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Techmeme

Bengaluru-based Sarvam, which is building AI models for local languages, launches its Indus chat app in beta, powered by its Sarvam 105B model (Jagmeet Singh/TechCrunch)

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The US launches the Tech Corps, a program under the Peace Corps to send volunteers abroad to promote American AI, as the US competes with China for AI dominance (Viola Zhou/Rest of World)

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Microsoft Gaming CEO Asha Sharma says she is committed to "the return of Xbox" and that the company won't "flood our ecosystem with soulless AI slop" (Sean Hollister/The Verge)

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India joins Pax Silica, a US-led initiative that aims to build secure supply chains for semiconductors, advanced manufacturing, and critical technologies (Rajesh Roy/Associated Press)

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Source: OpenAI is projecting that its revenue will exceed $280B in 2030; last month, OpenAI said its annualized revenue grew to $20B+ in 2025 (Shirin Ghaffary/Bloomberg)

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Sources: OpenAI is telling investors it's targeting ~$600B in total compute spend by 2030, months after Sam Altman touted $1.4T in infrastructure commitments (CNBC)

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Sources: OpenAI staff raised concerns about a Canadian mass shooting suspect months ago; OpenAI says her activity didn't meet the bar for reporting to police (Georgia Wells/Wall Street Journal)

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Xbox President Sarah Bond, long thought to be Phil Spencer's heir, is leaving; Xbox Game Studios head Matt Booty is promoted to Chief Content Officer (Ryan McCaffrey/IGN)

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Phil Spencer will retire after 38 years at Microsoft; Asha Sharma, the president of product in Microsoft's Core AI business, will become the CEO of gaming (Jordan Novet/CNBC)

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Anthropic launches Claude Code Security, which "scans codebases for security vulnerabilities and suggests targeted software patches"; cybersecurity stocks fall (Ryan Vlastelica/Bloomberg)

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Code Metal, which uses AI to let engineers translate legacy code into modern languages, raised a $125M Series B led by Salesforce Ventures at a $1.25B valuation (Lauren Goode/Wired)

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A US judge rejects Tesla's bid to overturn a $243M jury verdict over a fatal 2019 Autopilot crash, a blow for Tesla as it faces a growing wave of lawsuits (Fred Lambert/Electrek)

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Sources: Google may invest $100M in Fluidstack at a $7.5B valuation and has backstopped crypto miners that are building datacenters, seeking to expand TPU use (Wall Street Journal)

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Tech stocks rise slightly from their morning lows after the Supreme Court ruled that President Trump lacked the authority to impose sweeping global tariffs (Adam Levine/Barron's Online)

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Peak XV, which split from Sequoia in 2023, raised $1.3B across new India- and Asia-focused funds, bringing its total assets under management to over $10B (Jagmeet Singh/TechCrunch)

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Claude's C Compiler shows AI elevates the role of human judgment and vision; it's a milestone, but closely mirrors LLVM/GCC, and hard codes things to pass tests (Chris Lattner/Modular Blog)

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Sources: OpenAI has 200+ people working on AI devices, including a smart speaker with a camera costing $200 to $300, possibly smart glasses and a smart lamp (The Information)

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Avantos, which makes an AI-native client management system for financial institutions, raised a $25M Series A led by Bessemer, taking its total funding to $35M (Minh Le/Tech in Asia)

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OpenAI says users aged 18 to 24 account for nearly 50% and under-30s represent 80% of ChatGPT messages in India; 35% of chats are related to professional tasks (Ivan Mehta/TechCrunch)

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Pepper, which offers a digital storefront for independent food distributors, raised a $50M Series C led by Lead Edge Capital, taking its total funding to $100M (Chris Metinko/Axios)

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Scott Myers, the head of Snap's AR glasses subsidiary Specs, leaves after six years; sources say Myers left after a "blow-up" with Evan Spiegel over strategy (Alex Heath/Sources)

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Sources: SoftBank plans to form a consortium to build a $33B power plant in Ohio, set to produce 9.2 GW for AI data centers, as part of the US-Japan trade deal (Nikkei Asia)

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General Catalyst plans to invest $5B in India over five years, an increase from the $500M to $1B it previously announced, after merging with a local VC in 2024 (Jagmeet Singh/TechCrunch)

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Google rejected 1.75M policy-violating Android apps and blocked 80K+ developer accounts from Google Play in 2025, down from 2.36M apps and 158K accounts in 2024 (Sarah Perez/TechCrunch)

