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Techmeme

Q&A with Google Chief AI Scientist Jeff Dean about the evolution of Google Search, TPUs, coding agents, balancing model efficiency and performance, and more (Latent.Space)

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Sources: SpaceX and xAI are competing in a $100M DoD contest to make voice-controlled, autonomous drone swarms; OpenAI is helping Applied Intuition's submission (Katrina Manson/Bloomberg)

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Apple says it will bring "advanced video capabilities" to Apple Podcasts this spring, including allowing users to switch between watching and listening to shows (Todd Spangler/Variety)

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Internal email: the European Parliament has blocked AI features on the work devices of lawmakers and their staff over cybersecurity and data protection concerns (Politico)

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Crypto lender Nexo says it is relaunching in the US in partnership with Bakkt, three years after leaving the US and paying a $45M fine to settle SEC charges (Elizabeth Howcroft/Reuters)

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As India hosts its AI Impact Summit in New Delhi this week, the country is promoting its approach of developing cheaper AI tools aimed at solving local problems (Tripti Lahiri/Wall Street Journal)

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A look at the fall of Indian edtech startup Byju's, leading to US court sanctions, as lenders accuse founder Byju Raveendran of siphoning $533M of a $1.2B loan (Financial Times)

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A senior official says Pentagon is "close" to designating Anthropic a "supply chain risk", requiring all US military contractors to sever ties with the company (Axios)

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Apple sends invites for a "special Apple Experience" event on March 4 in New York City; rumors suggest an M5 MacBook Pro, entry-level iPad Air, and iPhone 17e (Hartley Charlton/MacRumors)

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Data analytics company Fractal, which became India's first AI unicorn in 2022, raised $313M in its Mumbai IPO; its shares fell 5% amid a weak Indian IPO market (Rajesh Mascarenhas/Bloomberg)

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Samsung releases an ad for the Galaxy S26 series that briefly shows a "Zero-peeking privacy" toggle to black out on-screen content for onlookers at an angle (Dominic Preston/The Verge)

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Anthropic opens a Bengaluru office, its second in Asia, says its India run-rate revenue doubled since October, and curates training data for 10 Indic languages (Anthropic)

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Sources: Sony is considering pushing back the debut of its next PlayStation console to 2028 or even 2029, as the AI boom fuels huge memory chip demand (Bloomberg)

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London lawsuit: Getir co-founders Nazim Salur and Serkan Borançılı sue Abu Dhabi's Mubadala for $700M, alleging a "significant loss" in breaking up Getir assets (Suzi Ring/Financial Times)

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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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