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AI Billions: Should Every Citizen Get a Cut?
AI news, leaders, business insights and more
Dr. Ayesha Khanna
May 12, 2026 • Reading Time: 2 minutes
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AI Billions: Should Every Citizen Get a Cut?
Robots can make a bed faster than humans
AI Around the World
NEWS YOU CAN’T MISS
Samsung’s AI Billions: Should Every Korean Get a Cut?
Image 2.0 by Open AI
South Korea just floated a 2026 idea: use the AI boom to send people cash.
A senior policymaker, presidential policy chief Kim Yong-beom, suggested a "citizen dividend" funded by extra tax money the government is pulling in from AI winners like Samsung and SK Hynix.
His Facebook post spooked investors so badly that the Kospi, Korea's main stock index, briefly dropped more than 5% in one day before partially bouncing back once he clarified the money would come from existing tax windfalls, not a new tax on profits.
Markets are jumpy because the index has surged about 80% this year on AI optimism and shows how jittery an AI‑driven market can be about redistribution talk.
Why are Samsung and SK Hynix the AI winners? They make the high-bandwidth memory (HBM) chips that go inside Nvidia's AI servers. Only three companies in the world can supply HBM at scale.
The numbers are huge: Samsung alone may earn over $200 billion in profit this year, second only to Nvidia. Combined with SK Hynix, that's billions in corporate tax for Korea.
The “citizen dividend” idea is still just a concept, but it taps into a simple question everyone can understand: if AI is making a few giant companies incredibly rich, how much of that should flow directly to workers and everyday citizens, not just shareholders? A good question to ask indeed. 🤔
Figure robot can make a bed faster than humans
Image: Figure
Figure's new demo isn't just robot housekeeping — it's a glimpse of AI labor working as a team. Two humanoids reset a staged bedroom in under two minutes: opening doors, hanging clothes, taking out trash, and lifting a comforter onto the bed together.
No central planner, no messages between them, no shared brain. Each robot runs the same neural network and figures out what its partner is doing from motion alone — the way two people folding a sheet glance and adjust.
Figure says it's the first time a single learned network has pulled off multi-humanoid teamwork directly from pixels to actions.
The under-hyped detail: 2kW wireless charging coils in the feet, so the robot just steps onto a pad and tops itself up. No outlets, no cables, no human needed.
If this holds up outside the demo, humanoids start looking less like viral clips and more like the background labor that could run hotels, warehouses, and eventually your laundry.
Pricing is still evolving, but current estimates put a Figure‑class humanoid in roughly the 50–100k USD band per unit, depending on model and deployment. 😬
Would you buy two Figure robots to make your bed every day? |
AI Around the World
🇨🇳China – Moonshot AI’s Kimi: Moonshot AI (a Chinese startup) released an open-source model called Kimi K2.6. It can code almost as well as top models like Claude, but it costs much less to use and anyone can download it for free.
🇨🇦 🇩🇪 Canada + Germany – Cohere acquires Aleph Alpha: A big Canadian AI company called Cohere bought a German AI company called Aleph Alpha.
Together they created a $20 billion company that wants to give Europe and Canada their own sovereign AI so they don’t have to rely only on US or Chinese companies.
🇰🇷 South Korea – Samsung: Samsung (South Korea’s biggest tech company) is growing very fast because of AI chips. Its value is now heading toward $1 trillion thanks to huge demand for the chips that power AI around the world.
🇬🇧UK – ElevenLabs: ElevenLabs, a UK startup that makes AI voices, just got a huge new investment. Big investors like NVIDIA and BlackRock helped push the company’s value to $11 billion because its AI voice tools are being used by millions of people and companies.
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Until next time!
Amplify Team ❤️
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