Thursday, January 15, 2026

SpaceX Mars 2026 🚀, mega IPOs 💰, Sequoia declares AGI 🤖

SpaceX has announced plans for a potential mission to Mars as early as late 2026. The proposed schedule coincides with a rare planetary alignment ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌  ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ 

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Together With Okta

TLDR 2026-01-15

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Big Tech & Startups

2026 May Be the Year of the Mega IPO (5 minute read)

At least three of the most valuable and highest-profile tech companies are currently preparing to list their shares on the public market. Anthropic, OpenAI, and SpaceX have all taken early steps to go public. Any of these companies would be among the most valuable ever to go public. The listings could create an enormous bonanza for Wall Street, which has seen a slump in IPOs since 2021.
Musk says Tesla is moving Full Self-Driving to a monthly subscription (3 minute read)

Tesla will stop selling its Full Self-Driving (Supervised) software for a flat rate and instead only offer it as a monthly subscription after February 14. The feature will start at $99 per month. It was previously priced at a one-time payment of $8,000. The technology still requires a human driver at the wheel ready to steer or brake at any time.
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Science & Futuristic Technology

Elon Musk surprises everyone: SpaceX will attempt to reach Mars by the end of 2026 (4 minute read)

SpaceX has announced plans for a potential uncrewed mission to Mars as early as late 2026. The proposed schedule coincides with a rare planetary alignment between Earth and Mars that offers a narrow but valuable launch opportunity. Several core technologies essential to deep space travel remain in development. Starship Version 3 is expected to debut this year. It will feature upgrades that may prove pivotal to long-duration missions beyond Earth orbit.
Genetic Therapy Aims To Bring Hearing To Those Born Deaf (3 minute read)

OTOF-related hearing loss results from a genetic change in a single critical protein. The auditory nerve fails to receive the proper signals from the hair cells in the ear due to the lack of the proper protein, resulting in profound deafness. DB-OTO is a virus-based gene therapy that can deliver a working version of the OTOF gene. It uses a non-pathogenic virus to carry the proper genetic code that produces the protein. In an early trial of the DB-OTO treatment, eleven out of twelve patients developed improved hearing within weeks, and nine patients no longer required cochlear implants.
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Programming, Design & Data Science

Feel like you're working more, but getting less done? Inside the hidden productivity crisis (Sponsor)

55% of knowledge workers are putting in more hours but delivering less. The culprit? Well over half say that fragmentation is a productivity killer. Miro's 2025 Momentum at Work Report lays out the costs of tool sprawl and the solutions that get teams back on track. Read the report
Scaling long-running autonomous coding (6 minute read)

Model choice matters for extremely long-running tasks. GPT-5.2 models perform better at extended autonomous work compared to Opus 4.5 and GPT-5.1-codex. Many improvements come from removing complexity rather than adding it. The best system is often simpler than you'd expect. The harness and models matter, but the prompts matter more.
Junior Developers in the Age of AI (8 minute read)

The most compelling reason to hire juniors is AI itself. The biggest barrier to AI transformation has been workforce buy-in. Gen Z leads in AI adoption, and they act as an accelerant, helping colleagues learn AI tools and workflows. AI has lowered the cost of onboarding. If the infrastructure already exists, hiring juniors may be one of the highest-leverage AI bets available today.
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Miscellaneous

TLDR is hiring a Curator for TLDR IT! (TLDR Curator, ~5 hrs/week) 🖥️

We are launching a brand new newsletter covering IT and enterprise tech. We already have 500,000+ subscribers waiting for the first edition.

We need a domain expert to curate and write the daily summaries. If you want to be the voice of the IT industry, please send your resume or LinkedIn to itcurator@tldr.tech!

2026: This is AGI (10 minute read)

Long-horizon agents allow models to take actions and iterate over time. The rate of progress in this area of research is exponential. It is estimated that agents will be able to work reliably to complete tasks comparably to human experts by 2028. People will soon be able to hire agents - one of the litmus tests for AGI.
When Will They Take Our Jobs? (12 minute read)

Humans will lose control over the future if AI capabilities continue to advance. However, if we manage to avoid that, there's a good chance humans will retain a lot of employment during the Cyborg Era, which might last around 10 to 20 years. It is implausible that AI capabilities and available compute continue to increase indefinitely. This is a transitional state.

Quick Links

Anthropic is making a huge mistake (1 minute read)

Anthropic blocking third parties from using the Claude Code API will not convert people back to Claude Code, it will just convert people to other model providers.
Gas Town Decoded (3 minute read)

This post presents a list of terms used in Gas Town, an AI agent orchestration tool, decoding the definitions used in the introductory paper for developers.
Google launches Personal Intelligence feature in Gemini app, challenging Apple Intelligence (2 minute read)

Google is testing a new AI tool with users that connects information from various apps to provide personalized answers in its chatbot.
Getting Real Leverage from Claude Code (18 minute read)

This post discusses how to run multiple Claude Code sessions in parallel, each in its own fully isolated environment.
AI Enables As-Needed Software Features (1 minute read)

AI enables people to just describe what they want, and then apps write the code needed to do it on demand.
Digg and Reddit creators relaunch Digg to compete with Reddit (1 minute read)

Digg has relaunched with a focus on trust signals, transparency in moderation, and defenses against AI-driven spam.

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Thanks for reading,
Dan Ni & Stephen Flanders


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