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Techmeme

Alibaba debuts Qwen3.5, a 397B-parameter open-weight multimodal AI model that it says is 60% cheaper to use and 8x better at large workloads than Qwen3 (Eduardo Baptista/Reuters)

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Analysis: US productivity rose by ~2.7% in 2025, nearly doubling the 1.4% annual average over a decade, as AI-exposed sectors cooled their entry-level hiring (Erik Brynjolfsson/Financial Times)

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OpenAI retired GPT-4o on February 13, angering loyal users, 20K+ of whom signed a petition; 4o showed the unique attachment that people can form with chatbots (Shirin Ghaffary/Bloomberg)

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ByteDance says it "respects IP rights and we have heard the concerns regarding Seedance" and it plans to "strengthen" safeguards, after Disney's legal threats (Osmond Chia/BBC)

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A look at the US tech industry's effort to influence Californian politics: fighting the 5% billionaire tax, super PACs, and seeking a new tech-friendly governor (Dara Kerr/The Guardian)

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A look at Anti Fund, a small VC firm cofounded by YouTuber Jake Paul that has gained access to hot rounds in startups like OpenAI, Anduril, Polymarket, and Ramp (Jake Angelo/Fortune)

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In a podcast, OpenClaw creator Peter Steinberger describes his phone calls with Mark Zuckerberg and Sam Altman, and says he had been contacted by "every big VC" (Marcus Schuler/Implicator.ai)

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Analysis: sports bets on Kalshi generate an estimated ~$1.3B in annualized revenue, underscoring the threat prediction markets pose to traditional operators (Financial Times)

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Sensor Tower: dating app downloads in Saudi Arabia have risen annually for five years, hitting 3.5M in 2025, as liberalization enables more casual relationships (Omar Abdel-Baqui/Wall Street Journal)

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Credit derivatives trading on specific tech companies continues to rise, amid concerns that they may be borrowing too much to fuel AI development (Bloomberg)

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Vitalik Buterin, who backed Polymarket, says he's "starting to worry" that prediction markets "seem to be over-converging to an unhealthy product market fit" (Zack Abrams/The Block)

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Sensor Tower: TikTok's US DAUs were ~95% of its usership the week of January 19, with metrics showing little sign of a mass exodus since its January 23 takeover (Matthew Chin/CNBC)

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Bengaluru-based C2i Semiconductors, building a "grid-to-GPU" power system for datacenters, raised a $15M Series A led by Peak XV, bringing total funding to $19M (Jagmeet Singh/TechCrunch)

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Following Disney, Paramount sent a cease-and-desist letter to ByteDance, alleging its AI-generated Seedance videos and Seedream images infringed Paramount's IP (Todd Spangler/Variety)

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Keir Starmer says no platform "should get a free pass", as the UK moves to tighten online safety laws covering AI chatbots and social media, to protect children (Mari Novik/Financial Times)

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India-based AI cloud startup Neysa plans to raise up to $600M in equity led by Blackstone, plus $600M in debt, to deploy 20K+ GPUs in India for AI training (Baiju Kalesh/Bloomberg)

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A look at a new generation of Chinese billionaire AI entrepreneurs who keep a low profile, with fortunes entwined with China's push for tech independence (Bloomberg)

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Researchers outline Iran's digital surveillance capabilities, integrated across communications and internet networks, and recently used to track down protesters (New York Times)

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Sam Altman says Peter Steinberger, creator of OpenClaw, is joining OpenAI "to drive the next generation of personal agents"; OpenClaw will remain open source (Sam Altman/@sama)

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OpenAI in Advanced Talks to Hire OpenClaw Founder, Others Connected to Agent Project (The Information)

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Sources: OpenAI is in advanced talks to hire OpenClaw founder Peter Steinberger and several team members; Steinberger would likely work on personal agents (Nick Wingfield/The Information)

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Analysis: DRAM and NAND memory prices have jumped 600%+ over the past year for routers and set-top boxes, hitting telcos targeting aggressive broadband rollouts (Counterpoint Research)

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Sam Altman says that India has 100M weekly active ChatGPT users, the app's second-largest userbase after the US, ahead of the AI Impact Summit (Jagmeet Singh/TechCrunch)

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Former NPR host David Greene sues Google for allegedly replicating his voice in NotebookLM without permission; Google says the voice is based on a paid actor (Will Oremus/Washington Post)

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Sources: the WH is pressuring Utah Republican State Rep. Doug Fiefia to abandon HB 286, an AI transparency and kids' safety bill similar to California's AI law (Maria Curi/Axios)

