In the first edition of The Rundown Roundtable for 2026, our team members share their predictions on how AI will be used in industry and everyday life. Rowan, founder and CEO, predicts that Google will finally master AI integration into its existing products like Gmail, Search, YouTube, and Android, gaining an edge over OpenAI in overall AI user adoption. While ChatGPT remains the dominant chatbot, Google will lead in other AI functionalities, particularly in product integration, video generation, and image creation.
Jason, a developer, anticipates the first major “AI drug moment,” when the technology moves beyond impressive lab demos and becomes a routine method for producing drug candidates. While AI may not cure cancer, some AI-first candidate will undergo a major Phase 3 launch, sparking a new wave of the “AI discovery stack” approach in pharmaceuticals.
Zach, an AI writer, predicts that one of the leading Western labs will announce a new model as AGI in 2026, although the term is so overloaded and debatable that discussions about definitions will continue. This “AGI” model will be an improvement, but it will not bring drastic changes, and life will continue almost as it did after previous, often subtle, milestones like the Turing Test.
In Brief: Tech World Highlights
- Google’s lead engineer Jaana Dogan shared that Claude Code replicated in one hour what her team had been trying to build for an entire year.
- Elon Musk responded to Midjourney founder David Holz’s post on AI programming development, stating that “we have entered the singularity.”
- Prime Intellect published research on recursive language models, an approach allowing AI agents to manage their memory to perform tasks lasting weeks or months.
- Anthropic is acquiring up to a million of Google’s TPUv7 AI chips from Broadcom, with the Ironwood chip line increasingly emerging as an alternative to Nvidia.
- xAI released a new upgrade to its creative platform Grok Imagine, with Elon Musk revealing that “another major upgrade” will arrive in three weeks.
AI Trending Tools:
- GLM-4.7: New SOTA open-source model from Z AI.
- CC: Experimental AI productivity agent from Google Labs in Gmail.
- Unwrap Customer Intelligence: Converts unstructured user feedback into data-driven insights that help shape product development.
