrid architecture" (mixing something called Gated Delta Networks with Mixture-of-Experts, for the tech nerds among us) to keep it efficient despite its size. Basically, it’s smarter, faster, and can read a library's worth of books in one go. If you're building apps, this is a model you need to test ASAP.

Mickey Mouse sends in the lawyers 🐭⚖️

ByteDance (the parent company of TikTok) just launched a new AI video app called Seedance 2.0, and it immediately broke the internet... and then the law, apparently.

The app is incredibly powerful—capable of generating cinematic videos from text, images, and audio. But users immediately started making videos of Tom Cruise fighting Brad Pitt, and Star Wars characters duking it out.

Naturally, Disney and Paramount were not amused. They slapped ByteDance with cease-and-desist letters, calling it a "virtual smash-and-grab" of their IP. ByteDance has already responded, promising to "curb" the app and strengthen safeguards. It’s a stark reminder that while the tech is ready for prime time, the legal frameworks are still catching up.

🧠RESEARCH

MedXIAOHE: A Comprehensive Recipe for Building Medical MLLMs

This paper introduces a new medical AI built to diagnose patients more accurately. Unlike standard models, it is trained specifically on rare diseases and learns to "think" through complex cases step-by-step. It creates reliable medical reports and significantly reduces made-up information, outperforming existing systems in clinical tests.

CoPE-VideoLM: Codec Primitives For Efficient Video Language Models

Current AI models represent videos as a series of full images, which is slow and expensive. This new method speeds up the process by reading the compressed video data (like movement directions) instead. It makes AI video understanding nearly 90% faster and cheaper without losing any accuracy.

Zooming without Zooming: Region-to-Image Distillation for Fine-Grained Multimodal Perception

AI often struggles to see tiny details in large images without slowly "zooming in" like a camera. This research teaches a model to spot fine details instantly in a single glance. By training it to mimic the zooming process without actually doing it, the AI becomes faster and sharper.

🛠️TOP TOOLS

Each listing includes a hands-on tutorial so you can get started right away, whether you’re a beginner or a pro.

Collov AI – One‑Click Virtual Staging Made Simple - virtual staging tool for real estate photos.

ColorMagic – AI-Driven Color Palette Generator AI Design Tool - web-based AI tool that generates ready-to-use color palettes from text prompts, brand names, HEX codes, or images.

Colormind – AI Color Palette Generator - AI-powered color scheme generator that uses deep learning trained on real-world visuals (photos, movies, art) to create cohesive palettes.

📲SOCIAL MEDIA

🗞️MORE NEWS

Anthropic vs. The Pentagon ⚔️ Reports reveal the U.S. military secretly used Anthropic’s AI to help capture Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro, triggering a major clash between the tech firm and the government. The Pentagon is now threatening to cancel its contract because Anthropic refuses to remove safety blocks that prevent its software from being used for weapons or mass spying. While other AI companies have agreed to the military's requests for unrestricted access, Anthropic is standing firm on its ethical limits.

OpenAI locks down ChatGPT 🔒 OpenAI just released a "Lockdown Mode" to stop hackers from tricking ChatGPT into leaking sensitive information. This new setting prevents the AI from browsing the live internet or using risky tools, keeping your data inside a safe bubble. It’s designed mostly for people like executives who need extra security, but it shows the company is finally taking data leaks seriously.

Anthropic moves into India 🇮🇳 Anthropic is officially setting up shop in Bengaluru to tap into the country's massive tech talent pool. They have already announced partnerships with major players like Air India to help them build software faster using their AI models. This expansion signals that they see India as a critical battleground for the future of artificial intelligence.

Nvidia makes AI agents cheaper 📉 Nvidia just revealed a powerful new chip system called Blackwell Ultra that drastically cuts the cost of running smart AI assistants. This hardware is built to handle complex tasks, like writing code or reasoning through long documents, without slowing down. It’s a huge deal because it finally makes running capable, autonomous AI agents affordable for businesses.

Ex-Google exec says skip the PhD 🎓 A former Google AI leader is warning students that spending years on a PhD or law degree might be a waste of time because technology is moving too fast. He argues that by the time you finish your degree, AI will likely have already automated the skills you spent years learning. Instead, he suggests focusing on things machines still struggle with, like emotional intelligence and adaptability.

AI Solves Erdős Problem A computer program solved a decades-old math puzzle known as an Erdős problem, earning the respect of top human mathematicians. Instead of just calculating fast, the AI used creative logic to find a proof that had stumped experts for years. This moment signals that machines are evolving from simple assistants into true scientific discoverers.