HARDWARE

8 big AI shifts to watch in 2026

If you thought AI was everywhere in 2025, that future is only going to accelerate in the next 12 months. There were developments we never could have anticipated last year. And while there will undoubtedly be plenty of surprises again this year — make sure you're subscribed to The Deep View to catch the biggest ones every day — there are plenty of future developments already in sight. Today, Nat Rubio-Licht and I break down the biggest ones to watch. Let’s count them down.

1. Can AI glasses make consumers love AI?

The big tech companies — Meta, Google, Apple, Amazon, and others — are betting that AI glasses will convince consumers that AI is good for more than just chatbot searches and laughing at AI slop. Consumers will still need a lot of convincing. As much as the Meta Ray-Ban AI glasses have been a surprise hit, they've still only sold several million pairs in total over the past couple of years. And screenless AI hardware devices like the Humane AI Pin and the Rabbit R1 have been largely rejected by consumers. OpenAI has generated buzz for its screenless Jony Ive-designed device that sounds a lot like the doomed Humane AI Pin. And startups like Pickel have created heat around their forthcoming AI glasses, hyperbolized as an $800 "soul computer" that looks too good to be true from the slick marketing video. Still, I've tried the Meta Ray-Ban Display glasses and there are some compelling everyday AI features such as live captions and live language translation. I'm also interested in the forthcoming Brilliant Labs Halo glasses that will feature a privacy-first, multi-modal AI agent to help you remember things — similar to the way meeting assistants take notes for you, but for real-life conversations. But make no mistake, companies large and small are coming for your face with AI in 2026.

2. Robotaxis will foreshadow AI's future
Self-driving taxis from Waymo, Tesla and others will likely grow to become one of the most common ways consumers interact with AI to get a taste of the future in terms of declining costs, societal impact on jobs, and automating previously manual tasks. During 2025 Waymo — owned by Google's parent company Alphabet — transformed from a quirky AI/robotics experiment into an emerging alternative to both Uber and taxis in five US cities. Those five were San Francisco, Los Angeles, Atlanta, Phoenix, and Austin. Near the end of the year, it also announced expansion into 5 more cities: Miami, Dallas, Houston, San Antonio, and Orlando. By the end of 2026, Waymo's expansion could extend up to another dozen US cities and its first international location in London. Meanwhile, Tesla's Robotaxi service launched in Austin, Texas and the San Francisco Bay Area during 2025, and the company has slated its next expansion for Las Vegas, Phoenix, Dallas, Houston, and Miami. Waymo rides are currently about 30% more expensive than standard Uber, Lyft, and taxi rides. I suspect that's because Waymo wants to avoid the negative publicity of undercutting human drivers and potentially putting people out of work, at least for now. Tesla appears to have fewer qualms about that — it's rides have been noted to be significantly cheaper than Uber at times. That feels like the inevitable reality here. I've been surprised at how many people have already told me they prefer robotaxis to human drivers, for variety of reasons. It's a future that's about to take another big step forward in 2026.

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BIG TECH

AI boom moves beyond LLMs, chatbots, and Nvidia

3. We enter the post-LLM phase of generative AI

At an event in November, Hugging Face CEO Clem Delangue called it: We’re not in an AI bubble, we’re just in an “LLM bubble.” Major model providers have been on a frenetic mission to make their large language models more formidable, with many chasing after the elusive and ill-defined goal of artificial general intelligence. But some of AI’s foremost thinkers have started to question the validity of this chase, turning their attention beyond the LLM. World models and physical AI have become a major focal point in recent months, with voices like Yann LeCun and Fei-Fei Li calling it the next frontier. And as large language model inference only becomes more costly, enterprises may find more luck with small language models and domain-specific models, or as IBM Research Chief Scientist Ruchir Puri put it, “artificial useful intelligence.” 2026 might be the year that LLMs hit a plateau – not in capability, but in no longer being the sole driving force behind the AI boom.

4. Agents usher in the post-chatbot era

Tech companies went absolutely feral for agents in 2025 as the tech promised to break us out of the call-and-response requirements of conventional chatbots. And as companies figure out what exactly these autonomous little helpers are capable of, the hype will only continue. With that hype, new complexities will emerge. These agents are already creating cybersecurity hiccups for IT teams, and could present new challenges for HR as the “digital employee” impacts workforce operations and morale. But agents might also force some of the biggest players in AI to work together for once, such as with the launch of the open-source Agentic AI Foundation in December, bringing the industry one step closer to interoperable agents that unlock far more value working together than they could working alone.

