Merry Christmas folks! This week, guest host (Sifted's) Mimi Billing and Ather discuss December's AI news updates. Highlights included Uber's entry into AI data labeling, Google DeepMind's Genie 2 for training AI in simulated environments, and Amazon's collaboration with Anthropic to develop a mega AI supercomputer. We covered the importance of new algorithms over mere scaling and the potential of agentic AI to bring advancements toward artificial general intelligence (AGI). The year saw record AI funding rounds, with Databricks leading at $10 billion, while disappointments included unmet expectations for reasoning capabilities in AI models. Looking ahead, we anticipate innovations in AI model architectures, memory integration, and task automation tools.