Here’s what’s happening in tech..

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Multiple dictionaries named AI slop the word of the year for 2025, each arriving at the term independently. It describes the wave of low quality AI content that has taken over the internet and left many people feeling like nothing they consume means anything anymore.

Here is what the data and the conversation are showing:

Scarce things carry value, and that dynamic is showing up. Parts of Gen Z are moving toward physical books and face to face experience, rejecting the algorithm driven feeds they grew up with.

AI content is largely a remix of existing human work. Once that well runs dry, demand for original human creativity is expected to rise steadily.

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Two U.S. agencies just made a big decision about who is in charge of crypto.

The SEC is the agency that oversees stocks. The CFTC oversees physical goods like oil and gold. For years, neither one had clear authority over crypto, and that gray area made it hard for companies to know what rules they were supposed to follow.

This week both agencies agreed on how to split the responsibility.

When a company first sells a crypto token to raise money, that sale is treated like a stock offering. The company has to register, disclose information, and follow strict rules. But once that token is out in the world and people are buying and selling it on their own, it is treated more like a commodity such as gold or oil, with fewer requirements attached.

The simplest way to think about it is this. The company's initial sale is where the heavy regulation applies. Everything that happens in the open market after that is a different category with different rules. A permanent law is still being written in Congress, but this framework is already being used as the guide.

Modern cars collect your contacts, call logs, location history, photos, and text messages every time you drive. That data moves through the car's built-in SIM card, your phone connection, Bluetooth devices, and the OBD (On-Board Diagnostics) port during service visits. Mozilla reviewed dozens of vehicle brands and rated cars as the worst privacy category they had ever evaluated.

The people selling you the car usually don't know what's being collected either. Fewer than one in twenty dealerships tell buyers that manufacturers can share and sell their data. Two thirds actively deny it happens.

Some add-on services make this worse. Emergency response features require location sharing, which companies then use for ongoing tracking and ad targeting. And if you try to disable the SIM card connected to these features, you can potentially disrupt other vehicle functions, leaving the car unsafe to operate.

There are a few things you can do right now:

Your data is worth a lot. Every piece of information about you, your location, what you buy, who you talk to, is being collected, repackaged, and sold. Companies profit billions, while you get nothing.

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OpenClaw is an open source AI agent that went from a GitHub project in November 2025 to 280,000 stars by January 2026, making it the fastest growing open source project ever. It connects to WhatsApp, Slack, and Telegram and takes real action on your behalf, sending emails, writing code, booking meetings, and managing files without you lifting a finger.

The problem is that it also broke things in serious ways. A researcher at Meta ran it on her real email inbox and within minutes it started mass deleting messages. The agent lost track of its instructions mid-task and kept going anyway. Meta banned it from work devices entirely.

That is what Nvidia's NemoClaw is designed to fix. It wraps a full security layer around agents like OpenClaw, locking down what files they can touch, what network calls they can make, and what actions they are allowed to take.

OpenClaw proved people want AI agents. NemoClaw is the infrastructure that makes them safe enough to actually use at work.

Explore free courses in AI, blockchain, privacy, & emerging technology - no matter where you’re starting from. This guide rounds up courses from Harvard, Princeton, & a few other top places worth your time.

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Think about what a human brain does. It reads a room, makes decisions, and moves a body all at once. Machines are getting close to doing the same thing.

Here is where things stand right now:

Put all three together and the question stops being if and starts being when.

The AI powering these robots gets stronger every few months. Quantum computing is leaving the lab and entering the real world. AI safety researchers started flagging serious risk estimates before humanoid robots even hit the market.

The machines are not aware yet. But they’re getting a brain, a body, and quantum physics behind both leaving humanity with questions on what will happen next.