Andrej Karpathy / @karpathy: AI coding agents made a huge leap forward since December, completing complex projects with minimal oversight, meaning “programming is becoming unrecognizable” — It is hard to communicate how much programming has changed due to AI in the last 2 months: not gradually and over time in the …
Miles Kruppa / The Information: Nvidia discloses $3.5B in guarantees to companies leasing land, power, and data center facilities, up 4x on Q3; the move may help firms without credit ratings — Nvidia said it has provided $3.5 billion in guarantees to companies leasing land, power and data center facilities, four times the amount it disclosed the previous quarter.
Andrej Karpathy / @karpathy: NanoClaw and other “claws”, smaller OpenClaw-like systems that can run on personal hardware, form a new layer running on top of agents that run on LLMs — Bought a new Mac mini to properly tinker with claws over the weekend. The apple store person told me they are selling like hotcakes and everyone is confused :) I'm definitely a bit sus'd to run OpenClaw specifically - giving my private data/keys to 400K lines of vibe coded
Krystal Hu / Reuters: Temporal, which builds open-source software to ensure “durable execution” of code, raised a $300M Series D at a $5B valuation, up from $2.5B in October 2025 — Software startup Temporal has raised $300 million in a funding round led by Andreessen Horowitz, valuing the company at $5 billion …
Nicolas Bustamante / @nicbstme: How LLMs are dismantling the moats that made vertical SaaS defensible, and why the market selloff is structurally justified but temporally exaggerated — In the past few weeks, nearly $1 trillion was wiped from software and services stocks. FactSet dropped from a $20B peak to under $8B.
Juro Osawa / The Information: Alibaba says Qwen generated 120M+ in orders from Chinese users over the past six days, ahead of the Lunar New Year; Alibaba is giving a ~$3.60 shopping voucher — Alibaba Group said its Qwen chatbot app's AI e-commerce service has generated more than 120 million orders from Chinese consumers …
Theo Wayt / The Information: xAI all-hands: Nikita Bier says X hit $1B in ARR from selling $3- to $40-per-month subscriptions, but offered no details on ad revenue or other xAI financials — X recently hit $1 billion in annualized recurring revenue from selling subscriptions, head of product Nikita Bier said in an xAI all-hands meeting on Tuesday.
Juro Osawa / The Information: xAI co-founder Tony Wu says he “resigned”, following co-founder Igor Babuschkin's exit in August 2025; Wu was in charge of reasoning and reported to Elon Musk — Tony Wu, one of xAI's cofounders, said he has resigned from Elon Musk's AI company.
Ingrid Lunden / Resilience Media: Munich-based Constellr, which builds thermal satellite imaging hardware and software, raised a €37M Series A, taking its total funding to €75M — Munich startup says defence and government interest ‘exploded’ its sales pipeline — Thermal imaging is a hot area right now in satellite tech …
Juro Osawa / The Information: ByteDance releases Seedance 2.0, an update to its AI video generation model that can make multi-shot scenes, available to select Jimeng and Jianying users — ByteDance's new AI video generation model Seedance 2.0, unveiled over the weekend, is generating a lot of buzz on social media, with some calling it a game changer.
Simon Willison / Simon Willison's Weblog: Anthropic rolls out a fast mode for Claude Opus 4.6 in research preview, saying it offers the same model quality 2.5 times faster but costs six times more — Claude: Speed up responses with fast mode. New “research preview” from Anthropic today: you can now access a faster version …
Eric Jang / Evjang.com: A look at the state of AI agents, the evolution of thinking models, the staggering need for inference compute in the coming years, automated research, and more — — Dr. Vannevar Bush, As We May Think, 1945 — If we consider life to be a sort of open-ended MMO, the game server has just received a major update.
Steven Sinofsky / @stevesi: Wall Street's idea that a software pure play will “vanish” into an LLM is “nonsense”: we need more software, and AI-enabled software moves up the product stack — Too much of what is going on is a race to get to a theoretical end state of a whole new world of business and technology.
@xai: 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 — Introducing Grok Imagine 1.0, our biggest leap yet. 1.0 unlocks 10-second videos, 720p resolution, and dramatically better audio. Imagine has generated 1.245 billion videos in the last 30 days alone. Try it now: https://grok.com/imagine [video]
Andrej Karpathy / @karpathy: Even though Moltbook has security risks and a lot of spam, the scale of nearly 150,000 autonomous AI agents interacting with each other is unprecedented — I'm being accused of overhyping the [site everyone heard too much about today already]. People's reactions varied very widely, from “how is this interesting at all” all the way to “it's so over”. To add a few words beyond just memes in jest - obviously when you take a look at
Charlotte Van Campenhout / Reuters: The Netherlands' consumer protection regulator launches an investigation into Roblox under the DSA over potential risks to underage users in the EU — The Netherlands' consumer protection regulator ACM has launched an investigation into U.S. gaming platform Roblox (RBLX.N) …
Reuters: Filing: Chinese AI chipmaker Axera, which focuses on AI inference SoCs for on-device and edge computing, aims to raise up to ~$379.2M in a Hong Kong IPO — Chinese artificial intelligence chipmaker Axera Semiconductor is aiming to raise HK$2.96 billion ($379.2 million) …
Casey Newton / Platformer: A critique of a large UK social media study that suggested measures like social media bans are unlikely to have an effect on teens' long term mental health — The “moral panic” framing misses how platforms actually harm kids. PLUS: Newsom investigates TikTok over Trump, and the Clawdbot frenzy
Kimi: Moonshot says Kimi K2.5 builds on K2 with “pretraining over ~15T mixed visual and text tokens” and “can self-direct an agent swarm with up to 100 sub-agents” — Today, we are introducing Kimi K2.5, the most powerful open-source model to date.
