The AI Daily Brief: Artificial Intelligence News and Analysis - The Race to Put AI Agents Everywhere
Episode Date: March 17, 2026Q1 was defined by the realization that agents are here — Q2 is shaping up as an all-out race to make them enterprise-ready. From Nvidia's Nemo Claw adding security to Open Claw, to Manus and Ada...ptive launching desktop agents, to OpenAI's internal "code red" refocus on enterprise and coding, every major player is converging on the same goal: getting agents out of experimentation and into production. In the headlines: Jensen Huang forecasts a trillion dollars in Nvidia revenue, Meta signs a $27 billion deal with Nebius, and Chinese AI labs start keeping their best models closed source.SUBMISSIONS CLOSING SOON - AGENT MADNESS: Our 64-Bracket tournament to find the coolest Agent of 2026 https://www.agentmadness.ai/Brought to you by:KPMG – Agentic AI is powering a potential $3 trillion productivity shift, and KPMG’s new paper, Agentic AI Untangled, gives leaders a clear framework to decide whether to build, buy, or borrow—download it at www.kpmg.us/NavigateMercury - Modern banking for business and now personal accounts. Learn more at https://mercury.com/personal-bankingAIUC-1 - Get your agents certified to communicate trust to enterprise buyers - https://www.aiuc-1.com/Blitzy - Want to accelerate enterprise software development velocity by 5x? https://blitzy.com/AssemblyAI - The best way to build Voice AI apps - https://www.assemblyai.com/briefRobots & Pencils - Cloud-native AI solutions that power results https://robotsandpencils.com/The Agent Readiness Audit from Superintelligent - Go to https://besuper.ai/ to request your company's agent readiness score.The AI Daily Brief helps you understand the most important news and discussions in AI. Subscribe to the podcast version of The AI Daily Brief wherever you listen: https://pod.link/1680633614Our Newsletter is BACK: https://aidailybrief.beehiiv.com/Interested in sponsoring the show? sponsors@aidailybrief.ai
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Today on the AI Daily Brief, the race to productize agents and make them enterprise grade is on.
Before that on the headlines, Nvidia CEO says the company is on track for a trillion dollars in revenue.
The AI Daily Brief is a daily podcast and video about the most important news and discussions in AI.
All right, friends, quick announcements before we dive in.
First of all, thank you to today's sponsors, Recall.A.I, AIC, robots and pencils, and Blitzy.
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And we're going to dive right in, but one quick reminder, Agent Madness submissions are live right now.
This is our bracket voting competition to find the coolest agents that people in this community have built.
If you want a chance to have your agent featured on the show, go to Agent Madness.com.
Submissions close very soon, so I encourage you to check it out.
Now with that out of the way, let's talk about a trillion bucks in revenue.
I'm old enough to remember when a trillion dollar market cap was a big deal.
And now here we are, AI is booming, and Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang has kicked off the company's
annual GTC conference with a massive prediction that the company will see a trillion dollars in
revenue between now and 2027.
At every GTC, Jensen's keynote, which is planned but not fully scripted, is the big event.
This one was no exception.
It was two and a half hours long, totally jam-packed with big announcements.
We got confirmation of the new GROC-powered server focused on inference.
The new rack-mounted system will combine 256 GROC chips with 72 Nvidia Rubin GPUs,
delivering 35 times the inference efficiency of current generation Blackwell chips,
with the system expected to ship in the second half of this year.
Jensen also unveiled a new Gen.
Gen.A.I. system that can enhance video game graphics on the fly.
Called DLSS5, the technology combines traditional graphics with an AI filter,
to create stable photorealistic graphics.
Being able to produce this effect at runtime on consumer hardware
is a big breakthrough that could significantly change the way video games are made.
For my claw fans out there, there is a new entrant into the OpenClaw category
which we'll cover in the main episode.
But ultimately, while the keynote had many big moments,
none grabbed headlines like Jensen's massive revenue forecast.
Late last year, Huang said that he expects $500 billion in sales in 2026.
On Monday, he doubled the forecast to a trillion, stating,
I believe that computing demand has increased by one million times in the last two years.
It's the feeling that we all have. It's the feeling every startup has.
Now, some tried to downplay the forecast, noting that it merely combines two financial years
at $500 billion apiece, meaning it's not so much a material change.