5. New chips will redefine AI beyond Nvidia

The AI industry’s manic obsession with Nvidia reached such a fever pitch this year that there’s literally a name for it: Jensanity, dubbed after the company’s perpetual leather jacket-wearing CEO, Jensen Huang. But some are starting to recognize that there exist alternatives to Nvidia’s reign. Amazon unveiled upgrades to its Trainium chips at Re:Invent in December, and Google is spreading its TPUs, the company’s custom chips, far and wide, making its seventh-generation Ironwood chip generally available and discussing deals with Anthropic and Meta. Though it’d likely take some kind of catastrophic event to truly dethrone Nvidia at this juncture, AI innovators who want to move rapidly but are constrained by their Nvidia orders will have more alternatives in 2026.

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POLICY

As AI accelerates, so do the risks and confusion

6. Model developers will start to weigh the risks

Though voices like Geoffrey Hinton, Yoshua Bengio and (for some reason) Joseph Gordon-Levitt have been shouting from the rooftops about the risks that AI presents, model developers have been keenly optimistic so far. That, however, might change in 2026 as models become more powerful and new capabilities emerge. OpenAI might already be on guard, with CEO Sam Altman posting on X in late December that the company is seeking a “head of preparedness” to help implement “increasingly complex safeguards.” Given that the world’s most valuable startup has been treated as an industry bellwether thus far, it wouldn’t be surprising if other AI firms followed in its footsteps.

7. Government relationships with AI will get stickier

Last year saw a number of major AI firms seek to get cozy with the US government, from offering steep discounts to the General Services Administration to multi-billion-dollar investments that support the Trump Administration’s AI Action Plan. The Administration, too, is trying to make it easier for AI companies to have free rein by stymying state legislation. But not everyone is pleased. Sen. Bernie Sanders, for example, has pushed for a moratorium on data center development amid an “unregulated sprint to develop & deploy AI.” As AI becomes more and more politicized, don’t expect the regulatory landscape — or the discourse around how it should be governed — to become any less heated. With mid-term elections looming in the US, AI is on course to become a national issue rivaling health care, immigration, and the national debt.

8. We still won’t know what AI is going to do to us

To put it plainly, there’s still plenty of debate about whether AI is good or bad. There are the AI zealots who believe the tech is the key to unlocking a level growth and prosperity that’s exponential and therefore incomprehensible to most of the human race. On the flip side, there are the doomers who believe AI and robots will diminish our humanity — if not literally rise up and kill us all (they nearly view The Terminator as a documentary). And there's abundant data available to support either side of the debate. Conflicting reports are constantly emerging. AI is creating jobs and AI is killing jobs. It’s going to tank the stock market and make billionaires out of a lot more startup founders. It’s eroding our ability to forge human connections and providing people an outlet for mental healthcare. It’s destroying our capacity to think critically and it’s supercharging discovery. As these contradictory notions only continue to conflict, people are going to do what they’ve always done: Find the data that supports their preconceived biases and cling for dear life.

LINKS

• OpenAI works to overhaul its audio models in preparation for upcoming device

• XAI’s Grok says “lapses in safeguards” let it generate sexualized images of minors

• Brookfield to launch a cloud business, $10 billion AI fund

• Tesla deliveries were down 16% in the fourth quarter

• Baidu plans IPO for chip business Kunlunxin

• Samsung to double mobile devices powered by Google Gemini

• Clear: An app for Slack that coaches you to write more direct, concise messages.

• Figma MCP Server: Connect your preferred AI assistant to a Figma design document to act as your copilot. 

• Radial: Create shortcuts within macOS that are operated by gestures. 

• Qwen-Image-2512: Alibaba’s latest image model, now with finer details and better realism. 

• Grok Business and Grok Enterprise: xAI has launched business and enterprise plans, offering companies scalable access to its most advanced models.

• Anduril: Senior Software Engineer, Platform Security

• Anthropic: Research Engineer – Cybersecurity RL

• Snap: Senior Research Scientist, Generative AI

• Meta: AI Specialist - Product and Applied Research

GAMES

POLL RESULTS

What will be your primary chatbot in 2026?

OpenAI's ChatGPT (33%)
Google Gemini (26%)
Anthropic’s Claude (16%)
Perplexity (13%)
Other (12%)