Barbara Moens / Financial Times: The EU opens a formal DSA investigation into xAI over Grok generating sexualized images of women and children; xAI faces fines of up to 6% of global revenue — European regulators begin investigation into creation and spread of sexualised images of women and children
The Information: Google acquires Common Sense Machines, whose AI models create 3D assets from 2D images, and was last valued at $15M after raising $10M from a16z and others — Google has acquired Common Sense Machines, a Cambridge, Mass.,-based startup developing generative artificial intelligence models …
Jim Secreto / Financial Times: The US' TikTok deal is a win for ByteDance: it will keep and license the algorithm instead of selling it, and continue to run TikTok's commercial activities — Washington's compromise has stabilised one of Beijing's most important technology companies
Ben Thompson / Stratechery: Q&A with Netflix co-CEO Greg Peters on Netflix's stock roller coaster, viewer engagement, ads, the WBD acquisition, regulation, competition, Hollywood, and more — This week's Stratechery Interview is with Netflix co-CEO Greg Peters. Peters became co-CEO of Netflix in 2023 …
Counterpoint Research: Chinese smartphone shipments fell 1.6% YoY in Q4 2025 and 0.6% YoY for 2025 due to weak demand, rising prices, and memory shortages; iPhone shipments rose 28% — Type: — Insight — Team Counterpoint — Counterpoint research is a young and fast growing research firm covering analysis of the tech industry.
Palmer Luckey / @palmerluckey: Meta's VR layoffs may help the industry long term, as most affected roles focused on first-party content and games that competed with the broader ecosystem — I have an opinion on the Meta layoffs that is contrary with most of the VR industry and much of the media, but strongly held. This is not a disaster. They still employ the largest team working on VR by about an order of magnitude. Nobody else is even close. The “Meta is
Juro Osawa / The Information: The US House passes a bipartisan bill to expand US export controls to restrict Chinese companies' remote access to US AI chips from data centers outside China — The House of Representatives on Monday passed a bipartisan bill that expands U.S. export controls to restrict Chinese companies' ability …
Counterpoint Research: Global smartphone shipments rose 2% YoY in 2025, with Apple capturing the top position at a 20% share and 10% YoY growth, ahead of Samsung's 19% market share — - Global smartphone shipments grew 2% YoY in 2025, driven by increasing premium demand and improving momentum in key emerging markets.
Reuters: US PE firm Haveli Investments agrees to acquire a majority stake in business contract software company Sirion; a source says the deal values Sirion at about $1B — U.S. private equity firm Haveli Investments has agreed to make a majority investment in Sirion, which provides software …
Reuters: Singapore-based data center operator DayOne raised a $2B Series C led by Coatue to build hyperscale campuses in Lahti and Kouvola, Finland, and elsewhere — DayOne Data Centers has entered into definitive agreements for over $2.0 billion in its series C equity financing …
Satya Nadella / sn scratchpad: Satya Nadella says the tech industry needs to move past “slop vs sophistication” arguments and view AI as a “cognitive amplifier”, not a human substitute — As I reflect on the past year and look toward the one ahead, there's no question 2026 will be a pivotal year for AI.
Sneha Kumar / Reuters: Filing: Chinese chip designer OmniVision Integrated Circuits seeks to raise up to ~$617M in a Hong Kong IPO; HKEX: Hong Kong IPOs have raised ~$36B in 2025 — China's OmniVision Integrated Circuits (603501.SS) aims to raise up to HK$4.80 billion ($616.94 million) in its Hong Kong listing …
Nichiket Sunil / Reuters: Filing: Chinese chipmaker GigaDevice aims to raise up to ~$600M in a Hong Kong IPO, offering 28.9M shares at up to ~$21 each — China's GigaDevice Semiconductor (603986.SS) is targeting to raise up to HK$4.68 billion ($601.47 million) in an initial public offering in Hong Kong, according to a filing with the exchange on Wednesday.
Meta: Meta says it will continue to operate and sell the Manus service, and Manus' talent will join Meta to deliver agents across Meta products, including Meta AI — We are excited to announce that Manus is joining Meta to bring a leading agent to billions of people and unlock opportunities for businesses across our products.
