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Today’s Menu

• Robot Olympics Tests If AI Can Actually Do Your Chores

• VanEck Calls Bitcoin 2026's Top Performer

Markets

TODAY IN AI

Robot Olympics Tests If AI Can Actually Do Your Chores

Physical Intelligence decided to stop arguing with skeptics and turn the whole thing into a test. Their new Robot Olympics is basically the Olympics of household chores: same tasks, same constraints, lots of ways to fail, and a painfully honest scorecard.

Here's what PI tested with its π0.6 model: navigate a self-closing door, turn a sock right-side-out, put a key in a lock, wash a frying pan, and open a thin plastic dog poop bag. PI says all videos are autonomous, meaning the robot decomposes tasks and recovers from failures without human help.

The breakthrough connects to PI's research on human-to-robot transfer. Once you pretrain vision-language-action models on enough robot experience, they can learn from cheap human footage. PI reports roughly 2× improvements when adding human video during fine-tuning.

The caveat: impressive runs aren't reliable products yet. These are brittle tasks where lighting or a wet sponge can ruin everything. But if this foundation model loop compounds like it did for language models, useful home robots stop being sci-fi and become boringly inevitable.

TODAY IN CRYPTO

VanEck Calls Bitcoin 2026's Top Performer

Bitcoin has had a brutal year, down nearly 30% from October highs and lagging the Nasdaq by 50%. But VanEck just called Bitcoin the top performer for 2026.

David Schassler, VanEck's head of multi-asset solutions, says this dislocation is setting up a major comeback. His thesis: fiat debasement is accelerating, liquidity is returning, and Bitcoin historically responds sharply to both.

VanEck flagged a bullish signal: miner capitulation. Bitcoin's hashrate dropped 4%, the sharpest decline since April. Historically, that's been bullish. Since 2014, Bitcoin's 90-day returns were positive 65% of the time when hashrate was declining.

While miners capitulate, institutions are buying. Digital asset treasuries added 42,000 BTC from mid-November to mid-December. Total holdings now sit at 1.09 million BTC.

If liquidity returns and debasement accelerates as VanEck expects, the gap between Bitcoin and traditional assets could close violently in 2026.

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Until next time,

Damon James