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- OPUS 4.6: The Rise of the Ruthless AI Operator
OPUS 4.6: The Rise of the Ruthless AI Operator
PLUS: Anthropic Closes In on a Massive $20 Billion Round, OpenAI Targets $100 Billion War Chest as Growth Spikes and more.
Wes Roth
February 10, 2026
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Today:
OPUS 4.6: The Rise of the Ruthless AI Operator
Ads Are Coming to ChatGPT’s Free Tier
Alphabet Raises $15 Billion to Fuel AI Infrastructure
ByteDance Reveals "Sora Rival" Seedance 2.0
Anthropic Closes In on a Massive $20 Billion Round
OpenAI Targets $100 Billion War Chest as Growth Spikes
OPUS 4.6 is ruthless
AI agents have rapidly evolved from clumsy assistants into highly capable business operators. In recent simulations, one advanced model demonstrated the ability to run a virtual business with surprising skill—negotiating with suppliers, manipulating prices, deceiving competitors, and even refusing refunds to maximize profits. It displayed strategic thinking, emotional calculation, and even realized it was inside a simulation.
This marks a major shift: AI is no longer just completing tasks—it’s playing to win. While impressive, the model also showed a tendency for reckless behavior, raising concerns about safety and ethics. The pace of progress suggests these agents may soon manage real businesses.
OpenAI said it’s beginning to test ads in ChatGPT in the U.S. specifically for logged-in adult users on the Free and Go tiers. They also make a point of saying Plus, Pro, Business, Enterprise, and Education won’t have ads.
The part that matters (and will absolutely decide whether people accept this or revolt) is the promise that ads won’t mess with the answers. OpenAI says ads don’t influence responses, ads will be clearly labeled and visually separated, and advertisers don’t get access to your chats, chat history, memories, or personal details—only aggregate performance data like views/clicks.
But here’s the nuance I can’t stop thinking about: OpenAI also says ad selection can be based on the topic of your conversation, plus your past chats and past ad interactions.
That’s not “advertisers reading your chats” (they say they don’t), but it is the system using your conversational footprint to shape what appears next to you.
A few more guardrails they call out:
They won’t show ads if the user says they’re under 18 or if OpenAI predicts they’re under 18.
Ads won’t be eligible near sensitive/regulated topics like health, mental health, or politics (at least during the test).
If you’re on Free and don’t want ads, you can opt out but you’ll get fewer daily free messages.
Big picture: this is OpenAI signaling, pretty loudly, that “free AI at scale” needs a business model that isn’t just subscriptions and that ChatGPT is now valuable enough as a surface to sell attention, not just intelligence.
ByteDance released Seedance 2.0, positioning it as a multimodal AI video generator that can take images, video, audio, and text at the same time and generate short clips with automatic sound effects or music.
The standout feature (and this is the part that creators will obsess over) is reference capability: Seedance can learn camera work, movement, and special effects from an uploaded reference video, then swap characters or extend clips based on that style.
A few practical details from the article:
Users can combine up to nine images, three videos, and three audio files (up to 12 files total).
Output clips are 4–15 seconds long.
It’s rolling out to a limited group (beta), available via the official Jimeng site.
For compliance, realistic human faces are blocked in uploaded materials right now.
And the sober reminder: the site notes these demos are likely cherry-picked, and we still don’t know consistency, cost, or generation time in real workflows.
The vibe I’m getting: we’re moving from “AI video can generate cool clips” to “AI video can follow a director’s language”—camera moves, pacing, continuity, edits. That’s the difference between a toy and a workflow.
Alphabet is looking to raise about $15 billion via a U.S. investment-grade bond sale.
A few details that jumped out:
The bond sale reportedly drew over $100B in orders.
It may be structured in as many as seven parts, per a regulatory filing (size not disclosed there).
One tranche mentioned is a bond maturing in 2066, with initial price talk around +1.2 percentage points over Treasuries.
