Techmeme
February 1, 2026, 1:10 PM

Top News

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
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.
X: @asanwal and @bgurleyLinkedIn: Leevi Saari
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 …
Matthew Gault / 404 Media:
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  —  Moltbook is a “social media” site for AI agents that's captured the public's imagination over the last few days.
Reuters:
Filing: SpaceX is seeking US FCC approval to launch 1M satellites; SpaceX claims that they will orbit the Earth and harness the sun to power AI data centers  —  Elon Musk's SpaceX wants to launch a constellation of 1 million satellites that will orbit Earth and harness the sun to power AI data centers …
Nicole Fan / Rest of World:
Chinese government funding is backing traditional Chinese medicine providers to adopt AI for drug discovery, clinical diagnostics, acupuncture robots, and more  —  With backing from the Chinese government, TCM practitioners are integrating AI tools to reach new consumers at home and abroad.
Ann Cao / South China Morning Post:
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  —  The milestone underscores Alibaba's growing footprint in AI hardware, as Chinese firms accelerate efforts to build home-grown processors

Sponsor Posts

Subquadratic:
Subquadratic: the LLM built for 12M-token reasoning  —  SubQ can reason across entire codebases and document sets in one pass with no RAG workarounds.  Read how SubQ 1.1 Small holds near-perfect retrieval out to 12M tokens.
Cloudflare:
Cloudflare Connect 2026: The Agentic Conference  —  Stop preparing for agents.  Start running them.  100+ sessions, workshops, and speakers from OpenAI, Arm, and Cloudflare across AI, security, and performance.
Zoho:
Zoho for your industry: Where business software meets industry knowledge  —  Generic business software has come a long way.  Today, a good CRM, a solid finance tool, or a reliable helpdesk can transform how a business operates …
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.

Featured Podcasts

Channels with Peter Kafka:
Meta's New $1300 Glasses and the Fight to Control AI
Media and tech aren't just intersecting - they're fully intertwined. To understand how those worlds work, Peter Kafka talks to industry leaders, upstarts and observers.
Subscribe to Channels with Peter Kafka.
Great Chat:
Doomers at Dreamforce
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.
Big Technology Podcast:
YouTube CEO Neal Mohan: Why We're Betting On AI And Not Afraid Of It
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.
Sources:
Marc Benioff on the AI boom, SaaSpocalypse, and future of Slack
Candid conversations with the leaders shaping what's next in AI and the broader tech industry. Hosted by Alex Heath, who has covered Silicon Valley for more than a decade.
Subscribe to Sources.
Invest Like the Best:
Gabe Stengel - Building Investing Superintelligence
The leading destination to learn about business and investing. We do this by showcasing exceptional talent and ideas.
Subscribe to Invest Like the Best.
Grit:
Inside the AI Startup Making Customer Support 65% Cheaper
Grit explores what it takes to create, build and scale world-class organizations.
Subscribe to Grit.
 

About This Page

This is a Techmeme archive page. It shows how the site appeared at 1:10 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

Bloomberg:
X: @thestalwart and @thestalwart
LinkedIn: Antoine L. and Rachel GrafBluesky: @zachweinersmithForums: r/singularity

Earlier Picks

Debby Wu / Bloomberg: