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Researchers at OpenAI, Anthropic, and others are studying LLMs like living things, not just software, to uncover some of their secrets for the first time (Will Douglas Heaven/MIT Technology Review)

A look at WhatsApp's enormous global reach and influence, and how the messaging app became the dominant platform for everyday conversation worldwide (Sam Knight/New Yorker)

Microsoft warns Chinese companies, especially DeepSeek, are winning AI adoption outside the West, gaining significant market share in the Global South (Cristina Criddle/Financial Times)

The NYC token, launched by ex-New York City Mayor Eric Adams on January 12, saw its market cap drop from ~$600M to ~$100M after suspicious liquidity activity (Decrypt)

Sources: Balderton cashed out ~$2B of its Revolut stake in the past year, turning an early £1M bet into a historic European VC win; its fifth fund returned 25x (Financial Times)

Chinese chipmaker GigaDevice rose 54% in its Hong Kong debut after raising ~$600M in its IPO, and reported H1 2025 profit of ~$84M, up 14% from H2 2024 (Bloomberg)

Nvidia denies that it asked Chinese customers to pay upfront for H200 chips, saying it "would never require customers to pay for products they do not receive" (Reuters)

A late-2025 amendment to California's wealth tax proposal treats founder control as ownership, a move that could end founder-controlled startups in the state (Mike Solana/Pirate Wires)

SK Hynix will invest ~$12.9B to build an advanced chip packaging plant in South Korea to meet rising memory chip demand, targeting completion by the end of 2027 (Reuters)

Trump says Microsoft will "ensure" Americans don't face higher bills due to data centers' power use and Big Tech must "pay their own way" for their data centers (Business Insider)

Personal finance app Betterment says an individual accessed third-party systems to send fake crypto scam notification and believes the person accessed user info (Emily Mason/Bloomberg)

Claude Cowork hands-on: looks well positioned to bring the powerful capabilities of Claude Code to a wider audience, but the risks of prompt injections remain (Simon Willison/Simon Willison's Weblog)

Bakkt agrees to acquire Distributed Technologies Research, the stablecoin infrastructure company founded by Bakkt CEO Akshay Naheta; BKKT closed up 18.69% (Daniel Kuhn/The Block)

OpenAI acquires Torch, a one-year-old AI health care app that aggregates and analyzes medical records; a source says OpenAI is paying about $100M in equity (Laura Mandaro/The Information)

Elon Musk says Apple and Google's Gemini deal "seems like an unreasonable concentration of power for Google given that [they] also have Android and Chrome" (Joe Rossignol/MacRumors)

Sources: Meta plans to lay off ~10% of its 15,000-person Reality Labs division, disproportionately affecting those working on VR headsets and Horizon Worlds (New York Times)

Anthropic launches Cowork for Claude, built on Claude Code to automate complex tasks with minimal prompting, as a research preview for Claude Max subscribers (Webb Wright/ZDNET)

Italy's antitrust authority says it reduced the record fine imposed on Amazon in 2021, from €1.13B to €752M, after a recalculation (Elvira Pollina/Reuters)

Mark Zuckerberg says Meta is establishing a new "top-level" initiative called Meta Compute to build "tens of gigawatts" of AI infrastructure during this decade (Sara Fischer/Axios)

The UK plans to bring into force a law this week that will make it illegal to create non-consensual intimate images, as Ofcom investigates X (Laura Cress/BBC)

Sources: the US nears a trade deal with Taiwan that would reduce tariffs on the island's exports and include a commitment from TSMC to build 5+ fabs in Arizona (New York Times)

Google says Gemini will help power not only a more personalized version of Siri, but also future Apple Intelligence features (Joe Rossignol/MacRumors)

World Liberty Financial launches World Liberty Markets, letting users lend and borrow digital assets among one another, supporting its own token USD1 and others (Olga Kharif/Bloomberg)

Document: Meta said last week that it would exclude Italy from its ban on rival AI chatbots on WhatsApp, after an order from the country's antitrust authority (Foo Yun Chee/Reuters)

Alphabet hits a $4T market cap, becoming the fourth Big Tech company to reach the milestone, after its stock has risen 6%+ in the past month (Financial Times)

Researchers from Nvidia, Microsoft, and others develop AI models, trained on 1M+ species' data, to generate potential new gene editing and drug therapies (Financial Times)