Gavin Baker / @gavinsbaker: As inference splits into prefill and decode, Nvidia's Groq deal could enable a “Rubin SRAM” variant optimized for ultra-low latency agentic reasoning workloads — Nvidia is buying Groq for two reasons imo. 1) Inference is disaggregating into prefill and decode.
Abram Brown / The Information: Sequoia, a16z, and other VC firms invested $1.2B+ into police and public safety tech startups over the past year, following the success of Palantir and others — Over the past year, Andreessen Horowitz, Sequoia Capital and many of Silicon Valley's other top venture capital firms have funneled …
@metr_evals: METR: Claude Opus 4.5 has a 50% task completion time horizon of about 4 hours and 49 minutes, more than double that of Claude Opus 4 released earlier this year — We estimate that, on our tasks, Claude Opus 4.5 has a 50%-time horizon of around 4 hrs 49 mins (95% confidence interval of 1 hr 49 mins to 20 hrs 25 mins). While we're still working through evaluations for other recent models, this is our highest published time horizon to date. [image]
Business Insider: Google advises some employees on visas, including H-1B visas, not to travel outside the US due to processing delays, following new social media screening rules — - Google and Apple are advising some employees with visas not to travel outside the US, per memos viewed by Business Insider.
Akash Sriram / Reuters: Hut 8 partners with Fluidstack to build an AI data center in Louisiana for Anthropic, backed by a 15-year, $7B lease, starting with 245MW of computing capacity — Hut 8 (HUT.O) has signed a deal valued at about $7 billion to lease a data center in Louisiana, it said on Wednesday …
Juro Osawa / The Information: Source: Tencent tells staff that Yao Shunyu, an ex-OpenAI researcher who joined in September, is now its chief AI scientist, reporting to President Martin Lau — Tencent Holdings internally announced that Yao Shunyu, a researcher who joined from OpenAI in September, is now serving …
Emily Mason / Bloomberg: Visa says it will allow US banks to settle transactions using Circle's USDC stablecoin over Solana, the US' first full deployment of a stablecoin settlement — Visa Inc. is opening its US network to stablecoin settlement, expanding crypto-linked products and services enabled …
Reuters: China approves two cars from state-owned automakers with Level 3 autonomous capabilities, the first such approvals; the cars can drive in Chongqing and Beijing — China's industry regulator on Monday approved two Chinese cars with level-3 autonomous driving capabilities …
Counterpoint Research: Global smartphone shipments in 2026 are set to shrink 2.1% due to rising memory costs, led by Chinese OEMs; DRAM price surges are set to raise costs by 10%-15% — - Global smartphone shipments in 2026 are expected to shrink 2.1% due to rising memory costs.
Tim Dettmers: An Ai2 research scientist argues that AGI, as commonly conceived, will not emerge because it ignores, among other things, the physical realities of computation — If you are reading this, you probably have strong opinions about AGI, superintelligence, and the future of AI.
Ofcom: A survey of UK adults in 2025: on average, they spend 4.5 hours per day online, up 10 minutes on 2024, and 50%+ of time is on Google- and Meta-owned services — Our latest Online Nation report explores how adults and children in the UK experience life online.
Ben Thompson / Stratechery: Netflix changed movie distribution and its executives now think that licensing shows leaves money on the table; YouTube may help Netflix's WBD antitrust case — Warner Bros. started with distribution. Just after the turn of the century, Harry, Albert, Sam, and Jack Warner bought …
Sally Ward-Foxton / EE Times: Lemurian Labs, which aims to develop hardware-agnostic portability software for AI workloads, raised a $28M Series A co-led by Pebblebed Ventures and Hexagon — AI software startup Lemurian Labs has pivoted away from AI hardware, having raised a $28-million series A to build its AI software stack.
Abram Brown / The Information: Source: Microsoft is in talks to design future custom chips with Broadcom, which would involve Microsoft switching its business from Marvell — Microsoft is in talks to design future custom chips with Broadcom, which would involve Microsoft switching its business from Marvell …
Max A. Cherney / Reuters: Vinci, which uses AI simulations to accelerate chip and other hardware design, raised a $36M Series A led by Xora Innovation, taking its total funding to $46M — Startup Vinci said on Tuesday it has raised $36 million to finance its business of building software that can speed chip …
Derek B. Johnson / CyberScoop: Unit 42 details how underground hacking forums advertise and sell custom, jailbroken, and open-source AI hacking tools such as WormGPT and KawaiiGPT — As legitimate businesses purchase AI tools from some of the largest companies in the world, cybercriminals are accessing …
@artificialanlys: An analysis of Google TPU v6e vs AMD MI300X vs Nvidia H100/B200: Nvidia achieves a ~5x tokens-per-dollar advantage over TPU v6e and 2x advantage over MI300X — Google TPU v6e vs AMD MI300X vs NVIDIA H100/B200: Artificial Analysis' Hardware Benchmarking shows NVIDIA achieving a ~5x tokens-per-dollar advantage over TPU v6e (Trillium), and a ~2x advantage over MI300X, in our key inference cost metric In our metric for inference cost [image]