January 2026 - The Year of the AI Pioneer!
Issue #40
🌟 Words for the New Year!
Happy New Year, Pioneering Minds!
If 2025 was the year you tried AI, 2026 is the year you build small AI workflows that actually stick, in your work, your learning, and your life!
In 2026, we’ll help you become an AI Pioneer by building small, repeatable AI workflows. In Today’s issue: 3 reflections that shaped my thinking + a starter project you can begin this week.
In 2025, we hosted 20 events with partners across startups, law firms, and universities and non profits - a special thanks to Cooley who have been providing us with legal advisory! A sincere thanks to every partner, speaker, and attendee of 2025! You have been an amazing part of the community!
**Full sponsor/partner list at end of article.
Running into 2026, our focus is simple: more practical value. This means more hands-on events, more guided learning, more practical AI examples and more ways to learn with mentors - detailed below!
What happened in 2025?
Now, did you get the year-in-review from ChatGPT? I sure got mine! It reminded me of something true: AI isn’t a tool I “use sometimes” anymore. It’s part of how I learn, plan, and build. It has become part of how I live.
Over the past two weeks, I read three end‑of‑year reflections on building with AI—one for builders, one for founders, and one that’s more philosophical. All three landed on the same message: AI amplifies execution, but humans still own direction.
For builders: Boris Cherny on how he uses Claude Code
For founders: Tao Zhang (Manus) on what he believed before building Manus
For thinkers: Dr. Yuandong Tian (田渊栋) on finding value “above the flood line” in an age of abundant AI
original content in chinese so I created slides with notebookLM for ya
Boris’ post is the most immediately actionable: treat AI coding like working with a junior teammate: break tasks down, give tight specs, and review the output relentlessly.
Manus’ core idea is simple: agents don’t become useful when they’re clever—they become useful when they’re persistent. If your AI “forgets everything” each session, it’s just not even a toy, it’s unsable. The product path that wins is: start broad, learn from real usage, then turn the few workflows people repeat into reliable defaults.
Dr. Tian’s point hit me hard: in a world of “abundant genies,” the advantage isn’t getting answers, it’s choosing a destination and sticking with it. As AI makes execution cheaper, strategy becomes everyone’s job, not just leaders’.
In other words: if AI becomes your teammate, your job shifts to setting direction, delegating clearly, and reviewing quality. That’s the core skill of an AI Pioneer. These were only required for the leaders before, but now, now you have ateam and YOU are becoming the leaders of AI!
Next up, build something for yourself!
If this got you fired up to build something small for yourself, good. Because here’s the point of 2026: we’re going to practice. I’ll share one starter project below, but first, here’s the learning loop I use to ramp up fast:
ChatGPT 5.2 Thinking, Gemini to do deep research
(occasionally) manus to do wide research for comprehensive research
NotebookLM to help generate easy to digest content
Notion to store the content and summarize with notion AI
A pen and notebook to write down my thoughts and of course my phone to take photo and ask GPT/Gemini to answer my questions on the note!
If you try one thing this week: use AI to learn one topic you care about for 30 minutes (or 2 hours, or however long you like!). Then, write a one page summary in your own words. This combo helps solidify the knowledge you’ve just gained.
Starter Project: Your Personal Information Summarizer (that learns your taste)
One project you can start small and make more powerful over time: a personal information summarizer (not “news”) that gradually learns what you actually care about.
Why this is a great first personal AI tool: it teaches you the difference between retrieving information and building taste. Retrieval finds what you saved. Taste learns what you consistently value and filters the rest.
What it does (simple version)
Pick a few sources (newsletters, papers, YouTube channels, podcasts, saved links)
Summarize what’s new
You give quick feedback (“more like this / less like this” or just plain sentence)
Over time, it becomes a taste filter, not just a summarizer
You can eventually add RSS feeds, memory, and automation. But don’t start there.
Start with the simplest version: collect sources → summarize → save/ignore → reflect weekly.
Then, ask ChatGPT or Gemini how to expand it: rss feed (which is used to get updates about news, journal articles, videos, pod casts…all kinds of message sources), memory management (agentic rag), ai content summarizer. Personalize summarization and recommendations… all the fun stuff!
The best and most valuable aspect of this project is that it creates something uniquely you and helps you curate your content your way. And gets you familiarized with the AI development techniques and practices.
