Hello from The AI Night,
Today in AI:
Meta Acquires Manus One of the Leading Autonomous AI Agent Startups
Samsung Doubles Down: 800 Million Gemini-Powered Devices in 2026
Adobe Becomes Runway's Preferred API Partner Gets First Access to New Video Models
Source: Manus blog
Here's the deal: Meta announced it is acquiring Manus the Singapore-based company behind a general-purpose AI agent capable of executing complex tasks like market research, coding, and data analysis autonomously.
The Breakdown:
Manus will continue operating its subscription service independently while integrating into Meta's product ecosystem
The agent has processed over 147 trillion tokens and created more than 80 million virtual computers since launch earlier this year
Manus team will join Meta to build general-purpose agents across consumer and business products, including Meta AI
Company remains headquartered in Singapore; existing customers face no immediate disruption
CEO Xiao Hong emphasized operational continuity: decisions and product direction stay intact
The bigger picture: Meta gains a production-ready agentic AI layer with proven scale, accelerating its push into autonomous task execution across its platforms. For Manus, Meta's distribution billions of users offers a path to scale that few startups can access independently. This signals growing big-tech appetite for acquiring agent infrastructure rather than building from scratch.
Here's the deal: Samsung will expand its Galaxy AI-enabled mobile devices from 400 million to 800 million units this year, co-CEO T M Roh told Reuters. Galaxy AI features are largely powered by Google's Gemini with Samsung's Bixby handling select tasks.
The Breakdown:
Samsung is the world's largest Android platform backer this 2x expansion directly boosts Google's consumer AI distribution against OpenAI
Galaxy AI brand awareness surged from 30% to 80% in one year, per Samsung surveys
Most-used AI features: search, followed by generative editing tools, translation, and summarization
A global memory chip shortage is pressuring smartphone margins; price increases are "inevitable," Roh said
Samsung aims to "apply AI to all products, all functions, and all services as quickly as possible"
The bigger picture: This is a major distribution win for Google's Gemini. With 800 million devices, Samsung becomes one of the largest channels for consumer-facing AI giving Google scale that pure chatbot interfaces cannot match. For developers, it signals where on-device AI integrations will concentrate.
Source: adobe news blog
Here's the deal: Adobe and Runway announced a multi-year strategic partnership on December 18, 2025. Adobe is now Runway's preferred API creativity partner, giving Adobe customers early access to Runway's latest video generation models before broader release.
The Breakdown:
Runway's Gen-4.5 is now available in the Adobe Firefly app ahead of public release.
The two companies will co-develop AI video capabilities exclusively for Adobe applications.
Gen-4.5 offers improved motion quality, prompt adherence, and temporal consistency for multi-element scenes.
Firefly Pro subscribers get unlimited Gen-4.5 generations through December 22.
Adobe Firefly now aggregates models from Runway, Black Forest Labs, ElevenLabs, Google, Luma AI, OpenAI, and Topaz Labs.
Adobe states that content generated in Firefly is not used to train AI models.
The bigger picture: This positions Adobe as the central hub for professional AI video workflows, bundling best-in-class third-party models into tools creators already use. For Runway, it means distribution at scale through Adobe's enterprise install base. The partnership signals consolidation in AI video tooling around established creative software platforms.
What else you need to know:
Google released Nano Banana Pro, its latest image generation model powered by Gemini 3 Pro, across Gemini app, AI Mode in Search, NotebookLM, Workspace, Flow, and multiple developer tools.
Former Meta chief AI scientist Yann LeCun called new Superintelligence Labs head Alexandr Wang "inexperienced" in research and predicted more AI team departures after Zuckerberg sidelined staff over Llama 4 benchmark issues.
DeepSeek-AI introduced Manifold-Constrained Hyper-Connections to stabilize training by projecting residual mappings onto a doubly stochastic manifold, improving scalability and reasoning performance on BBH and DROP with minimal overhead.
SoftBank will acquire digital infrastructure investor DigitalBridge for $4 billion, gaining access to $108 billion in managed assets including data centers and fiber networks to support its AI expansion.
Chinese quant fund UBIQUANT's research arm released IQuest-Coder-V1, an open-source 40B code model scoring 81.4% on SWE-Bench Verified with 128K native context.
That’s it for today’s edition of The AI Night.
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