Toolify Weekly
Happy New Year's Eve (Eve), everyone! 🥂
If 2025 taught us anything, it's that AI is moving from "chatbots" to "agents" and from "digital" to "physical." This week brings that trend home to close out the year. Meta is getting hands-on (literally) by snapping up Manus, likely to give their AI models a sense of touch. Google dropped Gemini 3 Flash, putting pure speed and agentic workflow at the forefront. And Nvidia? They just made a surprise handshake with Groq that could reshape how fast chips run.
This week’s run-of-show:
Meta x Manus: The quest for embodied AI just got tactile.
Gemini 3 Flash: Google's new speed demon for agents.
Nvidia & Groq: The chip giants call a truce for speed.
The Slop Era: 2025's unfortunate legacy.
🔥Top Story
The Gist: Meta has acquired Manus, the Dutch startup famous for its high-fidelity haptic gloves and motion capture tech. This isn't just about better gaming on the Quest; it's a major play for Embodied AI.
The Details:
The Tech: Manus specializes in "quantifying hand data"—capturing exactly how fingers move and interact with the physical world.
The Strategy: With Meta's "Orion" AR glasses ramping up, they need an input method that doesn't rely on controllers. Manus provides the ground-truth data needed to train AI models to understand human dexterity.
The Vision: Zuckerberg is betting that for AI to be truly useful, it needs to understand the physical world, not just text. This acquisition bridges the gap between Llama's brain and the real world's hands.
Why it matters: We've mastered text and image generation. The next frontier for 2026 is Action. If Meta can successfully train models on Manus's high-fidelity motor data, we might finally get AI agents that can do more than just write emails—they might actually be able to teach robots (or avatars) how to manipulate objects with human-level precision.
🔥Top Story
The Gist: Just when we thought the model wars were cooling down for the holidays, Google dropped Gemini 3 Flash. It’s not just a "lite" version; it's a frontier-class model optimized for extreme speed and efficiency.
The Details:
Blazing Fast: Google claims it's 3x faster than the previous Gemini 2.5 Pro, making it ideal for real-time agents and voice interaction.
Aggressive Pricing: At $0.50 per 1M input tokens, they are practically giving away intelligence. This undercuts almost every major competitor for this tier of performance.
Smart Cookie: It scores 90.4% on GPQA Diamond, meaning it's reasoning at a PhD level while responding in milliseconds.
Why it matters: For a long time, we had to choose between "smart and slow" or "dumb and fast." Gemini 3 Flash proves that in late 2025, that trade-off is disappearing. For developers building agentic workflows where a bot needs to "think" 20 times in a row, this speed/cost ratio is an absolute game-changer.
Culture Shock
The Gist: NPR released a scathing review of the internet in 2025, highlighting the explosion of "AI Slop"—low-quality, mass-generated content designed solely to game algorithms or harvest clicks.
The Details:
The Definition: "Slop" isn't just bad AI art; it's the millions of zombie SEO articles, fake product reviews, and uncanny valley YouTube comments generated by bot farms.
The Impact: Search engines and social feeds are fighting a losing battle to filter this out. Finding "human" content has become a premium feature.
Why it matters: This is the "Dead Internet Theory" coming to life. As we head into 2026, the most valuable digital asset isn't content generation—it's content verification. Expect "Proof of Human" protocols to become a major trend next year.
Quick hits
News Snacks 🍿
Nvidia x Groq: Nvidia has reached a licensing deal with chip startup Groq. It looks like the hardware giant is finally acknowledging that Groq's LPU architecture is the real deal for fast inference.
X’s AI Edit Button: Twitter/X now lets anyone AI-edit your photos with a single click. There is no opt-out. Artists are furious, privacy advocates are screaming, and the memes are... inevitable.
Typeless: A new voice-to-text tool that doesn't just transcribe; it "polishes." It removes filler words, formats your ramblings into structured memos, and runs locally on your device for privacy.
AI Tools
New Tools to Try 🛠️
ConnectMachine: An AI agent for networking that manages your contacts, scans cards, and privately curates introductions without the social media noise.
Claude in Chrome: Anthropic’s official browser extension lets Claude read your tabs, fill forms, and execute web tasks directly in your browser.
Firecrawl Agent: A new endpoint from Firecrawl that turns natural language prompts (e.g., "Get me all YC W24 founders") into clean JSON data.
ClickUp Brain: ClickUp has launched "AI Super Agents" that can autonomously manage projects, draft briefs, and assign tasks based on voice notes.
Aident: A no-code platform that lets you build AI automations by simply describing the workflow in natural language.
DiffSense: A local AI tool for Apple Silicon that reads your git diffs and automatically generates context-aware commit messages.
Thanks for reading! See you in 2026 (or next week, we never sleep).