New Humanoids, Autonomous Vehicles Accelerate, and AI Chips Leap Forward

This Week in AI Newsletter: 1/5/2026

Boston Dynamics’ unveiled its Atlas robot at CES; it is 6’2”, 198 lbs, has 4 hour runtime, and can lift 110 lbs. More here.

Nvidia says that it is targeting a robotaxi launch with a partner potentially by 2027, though it has not named a launch partner. More here.

Lucid, Nuro, and Uber unveiled a luxury, autonomous, production-ready vehicle slated to launch later this year. More here.

After reporting on a 6% decrease in ChatGPT traffic after 2 weeks of Gemini 3’s release, a 22% has been reported in the past 6 weeks. More here.

NVIDIA unveiled Alpamayo, a new end-to-end autonomous driving AI that takes camera input and directly controls vehicles, launching on U.S. roads later this year starting with the Mercedes CLA. More here.

AMD unveiled its Ryzen AI 400 Series processors at CES 2026, claiming faster multitasking, content creation, and gaming as it pushes AI-powered PCs into the mainstream More here.

Nvidia launched its new Rubin chip architecture at CES 2026, positioning it as a major leap in AI hardware performance and efficiency as demand for large-scale AI compute continues to surge. More here.

Amazon launched Alexa.com, bringing its upgraded AI assistant Alexa+ to the web so users can chat with and use Alexa without an Echo device. More here.

How has Elon responded to the growing self-driving push from legacy automakers? He says genuinely safer-than-human autonomy is still years away, and argues incumbents won’t deploy AI hardware at scale until well after Tesla—putting them roughly 5–6 years behind. More here.