GenAI Daily - January 30, 2026: Google's Chrome AI Agent Revolution, OpenAI's Massive $60B Funding Round, NeurIPS Citation Scandal
Top Story
Google Launches Revolutionary AI Browsing Agent in Chrome
Google rolled out major updates to Gemini in Chrome yesterday, transforming the browser from a passive tool to an active agent layer with "auto browse" capabilities that can perform multi-step tasks like researching options, filling out forms, and coordinating actions across services.
The agentic features are designed for Google AI Pro and Ultra subscribers in the U.S. and allow users to delegate tasks to Chrome by asking it to do tasks for them on the web, including filling out forms, logging into websites, shopping and even making purchases.
Built on Gemini 3, Google's most intelligent model, the updates integrate powerful new AI features in Chrome that help users multitask across the web with a new side panel experience, bringing deeper integrations across Google's most popular apps to support complex multi-step workflows with auto browse.
Auto browse can use Google Password Manager to handle tasks even if a sign-in is required, and with the multimodal capabilities of Gemini 3, can identify what's in pictures, search for similar items and add them to your cart while staying within budget and applying discount codes.
Why it matters: This shift from passive browsing to agentic interaction positions Chrome as the distribution gatekeeper for the next generation of internet commerce, potentially reshaping how enterprises and consumers interact with web-based services.
Key Developments
OpenAI Eyes $60 Billion Investment from Tech Giants
Nvidia, Microsoft, and Amazon are in discussions to invest as much as $60 billion in OpenAI as part of a major new funding round, with the planned investments contributing to a round of as much as $100 billion.
Existing backer Nvidia is in talks to invest up to $30 billion and Microsoft, also already a backer, less than $10 billion, while Amazon, a new investor, could commit over $10 billion or even more than $20 billion.
The timing follows earlier reports that SoftBank was in discussions to invest another $30 billion into OpenAI, a move that could drive its valuation close to $830 billion, with OpenAI reportedly close to receiving term sheets from these firms.
Impact: This massive capital injection underscores how AI development has shifted from research talent to balance-sheet strength, potentially setting OpenAI's valuation at nearly a trillion dollars.
AI Citation Crisis Rocks Top Research Conference
GPTZero identified 100 hallucinations in more than 51 papers accepted by the Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS), following the company's prior discovery of 50 hallucinated citations in papers under review by the International Conference on Learning Representations (ICLR).
The analysis of more than 4,000 research papers accepted at NeurIPS 2025 uncovered hundreds of AI-hallucinated citations that slipped past three or more reviewers assigned to each submission, with fabrications including nonexistent authors, fake paper titles, fake journals or conferences, or URLs that lead nowhere.
Research shows published papers contain a non-negligible number of objective mistakes and that the average number of mistakes per paper has increased over time - from 3.8 in NeurIPS 2021 to 5.9 in NeurIPS 2025 (55.3 percent increase).
Despite reviewers being explicitly instructed to flag hallucinations in 2025, even if 1.1% of papers have one or more incorrect references due to LLMs, the NeurIPS board argues the content of the papers themselves are not necessarily invalidated.
Impact: This crisis highlights systemic risks in AI-assisted research, where even top AI researchers cannot reliably detect hallucinations from the tools they're building and studying.
NVIDIA Launches Nemotron 3 for Agentic AI Development
NVIDIA announced the NVIDIA Nemotron 3 family of open models, data and libraries designed to power transparent, efficient and specialized agentic AI development across industries, introducing the most efficient family of open models with leading accuracy for building agentic AI applications.
Nemotron 3 Nano delivers 4x higher throughput than Nemotron 2 Nano and delivers the most tokens per second for multi-agent systems at scale through a breakthrough hybrid mixture-of-experts architecture.
The family includes Nemotron 3 Nano (30-billion parameters activating up to 3 billion at a time), Nemotron 3 Super (approximately 100 billion parameters with up to 10 billion active per token), and Nemotron 3 Ultra (about 500 billion parameters with up to 50 billion active per token).
Nemotron 3 Nano is available now on AWS via Amazon Bedrock and will be supported on Google Cloud, CoreWeave, Crusoe, Microsoft Foundry, Nebius, Nscale and Yotta soon, with Super and Ultra models expected in the first half of 2026.
Impact: NVIDIA's push into open-source agent development models challenges proprietary platforms and provides enterprises with transparent alternatives for building specialized AI systems.
Product Launches
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Google Chrome Auto Browse: Agentic browsing capabilities powered by Gemini 3 for AI Pro/Ultra subscribers - Transforms browser into active agent for complex web tasks (Google Blog)
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NVIDIA Nemotron 3 Family: Open models for agentic AI development with 4x throughput improvements - Enables transparent multi-agent system development (NVIDIA Newsroom)
Funding & Deals
- OpenAI - $60B+ Funding Round: Multi-company investment led by Nvidia ($30B), Microsoft (<$10B), and Amazon ($10B+) targeting $830B valuation - Demonstrates shift from talent to capital-intensive AI development - Led by strategic infrastructure partners (Bloomberg)
Related reading: Check out this week's [Deep Insights analysis] for strategic context on these developments.