Bloomberg analyst Kunjan Sobani wrote,
The update should ease fears of a pullback in 2027 as Rubin enters the cycle,
although it may also reset market expectations higher and raise the bar again.
This feels to me to be slightly missing the bigger picture.
Jensen is now signaled that NVIDIA can see enough demand to drive $500 billion in annual sales.
This would more than double revenue from the past year.
In fact, the list of companies with a half a trillion in annual sales is just Walmart and Amazon,
with Saudi Aramco falling slightly short.
If Huang's forecast is correct, it will be completely unparalleled growth for a company of
anywhere near Nvidia's size.
Remarking on the event, Josh Kale wrote,
The man doubled his demand forecast to a trillion dollars,
announced data centers in space, and closed the show with a robot singing country music.
This is NVIDIA's world.
Everyone else is just renting compute in it.
Next up, if it is Invidia's world, one of the new players in it is, of course, the Neoclouds.
On that front, meta has signed a $27 billion deal with Nebius.
Nebius, which is similar to CoreWeave and N-scale, operates smaller AI data centers than their hyper-scaler counterparts.
This often includes differentiated chips or full-stack support for model training or specialized inference.
Nebius' new deal with meta spans five years, and this is in addition to a $3 billion deal signed by Meta in Nović.
November. Nebius plans to deploy NVIDIA's new Vera-Ruban chips on Meta's behalf. The chips are expected
to be available in the second half of this year, with Nebius powering on the new cluster early next year.
Now, while it's possible that meta is turning to Nebius for specialized data center management,
the simpler explanation is just that the entire industry is capacity-constrained right now,
and that meta, like all the other AI labs, is gobbling up all the available data centers they
can get their hands on. That includes partnering with the neoclouds to take any capacity they can
offer. The deal, though, also represents a phase shift for the smaller end of the
the data center industry. Nebius is one of the larger neoclouds, yet they only had a little over a
billion dollars in revenue last year. Meaning for my math friends out there, this is an order of
magnitude larger than all the business they've done so far. AI infrastructure continues to scale up at a
massive pace and the neocloud seem to be getting their slice of the action. One area of infrastructure
buildout that has been a little bit, shall we say, beleaguered, is the Open AI Stargate effort.
The company has now appointed new leaders to oversee their revamped and restructured Stargate.
Now, over the last couple of months, we've heard all sorts of things about Stargate.
We learned that the joint venture with Oracle and SoftBank never really got off the ground,
and more recently that OpenAI was walking away from expansion plans at the flagship site in Avalene, Texas.
That reporting also suggested that the Stargate name would be attached to all data centers operated by OpenAI,
rather than only their own site developments.
Now the information reports that the structure of the New Look Stargate division has been put in place.
Former Intel executive Sachin Kati will oversee the division, which consists of three distinct
teams. One team will work on technical data center design, another on commercial partnerships with
various cloud providers and chip manufacturers, and the third will be responsible for on-the-ground
management of facilities. Previously, OpenAI's infrastructure teams were organized by project rather
than role and reported up to President Greg Brockman, meaning this restructuring could represent
a more specialized and dedicated in-house team being put in place. Reporting also confirms that
OpenAI is less concerned about ownership of data centers and more willing to lease in order to
scale up compute. This would comport with basically everything else we're seeing in the industry,
where all of the fancy and fiddly efforts
are kind of flowing by the wayside
in order to just get access to as much compute as possible.
Less fun for OpenAI is that they just got sued by a dictionary.
Encyclopedia Britannica and their subsidiary, Miriam Webster,
have sued OpenAI for use of their dictionaries and encyclopedias in training data.
Further, Britannica claims that Chat Chp.T.
Has cannibalized their web traffic by producing content that substitutes or competes.
Responding to the lawsuit in OpenAI spokesperson said,
Our models empower innovation and are trained on publicly available data
and grounded in fair use.
Now, for our last topic today, it's actually two stories that both seem to point in a similar
direction, which is a change in how open source AI gets developed. The first story is that
Alibaba has restructured their AI organization in a shift, it seems, to maximize profits.
Rumors were swirling earlier this month that a big move was in the works as three senior
researchers left the Quinn team. The departures included technical lead Justin Lin, who is credited
with Sheparding Quinn from its first training run to becoming one of the most popular
open source models. Speculation at the time was that Alibaba was shifting focus,
from pure research to driving AI-related revenue through their first-party API.