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Sources: Amazon's AI tools have caused at least two AWS outages, including a 13-hour disruption in December; Amazon says it was "user error, not AI error" (Rafe Rosner-Uddin/Financial Times)

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Microsoft's AI safety team proposed technical standards for detecting AI-generated content, but its CSO declined to commit to using them across its platforms (James O'Donnell/MIT Technology Review)

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How some political candidates and activists across ideologies and professions are pushing back on the spread of data centers and AI in the US (Andrew R. Chow/Time)

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Uber's market cap fell to ~$150B, down ~25% in six months, as investors weigh robotaxi disruption and see the market as a two-horse race between Waymo and Tesla (Dan Gallagher/Wall Street Journal)

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A US grand jury indicted two former Google engineers and one of their husbands for allegedly stealing trade secrets relating to the Tensor chip for Pixel phones (Robert Burnson/Bloomberg)

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Tech companies are increasingly building private power plants to fuel off-grid data centers, a move some warn has reliability challenges and hurts climate goals (Evan Halper/Washington Post)

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Perplexity's retreat from ads signals a strategic shift as it recognizes its product is not for a mass audience and expects growth to come from enterprise sales (Maxwell Zeff/Wired)

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Sources: Nvidia is close to finalizing an up to $30B investment into OpenAI, replacing 2025's long-term $100B commitment; the deal could be closed this weekend (Financial Times)

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Los Angeles County sues Roblox, alleging it engaged in deceptive business practices that exposed children to sexual content, exploitation, and online predators (Jonathan Lloyd/NBC Los Angeles)

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Sources: Meta cuts its annual distribution of stock options by ~5% for most of its staff, equating to tens of thousands of employees, after a ~10% cut in 2025 (Hannah Murphy/Financial Times)

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Sources: Emerald AI, which develops software to curb data center energy demand, is raising a $25M seed extension at a ~$250M post-money valuation (Alan Neuhauser/Axios)

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Sony shuts down Bluepoint Games, the PlayStation subsidiary behind remakes of older games like Demon's Souls and Uncharted; ~70 employees will lose their jobs (Jason Schreier/Bloomberg)

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Meta says it is "explicitly separating" Quest VR from its Worlds platform, making Worlds "almost exclusively mobile" and setting it up to compete with Roblox (Jay Peters/The Verge)

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Docs: DHS has signed a five-year, $1B blanket purchase agreement with Palantir, allowing agencies like ICE to skip the competitive bidding process (Makena Kelly/Wired)

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CZ returned to the US for the first time since his 2024 prison release to attend a World Liberty Financial event at Mar-a-Lago with Brian Armstrong and others (Wall Street Journal)

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Workers describe a deteriorating culture at Jack Dorsey's Block as morale plunges amid rolling layoffs and a push to use AI tools to improve productivity (Reece Rogers/Wired)

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Toronto-based chip startup Taalas, which hardwires AI models into custom silicon to achieve faster inference, raised $169M, bringing its total funding to $219M (Max A. Cherney/Reuters)

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Sources: AMD agrees to backstop a $300M loan from Goldman Sachs for Crusoe to buy AMD AI chips, the first known case of AMD chips used as debt collateral (The Information)

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Reddit is testing an AI search feature that takes community recommendations and shows matching products from its advertisers in the results (Aisha Malik/TechCrunch)

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Cleveland-based Eagle Wireless, which makes cellular modules used in IoT devices, raised a $30M Series B as the US seeks to reduce its reliance on China (Chris Metinko/Axios)

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New York pulls a proposal that would have allowed for robotaxi services outside NYC, a setback for Waymo, which wants to hit 1M paid weekly US rides by 2026 end (Natalie Lung/Bloomberg)

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Inside the "gay tech mafia" that mixes social and professional lives, as investors, entrepreneurs, and executives detail gay influence in Silicon Valley (Zoë Bernard/Wired)

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Google rolls out Gemini 3.1 Pro, which it says is "a step forward in core reasoning", for all users in the Gemini app; the .1 increment is a first for Google (Abner Li/9to5Google)

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Austin-based Ownwell, which helps homeowners appeal property taxes, raised a $50M Series B, including $30M in equity, bringing its total equity funding to $54M (Mary Ann Azevedo/Crunchbase News)

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ZaiNar, a developer of a GPS alternative that uses Wi-Fi and 5G to provide location data, raised $10M at a $1B valuation, bringing its total funding to $100M (Katie Roof/The Information)

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West Virginia's AG sues Apple for allegedly violating consumer protection law by not implementing tools like PhotoDNA to detect CSAM stored and shared on iCloud (Kalley Huang/New York Times)

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