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Plaud launches the $179 Plaud NotePin S AI recorder, similar to the $159 NotePin but with a button, alongside a new desktop app for recording meeting audio (Dominic Preston/The Verge)

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US immigration lawyers, talent managers, and creators say influencers and OnlyFans models now dominate O-1B visas, which are reserved for "exceptional" artists (Ian Hodgson/Financial Times)

How a crew of crypto-focused criminals moved from SIM swap attacks to coordinated, violent home invasions and kidnappings, targeting small-time crypto investors (Austin Carr/Bloomberg)

Sources: Palo Alto Networks is in talks to acquire Israeli cybersecurity startup Koi for $400M; Koi has raised $48M to date (Sophie Shulman/CTech)

Sources: Cisco is in advanced talks to acquire cybersecurity company Axonius for $2B; Axonius has raised ~$700M and was valued at $2.6B during earlier rounds (Meir Orbach/CTech)

Hands-on with Xreal's Neo, a $99 battery pack and mini-dock that acts as a passthrough converter so the company's glasses can work with the Nintendo Switch (Scott Stein/CNET)

Xreal unveils the $449 1S, a pair of AR glasses with 1200p, 700 nits brightness, 52 degree FOV, and 16:10 aspect ratio; the 1S can convert any 2D video into 3D (Victoria Song/The Verge)

A profile of June Paik, CEO of Seoul-based chip startup FuriosaAI, valued at ~$700M, whose AI chip dubbed "RNGD" is slated to enter mass production this month (Jiyoung Sohn/Wall Street Journal)

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Tech workers in Silicon Valley are increasingly experimenting with gray-market peptide drugs from China, legal for personal use, for improving focus and more (Jasmine Sun/New York Times)

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EU officials and policymakers say the EC will intensify its enforcement of the DMA and DSA in 2026, a move expected to renew clashes with US Big Tech and Trump (Barbara Moens/Financial Times)

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Reddit surpasses TikTok as the fourth most-visited social media service in the UK, likely driven by changes to Google's search algorithms and AI deals (Michael Savage/The Guardian)

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Filing: West Co, founded by Biz Stone and Evan Sharp, raised $29M; it launched the invite-only social app Tangle, "designed for intentional living", in November (Tim Bradshaw/Financial Times)

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Fueled partly by US tech companies, governments worldwide are racing to deploy GenAI in schools and universities, even as agencies such as UNICEF urge caution (Natasha Singer/New York Times)

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A new Polymarket account bet $30K on Maduro's capture just hours before Trump's announcement, renewing questions on insider information in prediction markets (Herb Scribner/Axios)

A look at AVA, an AI chatbot developed by Alaska's court system to provide aid in the probate process, which has been plagued by delays and hallucinations (Jared Perlo/NBC News)

Q&A with Kara Swisher on Sam Altman's determination to "do anything to make OpenAI win", Elon Musk, the tech industry's Trump pivot, and more (Mishal Husain/Bloomberg)

Dating apps are pivoting to Asia as swipe-right fatigue hits the West; India, China, and Indonesia ranked among the top five markets by downloads in 2025 (Financial Times)

The Groq deal shows the challenges Nvidia faces as options to deploy its cash flood narrow; its annual free cash flow has risen from $4.2B in 2020 to $80B+ now (Dan Gallagher/Wall Street Journal)

A deep dive into co-packaged optics, long promised to transform data center connectivity, covering benefits, challenges, architecture, key companies, and more (SemiAnalysis)

A look at Elon Musk's bet that Tesla's future is in its Optimus humanoid robots, which for now rely on human helpers and still face commercial challenges (Becky Peterson/Wall Street Journal)

London is set to become the first city where both US and Chinese robotaxis operate, as Waymo and Baidu prepare to launch their robotaxis in the city in 2026 (Tim Bradshaw/Financial Times)

Global SWF: sovereign wealth funds invested $66B in AI and digitalization in 2025, with Mubadala investing $12.9B and Kuwait Investment Authority investing $6B (Alex Dooler/Bloomberg)

What to expect at CES 2026: laptops with new chips from Intel, Qualcomm, and AMD, more AI integrations, smart home robotics, smart glasses, and more (The Verge)

Ilya Lichtenstein, sentenced in Nov. 2024 to five years in prison for hacking Bitfinex, has been released early due to First Step Act, Trump's prison-reform law (CNBC)

California launched a free tool on January 1 that lets residents request the deletion of their personal data from over 500 registered data brokers (Michael Kan/PCMag)