Some wondered if this shift would herald the end of open-source quen models.
According to a memo cited by Bloomberg, the restructuring is now complete.
The Quen research team has been folded into a new division that also includes consumer-facing
apps and AI-related products like the Quark Smart Glasses.
The new division is called the Alibaba token hub and will be directly led by CEO Eddie Wu.
Wu wrote in the memo,
ATH is built around a single organizing mission, create tokens, deliver tokens, and apply
tokens. I will lead ATH directly with a mandate to drive strategic coordination across our AI businesses,
embed AI deeply into how we work, and preserve the agility that lets us move fast. Bloomberg writes
that the restructuring, quote, signals the company's clear emphasis on monetizing AI. The division's
name is a direct reference to the units of computing that companies charge users. Meanwhile,
another Chinese startup, Z.a.I. has released a faster, cheaper version of their leading model,
but they are keeping it closed source. The new model is called G.
LM5 Turbo and offers similar performance to GPD 5.2 at a cost that's closer to Gemini 3 Flash.
The speed boost is arguably a bigger deal, with the model optimized for running open-cloth-style
tasks like tool use and long-chain execution.
ZAI said the model would be released as closed source, but that its capabilities would be
folded into future open-source releases.
Venture Beat wrote that the decision is emblematic of a broader shift in the Chinese market.
They suggest the Chinese labs are adopting an approach where lightweight open-source models
are used to boost distribution and generate goodwill among developers,
while more powerful models are delivered as proprietary systems
aimed at generating enterprise sales.
writes Venturebeat,
that would not mark the end of open source AI from Chinese labs,
but it could mean their most strategically important agent-focused offerings
appear first behind closed access,
even if some of their underlying advances later make their way into open releases.
This, I think, is a trend that is worth keeping an eye on.
Corinne on X wrote,
ZAI has been the loudest open source voice in AI for two years.
They just released their first close-horse model.
That one decision tells you more about where the industry is heading than any benchmark.
By the way, for those of you who are just listening and not watching,
the picture that ZAI chose to release the model with is a glowing lobster riding a horse.
Nathan Lambert, who just wrote an interesting essay on this topic, wrote,
We're in the era when the cost of building LLMs is skyrocketing,
and the why for releasing them openly is static slash not changing slash week.
Definitely a trend worth watching, but for now, that is going to do it for the headlines.
Next up, the main episode.
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Welcome back to the AI Daily Brief. We're coming up on the end of Q1, and as part of that I've been working on a big quarter two state of AI report.
As you might expect, maybe the key story of Q1, was OpenClaw, not even just because of OpenClaw itself,
but because of what it represented.
I think you can look at OpenClaugh as the instantiation of the new capability set
that shifted around the end of last year, and which has really come to the four this year.
It's what I called on yesterday's episode AI's Second Moment
and refers to this idea that agents are actually at this point viable
and that people are in the midst of a million experiments right now
giving agents systems access, building new types of systems to have agents interact,
and especially, and as we'll talk about today,
solving some of the key challenges of agents to make sure that they can defeat
fuse across the entire business world.
Part of the specific catalyst for today's show is Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang's speech at their
annual GTC event yesterday, where Jensen said explicitly, every software company in the world needs
to have an open-cloth strategy and where he began to show off their enterprise-grade version
of the software.
Now even before this, the clawification of the world was well underway.
Kevin Simback from Delphi Labs recently wrote a post about all of the different variations in
competitors and started by claiming.
that OpenClaw opened the door. Kevin writes, before OpenClaugh, agents were mostly technical
experiments that produced nothing more than timeline slop. After OpenClaw and with the advent of
Opus 45 and 46, agents became accessible, just a telegram message away, always on, actually
doing helpful things and kickstarting a new generation of digital opportunities. OpenClaw quickly
proved two things at once. People don't want AI chat, they want to get work done, and giving
an LLM brought access to your machine and or personal info is both insanely useful and my
mildly terrifying. So, as he writes, the last month has been a weird kind of Darwinism,
with builders shipping faster than slot posters, security people screaming into the void,
and a growing cohort of people saying, oh crap, this is actually going to rewrite how software
and digital businesses work. And yet, as Kevin acknowledges, not everyone is sold on OpenClawn
itself, and there has been a mad race to build or update alternatives. A bunch of them, like
Nanobot, Zeroclaw, Pico claw, or Nanoclaw are all attempts to reduce the overall complexity
down to some specific useful feature set, and then there's others like Open Fang, Hermes,
Maltus, and Ironcloth that are all trying to bring security to it through self-hosting.
