Techmeme
February 1, 2026, 10:10 PM

Top News

Mark Gurman / Bloomberg:
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  —  Apple's blockbuster holiday quarter was impressive — but it shouldn't give cover to avoid an AI reckoning.
Wall Street Journal:
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  —  $500 million investment for 49% of World Liberty came months before U.A.E. won access to tightly guarded American AI chips
More: Financial Times, Washington Post, The Information, New York Times, CNBC, The Coin Republic, CoinDesk, The Block, Raw Story, Sydney Morning Herald, Telegraph, CNBC, Bitcoin Insider, Mediaite, Cointelegraph, Bloomberg, The Parnas Perspective, To the Contrary, and Semafor
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  —  ...So yes it's a dumpster fire and I also definitely do not recommend that people run this stuff on their computers …
Matthew Gault / 404 Media:
Zijing Wu / Financial Times:
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  —  About three years ago, Stacey Tang, a manager in a pharmaceuticals company in Beijing, received a peculiar phone call.
James O'Donnell / MIT Technology Review:
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  —  Civitai—an online marketplace for buying and selling AI-generated content, backed by the venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz …
Jagmeet Singh / TechCrunch:
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  —  As the global race to build AI infrastructure accelerates, India has offered foreign cloud providers zero taxes through 2047 …
Connie Loizos / TechCrunch:
Inside Physical Intelligence, a startup co-founded by Stripe veteran Lachy Groom that is building general-purpose robotics foundation models and has raised $1B+  —  From the street, the only indication I've found Physical Intelligence's headquarters in San Francisco is a pi symbol that's …
Andrew Zucker / Wall Street Journal:
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  —  Thanks to a new iPhone feature, everyone now has an executive assistant in their pocket to filter unwanted calls

Sponsor Posts

Subquadratic:
SubQ Snap 1.1: the first long-context decision model for real enterprise work  —  Tied for #1 on the AA Decision Index, Snap is a multimodal model with a 384k-token context window for fast reasoning and agentic decisions.
Zoho:
Labels that build themselves: Simplified Label Automation in Zoho Writer  —  Anyone who ships every day knows this feeling.  Forty orders, each with a different number of items, and every item needs its own label.
IDrive:
Protecting your Cloud Applications Data  —  Backing up Office 365, Google Workspace, Dropbox & Salesforce data is critical to preventing data loss or corruption, complying with laws and avoiding critical downtime in case of a disaster.
WebBrain:
WebBrain: an open-source AI agent for your browser  —  Read pages, fill forms and automate tasks in Chrome or Firefox.  Use local models or your preferred AI provider.  Get started free.

Featured Podcasts

Big Technology Podcast:
AI Stockpocalypse, Anthropic Nears RSI?, Prediction Markets vs. Pollsters
The Big Technology Podcast takes you behind the scenes in the tech world featuring interviews with plugged-in insiders and outside agitators.
Subscribe to Big Technology Podcast.
Machine Gods:
The Purple Tsunami Against Data Centers
The official podcast of the singularity, from Casey Newton and Kevin Roose. Twice-weekly news, analysis, and interviews with the people who are building the future.
Subscribe to Machine Gods.
Invest Like the Best:
Ramtin Naimi - The State of Venture
The leading destination to learn about business and investing. We do this by showcasing exceptional talent and ideas.
Subscribe to Invest Like the Best.
The Upstarts Podcast:
How Ramp Built A $60B AI Product Factory Off A Corporate Card | Co-CEO Eric Glyman
Veteran tech reporter Alex Konrad sits down with breakout entrepreneurs taking on the status quo to shake up their fields in AI, design, nuclear energy, space, and more.
Subscribe to The Upstarts Podcast.
Great Chat:
Would you let a robot do it?
A podcast mostly about tech. Brought to you weekly by Angela Du, Sally Shin, Mac Bohannon, Helen Min, and Ashley Mayer.
Subscribe to Great Chat.
Training Data:
A Model For Everyone: How Ronak From Trajectory Is Building Products For Continual Learning
Sequoia Capital partners host conversations with leading AI builders and researchers to develop a deeper understanding of the evolving technologies and their implications.
Subscribe to Training Data.
 

About This Page

This is a Techmeme archive page. It shows how the site appeared at 10:10 PM ET, February 1, 2026.

The most current version of the site as always is available at our home page. To view an earlier snapshot click here and then modify the date indicated.

More News

Trishla Ostwal / Adweek:

Earlier Picks

Bloomberg:
More: PYMNTS.com.  X: @thestalwart and @thestalwart
LinkedIn: Antoine L. and Rachel Graf.  Bluesky: @zachweinersmith.  Forums: r/singularity
Debby Wu / Bloomberg: