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xAI engineer Sulaiman Ghori says he has "left" the company days after appearing on a podcast last week claiming that xAI had been skirting regulations and more (AJ Dellinger/Gizmodo)

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Marketing tech startup Applecart raised $100M in a minority funding round led by Blackstone's growth equity business, a source says at a ~$700M valuation (Myles Miller/Bloomberg)

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X unveils Bluesky-like "Starterpacks" to help users find accounts that match their interests, curated by X and rolling out in the coming weeks (Sarah Perez/TechCrunch)

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Layoffs hit Vimeo for the second time since September 2025, when it laid off 10% of its workforce; Bending Spoons acquired Vimeo for around $1.38B in November (Business Insider)

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Sources: Sam Altman has been meeting with top investors in the Middle East, looking to raise at least $50B for OpenAI at a valuation of about $750B to $830B (Bloomberg)

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Memo: Barret Zoph, the Thinking Machines Lab cofounder who rejoined OpenAI last week, will lead OpenAI's enterprise push, as part of a broader reorganization (The Information)

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Unsealed docs: Spotify and labels sued Anna's Archive over plans to release scraped Spotify data; a US court grants a temporary order taking down some domains (Ernesto Van der Sar/TorrentFreak)

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Blue Origin unveils TeraWave, a satellite communications network for enterprise, data center, and government customers, and plans to begin deployment in Q4 2027 (Annie Palmer/CNBC)

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Neynar, a startup focused on decentralized social media infrastructure, is acquiring Ethereum-based social media project Farcaster from R&D firm Merkle (Daniel Kuhn/The Block)

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Sources: AI chip startup SambaNova is seeking to raise $300M to $500M after talks to sell the company to Intel for about $1.6B, including debt, stalled (Bloomberg)

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Sources: Apple is developing an AirTag-sized AI wearable pin with cameras, a speaker, microphones, and wireless charging that could be released as early as 2027 (The Information)

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Sources: Apple plans to revamp Siri this fall in iOS 27 and macOS 27 by turning it into the company's first AI chatbot, replacing the current Siri interface (Mark Gurman/Bloomberg)

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A Canadian federal court overturned a 2024 order that would have shuttered TikTok Canada's business operations over national security concerns (Mickey Djuric/Politico)

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Sources: Anthropic's revenue run rate hit $9B+ at the end of 2025, up from $4B in July 2025; Iconiq, Lightspeed, and Menlo are set to join its new funding round (Bloomberg)

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ElevenLabs launches an album of original tracks made by artists like Liza Minnelli and Art Garfunkel in "collaboration" with its Eleven Music AI model (Todd Spangler/Variety)

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Ubisoft cancels six games and delays others amid a restructuring into five genre-specific "creative houses"; it expects net bookings of ~€1.5B for FY 2025-2026 (Benoit Berthelot/Bloomberg)

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Anthropic overhauls Claude's "constitution" to enable the AI model to generalize and apply broad principles rather than mechanically follow specific rules (Beatrice Nolan/Fortune)

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Meta plans to expand ads on Threads to all users globally starting next week; Threads began testing ads in the US and Japan a year ago (Sarah Perez/TechCrunch)

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Sony launches the $230 LinkBuds Clip, open-style earbuds that sit outside the ear canal, with IPX4 water resistance and a 9-hour battery life, available now (Chris Welch/Bloomberg)

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AheadComputing, which develops a breakthrough RISC-V CPU architecture for AI, raised a $30M Seed2 led by Eclipse, Toyota, and Cambium, for $53M in total funding (Kyt Dotson/SiliconANGLE)

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Adobe updates Acrobat to add new AI features, including presentation generation, file editing, and creating podcast summaries from docs stored in Adobe Spaces (Ivan Mehta/TechCrunch)

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Upscale AI, which is building AI networking infrastructure to take on Cisco, raised $200M led by Tiger, Premji Invest, and Xora Innovation at a $1B+ valuation (Dina Bass/Bloomberg)

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Sources: Elon Musk is pushing for a SpaceX IPO by July, seems eager to beat OpenAI and Anthropic to market, and views it as a way to help xAI catch its rivals (Wall Street Journal)

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YouTube CEO Neal Mohan says creators will be able to generate Shorts using their AI likenesses later in 2026, and touts AI tools for making games and music (Jay Peters/The Verge)

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YouTube CEO Neal Mohan publishes his annual letter, saying YouTube aims to reduce "AI slop" and has strengthened parental controls, and teases Shorts updates (Alex Weprin/The Hollywood Reporter)