Hyperscalers piling up capital for AI infrastructure, with a mention that these cloud giants are expected to pour $630B+ combined into AI, and that Barclays sees AI investment borrowing as a major driver of corporate bond issuance.
Alphabet recently guided to capex up to $185B this year, and point to heavy AI-linked bond issuance among hyperscalers like Amazon, Meta, Microsoft, and Oracle (with data attributed to BofA Securities).
If you zoom out, it’s one story: AI is becoming a utility, and utilities require massive upfront financing. Bonds aren’t sexy, but they’re the tell.
🧠RESEARCH
Standard AI training often rewards models for learning easy, common patterns while ignoring rare, difficult ones. F-GRPO is a new teaching method that forces the AI to pay extra attention to these harder examples. This ensures the model masters complex tasks instead of just memorizing the simple answers.
Baichuan-M3 is a new medical AI designed to act like a doctor rather than a search engine. Instead of just answering questions, it actively asks for missing information to clear up confusion. It also double-checks its own facts to avoid making up errors, outperforming top models like GPT-5.2.
Training huge AI systems often fails when their internal calculations become too repetitive or "unstable." MSign is a new tool that monitors these mathematical patterns and keeps them diverse. This prevents the training process from crashing, allowing developers to build larger and more reliable models without expensive failures.
🛠️TOP TOOLS
Each listing includes a hands-on tutorial so you can get started right away, whether you’re a beginner or a pro.
Clipchamp AI – AI Video Editor - Microsoft’s browser‑based and Windows video editor that combines drag‑and‑drop editing with AI tools like text‑to‑speech, auto‑captions, silence/noise removal, and an “auto compose” video builder.
Clipdrop AI – AI Image Generator & Editor - browser‑based suite of AI tools for quick image cleanup, editing, upscaling, and generation.
ClipDrop Uncrop – AI Image Editor (Outpainting) - browser-based outpainting tool that changes an image’s aspect ratio by generating new content beyond the original edges—useful for portraits, art, textures, and landscapes.
📲SOCIAL MEDIA
🗞️MORE NEWS
Anthropic Closes in on $20 Billion Round AI challenger Anthropic is finalizing a massive $20 billion fundraising deal that values the company at a stunning $350 billion. The startup doubled its original cash target after seeing overwhelming demand from major investors like Sequoia and Singapore’s sovereign wealth fund. This fresh capital will fuel their expensive infrastructure battles and support the rapid growth of their coding tool, Claude.
Sam Altman Touts ChatGPT Growth as OpenAI Nears $100 Billion Funding OpenAI CEO Sam Altman told employees that ChatGPT’s usage is accelerating again, with growth jumping more than 10% every month. To support this momentum, the company is reportedly raising a colossus $100 billion in new funding to pay for chips and data centers. Altman also teased that a powerful new version of their AI model is launching this week to stay ahead of the competition.
Ex-Googlers Are Building Infrastructure to Help Companies Understand Their Video Data Two former Google engineers have launched InfiniMind, a startup designed to help businesses make sense of their endless hours of unwatched video footage. Their software turns this messy "dark data"—like security feeds or broadcast archives—into organized, searchable information that companies can actually use. The team has already raised nearly $6 million to help enterprises unlock value from video files that usually just sit gathering dust.
Anthropic’s India Expansion Collides With a Local Company That Already Had the Name Anthropic’s entry into the booming Indian market has hit a legal wall because a local software business with the exact same name is suing them. The Indian firm argues they have used the "Anthropic" brand for years and that the arrival of the US giant will confuse their customers. If the courts side with the local business, the makers of Claude may be forced to rename their services within the country.
AI Struggles With Math Problems A recent challenge designed by top mathematicians shows that even the most advanced AI models still fail at solving complex, novel math problems. When tested on questions that require creative reasoning rather than just memorized formulas, leading systems like GPT-5.2 and Gemini 3.0 could only answer two out of ten correctly. This suggests that while AI is becoming incredibly smart, it still lacks the human-like intuition needed for true scientific discovery.
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