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Techmeme

TikTok has launched a standalone micro drama app, PineDrama, in the US and Brazil, offering vertical serialized shows for free without ads or paywalls for now (Business Insider)

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OpenAI expands its $8/month ChatGPT Go subscription tier to the US and the rest of the world, after previously launching it in India and some other countries (Elissa Welle/The Verge)

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OpenAI will match ads to conversation topics using some personalization data, but claims it will not sell user data or expose user conversations to advertisers (Maxwell Zeff/Wired)

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OpenAI plans to test ads below ChatGPT replies for users of free and Go tiers in the US; source: OpenAI expects to make "low billions" from ads in 2026 (Financial Times)

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Vietnam's military-run telecom company Viettel begins construction of the country's first chip plant, with trial production expected to start by late 2027 (Phuong Nguyen/Reuters)

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Istanbul-based TaleMonster Games, the studio behind the puzzle game Match Valley, raised a $30M Series A led by Arcadia Gaming Partners and a16z (Tamara Djurickovic/Tech.eu)

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Analysis: Colossus 2, one of the world's largest AI datacenters, will use as much water/year as 2.5 average In-N-Outs, assuming only drinkable water and burgers (SemiAnalysis)

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Unsealed docs from Elon Musk's OpenAI lawsuit, set for a jury trial on April 27: Sutskever's concerns about treating open-source AI as a "side show", and more (Alex Heath/Sources)

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Unsealed docs from Elon Musk's OpenAI lawsuit, set for a jury trial on April 27: Sutskever's concerns about treating open-source AI as a "side show", and more (Alex Heath/The Verge)

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DoorDash Chief Revenue Officer Lee Brown is departing the delivery app company after less than six months; long-term VP Shanna Prevé will succeed Brown as CRO (Natalie Lung/Bloomberg)

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ClickHouse, a Snowflake challenger that offers an OLAP database management system, raised $400M led by Dragoneer at a $15B valuation, up from $6.35B in May 2025 (Dina Bass/Bloomberg)

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Source: Italian police searched the offices of the country's data protection agency, one of the EU's most proactive regulators, as part of a corruption probe (Reuters)

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Q&A with Netflix co-CEO Ted Sarandos about the $83B WBD bid, Trump's involvement in the deal, maintaining a 45-day theatrical window for WBD releases, and more (Nicole Sperling/New York Times)

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Cloudflare acquires AI data marketplace Human Native for an undisclosed sum, to help it develop a system where AI developers pay creators for training content (Davis Giangiulio/CNBC)

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Italy's competition watchdog opens two investigations into Microsoft's Activision Blizzard over sales practices the regulator calls "misleading and aggressive" (Reuters)

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TikTok says it will roll out new age detection tech, which analyzes profile information to predict whether a user is under 13, across Europe in the coming weeks (Supantha Mukherjee/Reuters)

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A profile of Wikipedia as it faces myriad challenges, including attacks from Elon Musk and the far right, reduced traffic due to AI, and a legal battle in India (Darren Loucaides/Financial Times)

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Sources: Chinese AI companies seek to rent compute in Southeast Asia and the Middle East for Nvidia Rubin access, as Zhipu and Alibaba warn of a widening US gap (Wall Street Journal)

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Australia's eSafety Commissioner reports social media platforms "removed access" to ~4.7M accounts under its ban for under-16s, which took effect in December (New York Times)

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SiFive says it will integrate Nvidia's NVLink Fusion with its RISC-V processor IP platforms, letting SiFive silicon communicate with Nvidia's and partner chips (Marco Chiappetta/Forbes)

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California regulators unanimously approved Verizon's nearly $10B Frontier acquisition; deliberations included Verizon committing to the state's DEI requirements (Matthew Keys/TheDesk.net)

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Meta says it will discontinue Workrooms, its VR space for workers, on February 16, and stop selling Quests and Horizon services to businesses from February 20 (Sean Hollister/The Verge)

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Sources: Trump and several state governors agree to direct grid operator PJM to hold an auction for tech companies to fund new power plants due to AI demand (Bloomberg)

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YouTube revises its policy to allow full monetization of nongraphic videos on sensitive issues, like abortion, self-harm, suicide, and domestic and sexual abuse (Sam Gutelle/Tubefilter)

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Sources: Thinking Machines lacks a clear product or business strategy and has been struggling over the last couple of months to raise a new round of financing (Alex Heath/Sources)