Yet if that represents one end of the spectrum of the clawification of AI, on the other hand,
you have a huge number of companies, some that were AI-native, some that weren't AI-native,
offering up what are effectively their own versions of OpenClaw.
In other words, agents that are deeply integrated and integratable with some key set of systems
and personal context.
At the end of February, Notion introduced custom agents, which have a lot of the end of February, Notion introduced
custom agents, which have a lot of features in common with OpenClaw, and also all of the
context that comes from integration with Notion where many companies are running all of their
information. And of course, we also got Perplexity Computer.
Perplexity Computer is a very full-throated reimagining of perplexity from the ground up,
into a complete problem solution design system, capable of spinning up complex systems of agents
and sub-agents to get things done and build things that people want. In the couple weeks since
Perplexity released computer, they've also released Computer for Enterprise, which can operate from
within Slack and which also has direct connections they claim to more than 400 applications,
and they also even got on the Mac mini part of the theme with their launch of personal computer,
which they call an always-on local merge with Perplexity computer that works for your 24-7.
Getting philosophical, Perplexity CEO Arvin Shrinibas wrote a long post about why the AI is the
computer. In it, he argues, AI models are becoming so capable that the products built around them
have been bottlenecked for showing their true potential. The chat UI is good for answers and agents are good
for individual tasks. Meanwhile, the UI for entire workflows has always been the computer.
Effectively what Arvind is arguing is that the full potential of agentic systems requires
the complete canvas of what your computer offers, bridging from local files to cloud systems
and beyond, which brings us to the not one, not two, not even really three, but closer to
three and a half new entrance into this clawification of everything category that were announced
just yesterday. Manus, which was purchased by Meta in December, was one of the early
leaders throughout 2025 in general purpose agents. This week they announced a new Manus desktop app,
the key feature of which they called My Computer. Very much picking up on the new design pattern,
they write, it's your AI agent now on your local machine. The use cases they point to include
organizing thousands of unsorted photos, renaming hundreds of invoices, building desktop apps in
Swift entirely on your computer with no code written manually, combining with existing connectors
to create seamless automated workflows, and creating local routines with personal projects, agents,
scheduled tasks. In the blog post, without naming OpenClaugh, they acknowledged the realization
of the need to be able to bridge from cloud to local. They write, the cloud sandbox has served
Manus well. Inside an isolated, secure environment, it has everything an AI agent needs. Networking,
a command line, a file system, and a browser. This is the foundation of Manus's power as a general
AI agent, always online and always ready to work. However, there has always been a fundamental
limitation. Your most important work happens on your own computer. Your project files, development
environments and essential applications all reside locally, not in the cloud.
My computer then is a way to close that gap.
Now one interesting thing about the Manus announcement is that they're thinking a little
bit ahead in terms of the specific opportunities that come with desktop.
For example, doing something that I haven't seen from a lot of the other competitors,
they're actually pushing the idea of building fully working Mac apps, not just cloud-based
applications that other people would use.
Cedric Chee writes, ClaudeCode, CodeCodecs, and Manus all seem to be converging on the same
idea. The agent lives on your machine. The second related announcement yesterday came from Adaptive.
They wrote, Introducing Adaptive Computer. We put AI inside of an always-on personal computer
that it uses to get work done. Schedule agents, create software, automate anything. By the end of this
year, they write, AI agents will use more software than humans do. You won't be the one clicking
the button or browsing the web page. Your agent will. That requires a new kind of computer.
We built one. Most business software they continue has the same problem. Someone has to sit there,
and operate it, moving data, updating records, filling out forms. That someone is usually you.