Comparing ChatGPT's mini-apps with native iOS apps: some like Uber, OpenTable, and TripAdvisor fell short with frequent error messages, but Instacart did well (Rolfe Winkler/Wall Street Journal)

On top of nonconsensual porn images, X users seem to be using Grok to alter images to depict real women being sexually abused, humiliated, hurt, and even killed (Maggie Harrison Dupré/Futurism)

Mumbai-based Knight Fintech, which builds core infrastructure that connects banks, lenders, platforms, and borrowers, raised $23.6M led by Accel (The Economic Times)

xAI launches Grok Business, priced at $30 per seat/month, for SMBs, and Grok Enterprise, whose price is not listed publicly, for larger organizations (Carl Franzen/VentureBeat)

India orders X to stop Grok from generating obscene content, giving it 72 hours to submit an action-taken report or risk losing its "safe harbor" protections (Jagmeet Singh/TechCrunch)

Filing: OpenAI President Greg Brockman was the biggest donor to Trump's super PAC in H2 2025, donating $25M; Crypto.com operator Foris DAX donated $20M (Bill Allison/Bloomberg)

Uber rewrote its UK driver contracts to act as an agent, rather than a supplier, of taxi services outside London, to avoid the UK's new 20% "taxi tax" on fares (Simon Goodley/The Guardian)

Pebble unveils the Pebble Round 2, a smartwatch with a rounded screen and basic health and activity tracking but no heart rate monitor, shipping in May for $199 (Sarah Perez/TechCrunch)

An interview with analyst Benedict Evans on the role of productization in AI adoption, an AI bubble, OpenAI, comparing Nvidia and Sun Microsystems, and more (The Circuit on YouTube)

xAI's Grok says "lapses in safeguards" led it to create sexualized images of people, including minors, in response to X user prompts; X took some images down (Bloomberg)

Yann LeCun admits that Llama 4's "results were fudged a little bit", and that the team used different models for different benchmarks to give better results (Melissa Heikkilä/Financial Times)

Tech analyst Dan Wang reflects on the Chinese Communist Party vs. Silicon Valley, AI and manufacturing, how China and the US are building the future, and more (Dan Wang)

As of January 1, UK crypto buyers are required to share their account details with tax officials or face penalties, as the UK seeks to collect unpaid taxes (Rachel Clun/BBC)

How Meta's Reels became a hit, with a $50B+ annual run rate; Sensor Tower: users spend 27 minutes/day on Instagram Reels, 21 on YouTube Shorts, and 44 on TikTok (Meghan Bobrowsky/Wall Street Journal)

How Nokia has reinvented itself for the AI revolution by expanding into cloud services, data centers, and optical networks, and by partnering with Nvidia (Kieran Smith/Financial Times)

Chinese AI chip startup Biren surged as much as 119% in its Hong Kong debut, after raising ~$717M in an IPO priced at ~$2.52 per share (Bloomberg)

How Arizona is training talent for its growing chip industry as suppliers fear tighter US immigration policy; Arizona has drawn $200B+ in investments since 2020 (Nikkei Asia)

Baidu says its AI chip unit Kunlunxin has confidentially filed for a Hong Kong IPO, aiming for a spin-off; a December fundraising reportedly valued it at ~$3B (Sneha Kumar/Reuters)

SpaceX plans to lower its Starlink satellites from orbiting at ~550km to ~480km in 2026 to improve space safety and reduce the likelihood of debris collisions (Rishabh Jaiswal/Reuters)

Brookfield is starting cloud company Radiant and a new $10B AI fund, after saying it plans to acquire up to $100B in land, data centers, and power assets for AI (Miles Kruppa/The Information)

How AI automation can fulfill Thomas Piketty's predictions on rising economic inequality, and why highly progressive taxes on capital can help slow the spiral (Philosopher Count)

A look at US tech laws coming in 2026, like California's SB 53 AI transparency law and Virginia's new social media limits for minors, effective from January 1 (Adi Robertson/The Verge)

Ukraine has become a live-fire test range for AI drones like the Bumblebee, provided by a secretive Eric Schmidt-led venture, raising alarms in Kremlin circles (C.J. Chivers/New York Times)

DeepSeek researchers detail mHC, a new architecture they used to train 3B, 9B, and 27B models, finding it scaled without adding significant computational burden (Vincent Chow/South China Morning Post)

Sources: OpenAI is taking steps to improve its audio AI models, in preparation for its AI-powered personal device, which is expected to be largely audio-based (Stephanie Palazzolo/The Information)