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Total global VC funding to fintech startups totaled $51.8B in 2025, up 27% YoY and above pre-pandemic totals, but much lower than 2021's peak of $141.6B (Mary Ann Azevedo/Crunchbase News)

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Ashley St. Clair, mother of one of Elon Musk's children, sues xAI, alleging Grok refused to stop making sexualized deepfakes of her, amid custody disputes (Peter Senzamici/New York Post)

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As Meta shifts resources away from its Supernatural VR fitness service, users mourn the loss of a community built around the platform and its coaches (Boone Ashworth/Wired)

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Google agrees to pay $8.25M to settle a class-action lawsuit alleging its AdMob SDK illegally collected data from children under age 13 (Suzanne Smalley/The Record)

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Source: at least two more Thinking Machines staffers are expected to join OpenAI soon; some researchers say they are exhausted by the industry's constant drama (Wired)

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Replit launches Mobile Apps on Replit, which enables vibe-coding of iOS apps with integrated Stripe monetization (CNBC)

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Sources: Replit is in advanced discussions to raise about $400M in a new round of funding that would roughly triple its valuation to $9B (Bloomberg)

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Mytra, which is building autonomous robots for warehouses that can move loads up to 3,000 pounds, raised a $120M Series C led by Avenir Growth (Allie Garfinkle/Fortune)

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Andrea Vallone, who left OpenAI in November as the head of its safety research team, joins Anthropic's alignment team (Hayden Field/The Verge)

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The US says Taiwanese companies will invest $250B+ in chip production in the US as part of a trade deal, with Taiwanese government guaranteeing $250B in credit (Kif Leswing/CNBC)

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Symbolic.ai, founded by ex-eBay CEO Devin Wenig and Ars Technica co-founder Jon Stokes, partners with News Corp to offer AI tools to WSJ, Barron's, and others (Ben Sherry/Inc)

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Equal1, which was spun out from University College Dublin, raised $60M to deploy its new quantum server for data centers, bringing its total funding to $85M (Ciara O'Brien/The Irish Times)

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Letter: a top House Republican warns severe DRAM and HBM3E supply shortages will constrain H200 export licenses; Nvidia says it "can serve all approved" orders (Maggie Eastland/Bloomberg)

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Google releases TranslateGemma, a suite of Gemma 3-based open translation models available in 4B-, 12B-, and 27B-parameter sizes, with support for 55 languages (The Keyword)

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X revises its developer API policies to "no longer allow apps that reward users for posting on X (aka 'infofi')", amid a backlash about increasing AI slop on X (André Beganski/Decrypt)

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Sources: Apple now needs to fight for TSMC production capacity amid the AI boom; Nvidia was likely TSMC's top customer in at least one or two quarters in 2025 (Tim Culpan/Culpium)

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OpenAI says it issued a request for proposals to US-based hardware manufacturers as it seeks to push into consumer devices, robotics, and cloud data centers (Bloomberg)

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Amazon files an objection to Saks Global's bankruptcy financing plan, and says its $475M investment in the department store is now effectively "worthless" (CNBC)

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Brain-computer interface startup Merge Labs, which Sam Altman co-founded, raised a $252M seed from OpenAI, Bain Capital, Gabe Newell, and others (Ike Swetlitz/Bloomberg)

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AI video startup Higgsfield raised an $80M Series A extension from Accel and others at a $1.3B+ valuation, and says it hit a $200M annualized revenue run rate (Krystal Hu/Reuters)

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Boston-based Tulip, which offers an AI-powered frontline operations platform used by 60K workers, raised a $120M Series D led by Mitsubishi at a $1.3B valuation (Forbes)

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Researchers detail WhisperPair, vulnerabilities in Google's Fast Pair protocol affecting 17 audio device models from 10 brands; Google rolled out updates (Wired)

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BlackRock raises $12.5B as part of its Microsoft partnership to bankroll data centers and energy infrastructure, bringing it closer to its $30B goal from 2024 (Silla Brush/Bloomberg)

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Bitmine, the largest corporate holder of ether, invests $200M in MrBeast's Beast Industries, set to close on January 19; Bitmine holds 4M+ ETH valued at ~$13.6B (Francisco Rodrigues/CoinDesk)

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India's Supreme Court rules Tiger Global's $1.6B Flipkart stake sale to Walmart in 2018 is subject to taxes, a ruling that will shape future cross-border deals (Reuters)

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