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Sources: Apple tweaked its Maps app for Tesla before the EV maker's planned addition of CarPlay; low-cost MacBook will get an aluminum chassis in playful colors (Mark Gurman/Bloomberg)

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Professor David J. Farber, whose work on academic experimental computer networks helped define the evolution of the early internet, died on February 7 at age 91 (Peter Wayner/New York Times)

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As AI and agents are adopted to accelerate development, cognitive load and cognitive debt are likely to become bigger threats to developers than technical debt (Margaret-Anne Storey)

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Western Digital said on its Q2 earnings call it had "pretty much sold out" its 2026 HDD capacity, and that the consumer sector accounted for 5% of total revenue (Muhammad Zuhair/Wccftech)

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Abhishek Singh, CEO of IndiaAI Mission, says India will seek international agreement on a "global AI commons" at this week's AI Impact Summit in New Delhi (Financial Times)

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Anthropic partners with CodePath to help redesign computer coding curricula at hundreds of US community and state colleges, integrating Claude AI tools (Wall Street Journal)

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Scale AI is suing the US DoD; Scale AI has several contracts with the department, and a spokesperson says the lawsuit "relates to a recent procurement decision" (Business Insider)

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Uber says it plans to launch Uber Eats in Austria and six other European countries in 2026, as it gains market share in the UK, Germany, France, and Spain (Financial Times)

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Airbnb says its custom-built AI agent now handles ~33% of its customer support issues in North America, and it is preparing to roll out the feature globally (Sarah Perez/TechCrunch)

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Amazon stock fell for the ninth straight day on Friday, its longest losing streak since 2006, opening at $244.98 on Feb. 3 and closing at $198.79 on Feb. 13 (Rani Molla/Sherwood News)

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Admin official: Pentagon may sever Anthropic relationship over AI safeguards; Anthropic says only mass surveillance and fully autonomous weapons are off limits (Axios)

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India approves a $1.1B state-backed VC fund to finance high-risk areas like AI and advanced manufacturing, doubling down on an effort that debuted in 2016 (Jagmeet Singh/TechCrunch)

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Analysis: despite investing $150B+ in 10+ years, China is expected to produce 2% of global AI chips in 2026 and 70x less memory storage than foreign chipmakers (Meaghan Tobin/New York Times)

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A deep dive into a global money-laundering ecosystem powered by crypto and messaging apps like WeChat and Telegram, used by drug cartels and criminal groups (Jessica Brice/Bloomberg)

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Current and former senior employees say AWS is undergoing a strategic shake-up amid fears it is losing ground to competitors in securing corporate AI contracts (Rafe Rosner-Uddin/Financial Times)

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ByteDance launches Doubao 2.0, an "agent era" upgrade of China's most widely used AI app capable of executing multi-step tasks, ahead of the Lunar New Year (Eduardo Baptista/Reuters)

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Dealroom and NATO Innovation Fund: European defense, security, and resilience startup funding rose 55% YoY to a record $8.7B in 2025, with AI accounting for 44% (Ingrid Lunden/Resilience Media)

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BNP Paribas analysis: Anthropic saw visits to its site jump 6.5% after its Super Bowl ad and DAUs jump 11% post-game, outperforming other AI companies (Samantha Subin/CNBC)

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Sources: TSMC plans to invest another $100B to build four more US fabs to ensure tariff-free chip sales; analysis: its Arizona site has land for four more fabs (Financial Times)

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India partners with Alibaba.com to help Indian startups and small businesses reach overseas buyers, highlighting its selective engagement with Chinese platforms (Jagmeet Singh/TechCrunch)

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Sources: OpenAI is charging $60 per 1,000 impressions for ads in ChatGPT, a high price similar to Netflix's rate when it introduced ads (Financial Times)

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SoftBank-owned Japanese payments app PayPay files for a US IPO, and reports a $675.47M profit on ~$1.82B revenue for the nine months ending December 31, 2025 (Arasu Kannagi Basil/Reuters)

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Sources: the US DHS recently sent hundreds of administrative subpoenas, which do not need a judge's approval, to tech firms to identify people critical of ICE (New York Times)

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A matplotlib maintainer explains how an AI agent that suggests code changes on open source repos wrote a hit piece on him after a rejection, and the aftermath (Scott Shambaugh/The Shamblog)

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Disney sent a cease-and-desist letter to ByteDance, claiming it infringed on Disney's works to train its Seedance 2.0 video generation model without pay (Sara Fischer/Axios)

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