Apple signs a multiyear Google deal to use Gemini and Google Cloud to power Siri's features in 2026, saying Google's tech "provides the most capable foundation" (Samantha Subin/CNBC)

Nvidia and Eli Lilly say they will invest $1B over five years in a new Silicon Valley-based AI drug lab, aiming to speed up the pharmaceutical industry's AI use (Bloomberg)

A viral Chinese app called "Are You Dead?" that asks users living alone to "check in" with a button press becomes the top paid app in Apple's App Store in China (Financial Times)

Crypto custody startup BitGo aims to raise up to $201M in its IPO on the NYSE at an up to $1.96B valuation, selling 11.8M shares priced between $15 and $17 each (Prakhar Srivastava/Reuters)

Eddy Cue says 2025 was a "record-breaking year" for Apple services: December was a monthly TV engagement record, the App Store has 850M+ weekly users, and more (Alex Weprin/The Hollywood Reporter)

Michael Saylor's Strategy bought 13,627 bitcoin for ~$1.25B between January 5 and 11, taking its total holdings to 687,410, and boosts its USD reserve to $2.25B (James Hunt/The Block)

Meta appoints Dina Powell McCormick, a prominent banking executive and former Republican official, as president and vice chair, reporting to Mark Zuckerberg (Sara Fischer/Axios)

Ampere Analysis expects streaming services' content spend to grow 6% in 2026 to $101B, crossing $100B for the first time, and overall content spend to grow 2% (Max Goldbart/Deadline)

Ofcom opens an investigation under the OSA into Grok over the sexualized deepfakes of women and kids being generated on X and threatens X with a ban or a fine (Financial Times)

Global smartphone shipments rose 2% YoY in 2025; Apple led with 20% market share and 10% YoY growth, followed by Samsung's 19% market share and 5% YoY growth (Counterpoint Research)

Paris-based autonomous drone maker Harmattan AI raised a $200M Series B led by Dassault at a $1.4B valuation, and aims to produce 10K drones per month in 2026 (Mark Bergen/Bloomberg)

Sources and filings: Peter Thiel donated $3M to a group to beat California's wealth tax proposal, the first of several expected tech leader donations in 2026 (New York Times)

Meta says it shut down nearly 550K accounts in Australia to comply with its under-16 social media ban, including 330,639 Instagram and 173,497 Facebook accounts (Nasteho Said/Bloomberg)

CES 2026 report: AI, autonomy, and robotic products are still finding their way, country-level booths are growing, Nvidia underpinned much of the show, and more (Steven Sinofsky/Hardcore Software)

A look at claims from Google, HSBC, and others about quantum computing breakthroughs over the past few months that helped boost quantum computing stocks in 2025 (Richard Waters/Financial Times)

Investigation: Google removed AI Overviews for two liver health queries after experts warned about inaccuracy, but slight tweaks still trigger AI responses (Andrew Gregory/The Guardian)

CES 2026: how some companies are trying to make their AI products cute and relatable, from Lenovo's chatty motorized laptop to Sharp's ChatGPT-powered Poketomo (Chris Velazco/Washington Post)

President Trump says "we may speak to Elon" about using Starlink to restore the internet in Iran, which has blocked the internet since January 8 amid protests (Rachael Levy/Reuters)

A profile of China's CXMT, whose $4.2B IPO goal would rank among the century's biggest chip debuts, as the memory chip maker faces US and South Korean curbs (Wall Street Journal)

Chinese AI executives say China is unlikely to eclipse the US in the AI race anytime soon, citing limited resources and US chip export curbs as key constraints (Bloomberg)

Naver, the largest South Korean buyer of Nvidia chips, is pitching its AI cloud services as an alternative for countries reluctant to use US or Chinese services (Song Jung-a/Financial Times)

Despite projections of memory shortages for PCs and phones, producers like Micron will proceed cautiously in adding new capacity, mindful of past downcycles (Dan Gallagher/Wall Street Journal)

Qatar and the UAE plan to join the Pax Silica coalition on January 12 and 15, respectively, expanding the US-led effort to secure AI and chip supply chains (Jarrett Renshaw/Reuters)

A profile of SpaceX President Gwynne Shotwell, who has worked at the company since 2002 and is known as a customer emissary and Elon Musk translator (Micah Maidenberg/Wall Street Journal)