The example they gave, interestingly, is the real-world business example of a hardware store
owner who has 47 new products in a spreadsheet and needs them to get added to square. Adaptive says
drag the file into Adaptive, tell it what you want, and it handles the rest. Out of scope of this
particular show, but I think it's super interesting that you're seeing these very bleeding-edge tech
companies trying to appeal to the hardware store owner use case. They then go on to pitch their
secret sauce, which they call encoded memory. They write what makes.
makes Adaptive different is what happens after. It encodes what it learned, how square works,
how your catalog is organized, and how you prefer things to be done. So the next week when
you ask for a daily sales report at 8 p.m., builds the agent, schedules it, pulls from
square data that it already knows. Now, anytime there's a new launch, it tends to be pretty hard
to get good signal from Twitter at this point because so much of the discourse is either
AI bots or undisclosed paid tweets, but Ole Lemon did write of a good experience that he
recently had through Adaptive. The example he gave was automating YouTube AI research.
Basically, his argument is that YouTube has a ton of really great videos on in-depth AI systems
that are extremely up to date and current with the moment, but there is a ton to filter through
that makes it hard to sit around and browse to get the diamonds in the rough.
The prompty gave adaptive was, analyze YouTube videos about AI and clawed workflows from the last
24 hours that have at least 10,000 views, pull the full transcripts, extract the top three
most tactical and actionable workflows, and send me a daily email report every morning.
The third and maybe biggest open claw and agent-related announcement yesterday, however, came from
NVIDIA.
The context for that quote we heard at the beginning about every company needing an open-claw
strategy was the setup for Jensen introducing NemoClaw.
Now, functionally, this is not actually a standalone agent, but rather a software toolkit
built on top of the OpenClaw project.
OpenClawe creator Peter Steinberger wrote yesterday,
Been so much fun cooking Open Shell and NemoClaw with the NVIDIA folks.
Huge step towards secure agents you can trust.
So what this is is basically an approach that adds privacy and security to OpenClaught instances
by giving them an isolated sandbox to work in.
The agent can still access resources as necessary, but the NemoClaw stack formalizes access control.
Specifically, it integrates into policy-based security and other guardrails to theoretically allow it to operate safely within enterprises.
NemoCla is model and hardware agnostic and allows users to choose between cloud and local models.
Encapsulating this whole shift, Jensen Huang said,
open clog gave the industry exactly what it needed at exactly the time.
Just as Linux gave the industry exactly what it needed at exactly the time,
just as Kubernetes showed up at exactly the right time,
just as HTML showed up.
It made it possible for the entire industry to grab onto this open source stack
and go do something with it.
Now, what's been interesting about the response is that for most,
although not for all, this hasn't been a jump the shark or jump the lobster moment.
Instead, people have been pretty enthusiastic about what Nvidia is trying to do.
Kevin Simback again writes,
excited to dig into NemoClaw.
Have spent a good bit of my career in Enterprise.
I've been pretty vocal about OpenClaugh not being enterprise ready.
But the concept of an agentic workforce is a killer and enterprises are going to want it,
so this may be what really kicks it off.
Tristan Rhodes writes,
I've been avoiding OpenClawn waiting for it to mature.
There have been countless variation in forks along the way,
but Nvidia is the most valuable company in the history of the world.
Does that mean NemoClaugh becomes the dominant variation of OpenClaugh?
Eric Sue wrote an entire X article called NVIDIA just solved the one problem blocking AI agents,
of course all about the security concerns.
Now, one thing I will say that's been interesting from our own experience,
regular listeners know we have two different open-claw-related things going on right now.
Claw Camp is an open-free, self-directed program
that walks people step-by-step through setting up their own Open Claw
and giving them access to a community of other builders who can help them along the way
that at this point more than 7,000 people have signed up to participate in.
Enterprise Claw, meanwhile, is a managed six-week executive sprint
that's meant to help individual enterprise leaders and teams from enterprises
get that same sort of learning but in a much more in-depth and supported way.
Now, as part of Enterprise Claw, we gave people the choice to either use OpenClawe
or do a generic version of agent team building using CodCode, Codex, cursor, etc.
And interestingly, it's about half and half in terms of who wanted to learn on OpenClawe
versus who wanted to use other systems.
Meaning that even in the pre-Enterprise-grade OpenClawe world,
there is still demand for figuring out how to use this platform,
which I think is certainly validation of everything that Jensen is saying.
Now, Robert Scobel had an interesting note from the Nvidia GTC Expo Hall
that was actually more about OpenAI than it was about Nvidia.
He writes, visiting the Expo Hall shows you why OpenAI is changing strategy.