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European VC funding rose 9% YoY to hit $58B in 2025, vs. North America's 46% YoY jump; AI led with ~$17.5B, followed by biotech's ~$13.4B and hardware's ~$10.8B (Gené Teare/Crunchbase News)

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Jensen Huang says that AI is already bringing economic benefits and needs more investment, and "the AI bubble comes about because the investments are large" (Mauro Orru/Wall Street Journal)

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OpenEvidence, which is building "ChatGPT for doctors", raised $250M led by Thrive and DST at a $12B valuation, up from $6B in October and $1B in February 2025 (Kate Rooney/CNBC)

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Salt Lake City-based Zanskar, which uses AI to find overlooked geothermal fields to boost US electricity supply, raised $115M, taking its total funding to $180M (Benoît Morenne/Wall Street Journal)

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Sensor Tower: consumers spent $85B on apps globally in 2025, up 21% YoY, and, in a first, more money went on non-game mobile apps than on games, driven by GenAI (Sarah Perez/TechCrunch)

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The BBC confirms a "strategic partnership" with YouTube to produce exclusive content, including news and YouTube channels aimed at children and young adults (Alex Ritman/Variety)

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Ukrainian-founded language learning marketplace Preply raised a $150M Series D led by WestCap at a $1.2B valuation; the startup has a 150-person office in Kyiv (Anna Heim/TechCrunch)

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Lightning AI merges with data center operator Voltage Park to create an "AI cloud" with a $2.5B valuation, managing 35,000+ Nvidia GPUs across six data centers (Iain Martin/Forbes)

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Meta CTO Andrew Bosworth: Superintelligence Labs delivered its first high-profile AI models internally in January, after just six months, which are "very good" (Jeffrey Dastin/Reuters)

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Israeli startup DataRails, which offers financial planning and analytics tools, raised a $70M Series C led by One Peak at an estimated $600M to $700M valuation (Globes)

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Chinese AI startup Zhipu says it is limiting GLM Coding Plan access after strong demand, taking only 20% of its current daily new subscriptions from January 23 (Bloomberg)

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GlobalWafers Chair Doris Hsu says the Taiwanese silicon wafer maker is preparing for phase two of its Texas plant, after unveiling plans to invest an extra $4B (Wen-Yee Lee/Reuters)

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Berlin-based Cloover, which makes software to help install solar, home batteries, and heat pumps, raised $22M from Lowercarbon and others and $1.2B in debt (Coco Liu/Bloomberg)

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How Ukraine and Russia both rely on the same Chinese drone suppliers, whose tech is vital to the war; China officially bans sensitive drone tech exports to both (Financial Times)

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US colleges like Virginia Tech and Georgia Tech are using AI to streamline admissions; Virginia Tech says AI that scores essay questions saved ~8,000 hours (Francesca Maglione/Bloomberg)

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Sources: OpenAI begins offering its chatbot ads to dozens of advertisers, initially charging per ad view, not per ad click, and asks them for <$1M commitments (The Information)

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As Taiwanese chipmakers push localization to secure supply chains, suppliers to the steel, plastics, and display industries are moving into Taiwan's chip sector (Cheng Ting-Fang/Nikkei Asia)

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A programmer estimates his typical day of coding with Claude Code is equivalent to running the dishwasher an extra time, much more energy than a "median query" (Simon P. Couch)

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Galaxy Digital plans to launch a hedge fund in Q1 2026 investing up to 30% in crypto tokens and the rest in financial stocks; sources say it has raised $100M (Nikou Asgari/Financial Times)

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Bengaluru-based Amagi, an ad tools provider for broadcast and streaming TV, fell below its listing price in its India market debut after raising $196M in an IPO (Jagmeet Singh/TechCrunch)

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Thoma Bravo co-founder Orlando Bravo says the slump in software company valuations over threat of AI-driven disruption is creating a "huge buying opportunity" (Financial Times)

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Payments using facial recognition are growing in South Korea as the tech improves; South Korean fintech app Toss has scaled its "Facepay" service to 1M+ users (Nami Matsuura/Nikkei Asia)

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The Gates Foundation and OpenAI plan to invest $50M to use AI to ease the impact of chronic staff shortages in 1,000 primary health clinics in Africa by 2028 (Financial Times)

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Apple wins dismissal of parts of a class action alleging it violated CA privacy law by collecting user data from its apps despite users believing they opted out (Isaiah Poritz/Bloomberg Law)

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Signal's Meredith Whittaker says deeper integration of AI agents into devices is "perilous" for encryption, since agents need access to lots of data across apps (Shona Ghosh/Bloomberg)

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