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xAI rolls out Grok Imagine 1.0, which it says can generate 720p 10-second videos with better audio, and says Imagine generated 1.245B videos in the past 30 days (@xai)

Sources: SpaceX is in advanced talks to combine with xAI and they have informed some of their investors, as Elon Musk moves quickly to consolidate his empire (Bloomberg)

How food delivery is reshaping US mealtimes, as some users spend thousands; NRA data shows nearly 75% of 2024 restaurant orders were not eaten in a restaurant (Priya Krishna/New York Times)

Snap blocked 415K+ Australian accounts as of January to comply with the under-16 social media ban and warns its implementation has "real technical limitations" (Josh Taylor/The Guardian)

The US' high-speed internet rollout means drillers, linemen, and splicers pull in soaring pay nationwide amid a labor shortage for the physically demanding work (Patience Haggin/Wall Street Journal)

China's desire to lead in cutting-edge AI is rubbing against its aim to control it; Zhipu AI warned IPO investors about the burden of complying with 6+ AI rules (New York Times)

Seoul unveils Maeumi, an AI chatbot integrated into its suicide prevention hotline, offering immediate emotional support even before a human counselor connects (Choi Jeong-yoon/The Korea Herald)

A look at Polymarket's rise since the US DOJ dropped its probe: securing publisher deals and US licenses, insider trading concerns, and bet resolution disputes (Wall Street Journal)

Alibaba says it will spend ~$431M in a Lunar New Year campaign from February 6 to attract users to its Qwen AI app, above Tencent's ~$143.7M and Baidu's ~$71.8M (Reuters)

Taiwan hits a 21.06% weight in the MSCI Emerging Markets Index, surpassing China's 20.93%, the first time since July 2007, boosted by AI-linked local companies (Abhishek Vishnoi/Bloomberg)

SEC complaint: a whistleblower alleges Google broke its ethics rules in 2024 to help an Israeli military contractor use AI to analyze drone surveillance video (Gerrit De Vynck/Washington Post)

Sources: a KKR-led consortium is nearing a deal to buy Singapore-based ST Telemedia Global Data Centers for $10B+, as Asia sees a data center investment frenzy (P.R. Venkat/Wall Street Journal)

OpenSourceMalware: 230+ malicious OpenClaw extensions, posing as crypto trading automation tools to steal user info, were uploaded to ClawHub since January 27 (Luke James/Tom's Hardware)

A look at DestinE, an EU-funded project to create Earth's digital twin using AI that has produced climate models with far higher resolution than current models (Clive Cookson/Financial Times)

AI conferences have rushed to restrict the use of LLMs for writing and reviewing research papers in recent months after being flooded with AI-generated slop (Melissa Heikkilä/Financial Times)

Q&A with D‑Wave CEO Alan Baratz on the Quantum Circuits acquisition, error-correcting quantum systems, its Davidson and Anduril defense collaboration, and more (Luke Kawa/Sherwood News)

French IT company Capgemini plans to sell its US subsidiary Capgemini Government Solutions, whose contract with the US ICE drew scrutiny from French lawmakers (Sybille de La Hamaide/Reuters)

Anthropic researchers detail "disempowerment patterns" in AI assistant interactions where AI potentially distorts a user's reality, beliefs, or actions (Kyle Orland/Ars Technica)

TikTok US says it has resolved technical issues caused by an Oracle data center outage; core features such as video view counts were impacted over the past week (Alex Weprin/The Hollywood Reporter)

Apple, long dominant in the electronics supply chain, is starting to be outbid by AI companies for components like memory, as suppliers gain leverage over Apple (Wall Street Journal)

Oracle says it plans to raise $45B to $50B in 2026 to build additional capacity for its cloud infrastructure through a combination of debt and equity sales (Vincent Lee/Bloomberg)

SpaceX and Tesla are feeling the gravitational pull toward xAI, as Elon Musk looks to use his empire to fund xAI's ravenous appetite for cash and compute (Bloomberg)

A survey of 100 companies in the Global 2000 on AI use: 78% of CIOs use OpenAI models in production, above Anthropic's 44%, but Anthropic's gains are impressive (a16z)

Researchers detail how AI tools for generating deepfakes proliferated on Civitai before it banned them in 2025; many tools submitted before the ban remain live (James O'Donnell/MIT Technology Review)

India proposes zero taxes for foreign cloud providers through 2047 on services sold outside the country as long as they run workloads from Indian data centers (Jagmeet Singh/TechCrunch)