All the big booths are Enterprise.
The biggest news here is how Nvidia is bringing OpenClaught to the Enterprise.
Which brings us to another important story from yesterday.
The Wall Street Journal reports that OpenAI is done with side quests
and will refocus on nailing a core business, which is now more than ever refocused on
enterprise encoding.
The journal reporting states that CEO of applications, Fiji Simo, has delivered a wake-up call
within the company, pointing out that their do-everything strategy has reduced their lead
on the competition.
Seymot told staff last week, we cannot miss this moment because we are distracted by side quests.
We really have to nail productivity in general and particularly productivity on the business
front.
Now, this is, of course, a big shift away from Sam Altman's traditional management approach,
which he described as betting on a series of startups within the company.
That led to a fairly dizzying array of product bets,
including the Sora app, the Atlas browser,
and the yet-to-be-reveed device just to name a few.
As basically everyone on AI Twitter has done,
the journal compared that approach to Anthropics' very narrow strategy
built around agendic coding and the way that expands
into broader sets of knowledge work for the enterprise.
Now, it's not new that OpenAI has decided to refocus efforts
on similar themes.
That's been the big story since GPT5 was released and Codex came out,
but there clearly seems to be a new,
urgency. Interestingly, according to Simo, the code red from last year is not over. Last week, she told
staff, we are very much acting as if it's a code red. And while a lot of people are speculating
around what might get the axe because of that, for example, the much maligned ads approach,
every day it seems we get some new announcement around Codex and their larger coding suite.
The most recent and the one that we got yesterday and that I think is coherent with all of these
qualification themes is the native integration of sub-agents into Codex.
The OpenAI Developers account writes,
You can accelerate your workflow by spinning up specialized agents to
keep your main context window clean, tackle different parts of a task in parallel,
steer individual agents as work unfold.
LLM Junkie and Will writes,
In the next Codex update, multi-agents will get a massive flexibility upgrade.
Hey, Codex, when you implement this plan,
I want you to delegate all of the lower complexity tasks to GPT 5.3 Spark subagents,
Instead of needing to create 100 different custom agent roles for different situations,
you can just prompt your agent to spawn whatever model or reasoning level you want,
with only natural language.
Emmanuel DiPetro went through some use cases for the subagent system,
things like code review where he argues you could have one agent per concern,
test coverage with one subagent writing tests and other checking edge cases and another validating,
etc., etc.
And it's clear that even though the foot is still firmly on the gas,
the shift in OpenAI strategy seems to be bearing some fruit.
OpenAI President Greg Brockman wrote yesterday,
GPD 5.4 has ramped faster than any other model we've launched in the API.
Within a week of launch, 5 trillion tokens per day,
handling more volume than our entire API one year ago,
and reaching an annualized run rate of $1 billion in net new revenue.
Sam Altman showed a chart of Codex usage,
being very aggressively up into the right,
adding the codex team are hardcore builders,
and it really comes through in what they create.
No surprise, all the hardcore builders I know have switched to codex.
Responding to the news about OpenAI shifting focus,
Dwayne on X writes,
I actually thought OpenAI were already doing a good job focusing on coding.
Codex is amazing for coding.
One area where they absolutely fail is UI.
GBT 5.4 can't design to save its life even if you have super detailed skill to guide it.
It has zero taste.
And for what it's worth, I talked about this on my operator's show.
This has very much been my experience to the point where I can't just give codex guidelines.
I literally have to give it the actual design files from Claude for it to copy exactly,
although my experience with codex when it comes to actually building has been really good.
Summing all this up, if Q1 was a realization that agents are here and a mass-wide-scale experimentation,
with the form factors and design patterns introduced by OpenClaw,
Q2 is set up to be an absolute sprint to productize those agents and get them ready for broader diffusion,
especially within the enterprise.
One thing that I will be watching closely is how much old patterns of productization,
where conventional wisdom was all about simplifying things for wider audiences,
still hold, given that the breakout was this incredibly complex system in OpenClaw.
I'm not sure I know where the right complexity band is going to be, or if it's going to be a spectrum of different types of complexity for different users,
but I can guarantee that just about everything that can be tried will be tried in the quarter to come.
For now, that is going to do it for today's AI Daily Brief.
Appreciate you listening or watching, as always.
And until next time, peace.