Pioneering Minds AI In 2026
Even after using AI daily for two years, I still learn something new constantly. The pace is real, so in 2026 we’re building structure around it.
1. Community Platform and Mentors
To help you become the AI Pioneer who can not just survive in the AI era, but also thrive in the new era, we are launching our community platform in early Q1.
A place where you can find your peers to exchange ideas and insights around AI, share your AI projects, learn from high quality courses and practice AI with real challenges like the one I shared above with instructions and help from experienced AI mentors within the community!
Mentors are currently accessible at the main website and we are in the process of onboarding more mentors, stay tuned!
P.S. Join the waitlist at pioneeringminds.ai to receive the newsletter and a platform invite when we launch!
2. More Events for Builders and Founders !!
We are hosting more curated AI events to support our professionals and founders through 2026! A public roadmap will be published again at www.pioneeringminds.ai in the coming week!
If there’s an event you want to see, or a topic you’d like to lead, reply and tell me what you’re building or learning.
3. New 2026 Annual Sponsor Program
Our Promise to Members
No spammy sponsorships.
No random ads.
Only partners that are genuinely useful to our audience.
As a nonprofit, our team runs on volunteer effort. If you’ve found value in this community, sponsorships and donations help us keep events and content high-quality.
Last year we learned something important: sponsorship shouldn’t be “one event visibility.” The best partnerships show up consistently!
So for 2026, we’re offering a full-year sponsorship package: sustained visibility across our newsletter, events, and community rather than a one-off logo slide.
Why annual beats single-event sponsorship:
Consistent presence all year (newsletter + events + community)
Better alignment with a focused audience
Higher trust and ROI through repetition
If you want the sponsor packet or want to explore fit, reply to this email or contact me at nickgu@pioneeringminds.ai.
Wishing you a focused, creative, and powerful 2026.
Dr. Nick Gu
Founder & President, Pioneering Minds AI
📅 January 2026 Events
Agentic AI in the Trenches | Startup Grind | Jan 6, 6–9 PM | In-Person | $5 | RSVP
Agentic AI Summit | ODSC | Jan 21–Feb 5 | Virtual | Free–$299 | RSVP
Tech Talk w/ Glean, FlutterFlow & Alaffia | NY AI Engineers | Jan 21, 6–8 PM | In-Person (Brooklyn) | Free | RSVP
Responsible AI: What Leaders Need to Know | Brown | Jan 22, 12–1 PM | Virtual | Free | RSVP
Overcoming AI Deployment Challenges | MIT xPRO & CSAIL | Jan 27, 11–11:45 AM | Virtual | Free | RSVP
AI in Education: Open Questions Panel | AiiCE | Jan 27, 5–6 PM | Virtual | Free | RSVP
ORBIT Winter School: Real-World Data Analytics | Duke DCRI | Jan 28–30 | Virtual | Free | RSVP
Career Conversations: AI/ML Careers | NYU Wasserman | Jan 28, 5–6:30 PM | Virtual | Free | RSVP
A Geometric Perspective on LLM Behavior | Princeton CITP | Jan 27, 12:15–1:15 PM | Virtual | Free | RSVP
AI & Tech Mixer NYC | NYC AI & Tech Meetup | Jan 29, 6–9 PM | In-Person (Brooklyn) | Free–$54 | RSVP
AI+Aging Seminar: SpeechCARE | Columbia Aging Center | Jan 29, 1–2 PM | Virtual | Free | RSVP
📚 References & Reading List
Clear, J. (2018). Atomic Habits: An Easy & Proven Way to Build Good Habits & Break Bad Ones. Avery. https://jamesclear.com/atomic-habits
Ribeiro, M. T., Singh, S., & Guestrin, C. (2020 ). Beyond Accuracy: Behavioral Testing of NLP Models with CheckList. Proceedings of the 58th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics. https://doi.org/10.18653/v1/2020.acl-main.442
Liang, P., et al. (2022 ). Holistic Evaluation of Language Models. arXiv preprint arXiv:2211.09110. https://arxiv.org/abs/2211.09110
Datadog (2025) “Building an LLM evaluation framework: best practices”
Sponsors and Partners of 2025
Law Firms
Non Profits
Startups
Academic institutions and groups