Indonesia lifts its ban on Grok after receiving a letter from X "outlining concrete steps" to prevent misuse; Indonesia was the first country to ban Grok (Jin Yu Young/New York Times)

Sources: Apple execs question if it has the ingredients to win in AI-first era, new MacBook Pros are about to launch, Apple considers clamshell foldable iPhone (Mark Gurman/Bloomberg)

India to exempt foreign companies from being taxed when providing equipment to their contract manufacturers in the country, a rule change Apple lobbied for (Reuters)

Inside Physical Intelligence, a startup co-founded by Stripe veteran Lachy Groom that is building general-purpose robotics foundation models and has raised $1B+ (Connie Loizos/TechCrunch)

A look at iOS 26's call-screening feature: some see it as an executive assistant that filters unwanted calls and some complain it makes people hard to reach (Andrew Zucker/Wall Street Journal)

Chinese government funding is backing traditional Chinese medicine providers to adopt AI for drug discovery, clinical diagnostics, acupuncture robots, and more (Nicole Fan/Rest of World)

A look at China's "genius class" system, which picks ~100K gifted teens annually for elite science-focused schooling; its alumni span ByteDance, PDD, and more (Zijing Wu/Financial Times)

Anthropic positions itself as the AI sector's superego, but it's caught between the pressures to be safe, fast, and rigorous while being commercially successful (Matteo Wong/The Atlantic)

Sources: Alibaba has delivered more than 100K units of the Zhenwu 810E, an ASIC for AI training and inference, surpassing those of its domestic rival Cambricon (Ann Cao/South China Morning Post)

A researcher says an exposed Moltbook database could have let anyone take control of the site's AI agents and post anything; the database has since been secured (Matthew Gault/404 Media)

OpenAI says it is asking select advertisers to commit $200K+ as it rolls out beta ads on ChatGPT; two sources say their companies were pitched lower amounts (Trishla Ostwal/Adweek)

Amazon asks the FCC for a 2-year extension until July 30, 2028, to deploy half of the 3,232 satellites for its Leo internet system, citing a rocket shortage (Alan Boyle/GeekWire)

Filing: Chinese AI chip designer Cambricon reports a $316M net profit in 2025, its first profitable year; rivals Moore Threads and MetaX narrowed their losses (Coco Feng/South China Morning Post)

Documents and sources: Abu Dhabi's Sheikh Tahnoon bin Zayed Al Nahyan backed a $500M investment for a 49% stake in WLF, four days before Trump's inauguration (Wall Street Journal)

Denver-based Northslope, which builds customized AI applications for Palantir OS, raised a $22M Series A led by Friends & Family Capital and Goldcrest Capital (Natalie Breymeyer/Axios)

Nomura: total returns for software debt in collateralized loan obligations have been lower than all other sectors in 2026, amid fears about AI's impact on SaaS (Bloomberg)

An interview with Nvidia's senior VP of hardware engineering, Andrew Bell, on continuing to provide Shield Android TV software updates a decade after its launch (Ryan Whitwam/Ars Technica)

Sources: Waymo nears a $16B round, valuing it at $110B; Alphabet will contribute $12B+, with a16z, Dragoneer, Mubadala, Sequoia, and DST Global participating (Financial Times)

Bitcoin has fallen to ~$78K, down ~7% in 24 hours, over 12% in the past week, and down ~37% since its ATH in Oct. 2025; Ethereum dropped ~18% in the past week (Bloomberg)

How the music industry is split over AI; some labels signed licensing deals for AI that mirror revenue splits they use with YouTube for user-generated content (Anna Nicolaou/Financial Times)

Filing: SpaceX is seeking FCC approval to launch 1M satellites into space; SpaceX claims the fleet will orbit the Earth and use the sun to power AI data centers (Reuters)

Miami-based Indigo, which uses AI-powered underwriting tech to provide medical liability insurance to physicians, raised a $50M Series B led by Rubicon Founders (Brock E.W. Turner/Axios)

Jensen Huang says Nvidia's OpenAI investment will be "the largest investment we've ever made", after a report said plans to invest $100B in OpenAI stalled (Debby Wu/Bloomberg)

Q&A with AMD CTO Mark Papermaster, who says AMD is the first customer for TSMC's 2nm process, on AMD's rise since he joined in 2011, AI in chip design, and more (Dr. Ian Cutress/More Than Moore)

Global Energy Monitor: over 97 GW of gas-fired power in the US pipeline were explicitly earmarked for data centers in 2025, compared with just 4 GW in 2024 (Molly Taft/Wired)