Techmeme
January 22, 2025, 8:35 AM

Top News

New York Times:
Trump pardons Silk Road creator Ross Ulbricht, a crypto and libertarian cult hero serving a life sentence since 2015 on money laundering, drug charges, and more  —  Ross Ulbricht was serving a life sentence for creating a site in a shady corner of the internet to sell heroin, cocaine and other illicit substances.
Kyle Wiggers / TechCrunch:
OpenAI, SoftBank, and Oracle unveil The Stargate Project, a JV to invest in US AI infrastructure, committing $100B now and up to $500B over the next four years  —  OpenAI says that it will team up with both the Japanese conglomerate SoftBank and with Oracle, along with others, to build multiple data centers for AI in the U.S.
More: CBS News, OpenAI, The Verge, New York Times, Associated Press, Engadget, The Economic Times, BBC, Silicon Republic, CNN, The Guardian, Reuters, Tech Monitor, PCMag, Quartz, Light Reading, Fortune, Total Telecom, ComputerWeekly.com, Blockonomi, Silicon Canals, Spyglass, TechRadar, diginomica, CNBC, CryptoSlate, TweakTown, The Decoder, en.ain.ua, Ace of Spades HQ, City A.M., The Gateway Pundit, crypto.news, BGR, Cryptopolitan, Analytics India Magazine, The Coin Republic, Interesting Engineering, The Fast Mode, Daily Sabah, Pulse 2.0, TechPowerUp, Tech Xplore, YourStory.com, RTÉ, The Indian Express, Türkiye Today, Arabian Business, Neowin, Hindustan Times, Decrypt, Wall Street Journal, Bloomberg, and The Hollywood Reporter
Bluesky: @martyswant and @edzitron.com
Financial Times:
Sources: Google is investing $1B+ more in Anthropic, which is also nearing a further $2B round from Silicon Valley VCs led by Lightspeed at a ~$60B valuation  —  Artificial intelligence group closes in on $60bn valuation  —  Google is making a fresh investment of more than $1bn into OpenAI rival Anthropic …
Washington Post:
Sources: a deep philosophical rift over how DOGE should operate spurred Vivek Ramaswamy's exit, with Donald Trump's January 20 EO embodying Elon Musk's vision  —  A deep philosophical rift between the two billionaire leaders of the “Department of Government Efficiency” left Musk to run the group.
Kyle Wiggers / TechCrunch:
Microsoft says it has signed a new deal with OpenAI that gives Microsoft “right of first refusal”, meaning it's no longer OpenAI's exclusive cloud provider  —  Microsoft was once the exclusive provider of data center infrastructure for OpenAI to train and run its AI models.  No longer.
Lucas Shaw / Bloomberg:
Netflix reports Q4 revenue up 16% YoY to $10.2B and 301.6M global subscribers, adding 18.9M subscribers, more than double analysts' estimates; NFLX jumps 14%+  —  - Netflix is raising subscription prices in its biggest market  — Report marks the end of regular quarterly customer updates
Nicole Sperling / New York Times:
Netflix raises prices in the US, Canada, Portugal, and Argentina; the standard US plan rose from $15.49 to $17.99 and standard with ads jumped a dollar to $7.99  —  The company said those results were buoyed by programming in recent months that exceeded internal expectations.
Drew Lerner / Awful Announcing:
Bloomberg:
Donald Trump says he would be open to Elon Musk or Larry Ellison purchasing TikTok US as part of a joint venture that would give the US government 50% ownership  —  “I have the right to make a deal,” Trump said at an event alongside Ellison at the White House on Tuesday.
Alexandra S. Levine / Bloomberg:
Becky Bracken / Dark Reading:
The Trump administration removed all advisory committee members within the DHS, including those in CISA and CSRB, which was investigating Salt Typhoon  —  In a letter sent today, the acting DHS secretary terminated membership to all advisory boards, including the Cyber Safety Review Board …
Mark Gurman / Bloomberg:
Sources: Meta aims to debut glasses with a built-in display and new Oakley-branded smart glasses for athletes in 2025, and resumes work on watches and earbuds  —  - Company resumes work on smartwatch and develops AirPods rival  — First real AR glasses, dubbed ‘Artemis,’ are planned for 2027
Dean Takahashi / VentureBeat:
A survey of 3,000+ game developers: 11% were laid off in the past year, 58% back unionization, 30% say GenAI has a negative impact on the industry, and more  —  The 2025 GDC survey revealed the impact of industry-wide layoffs in 2024 where one of every 11 game developers lost a job.
Juli Clover / MacRumors:
Apple says installing macOS Sequoia 15.3, iOS 18.3, or iPadOS 18.3 will turn on Apple Intelligence automatically on compatible devices; users can opt out later  —  When installing macOS Sequoia 15.3, iOS 18.3, or iPadOS 18.3, Apple Intelligence will be turned on automatically on compatible devices …
Radhika Rajkumar / ZDNET:
DeepSeek's new MIT-licensed AI models are accesible via DeepSeek's API at a fraction of the cost of comparable OpenAI models, but there are censorship concerns  —  Open-source artificial intelligence (AI) has reached another milestone — and the cost differences it represents could shake up the industry.
TechCrunch:
Truecaller rolls out real-time caller ID to its ~750K iOS subscribers, who account for 40% of its revenue; Truecaller has 2.6M+ paying subscribers in total  —  Popular caller ID app Truecaller has long left iPhone users at a disadvantage by not offering the caller information in real-time …
Louise Matsakis / Wired:
Days before TikTok briefly went dark, Instagram and Facebook made design tweaks, released new features, and ran ads promoting its apps as TikTok alternatives  —  In the days before TikTok went dark, Instagram and Facebook released a flurry of new features and ran advertisements promoting its platforms as a comparable alternative.
More: BBC, The Information, and MySmartPrice
Bluesky: @lmatsakis, @dlb, @bvigeant, and @jasonkoeblerForums: r/technews
Danny Park / The Block:
A Texas District Court rules against Tornado Cash sanctions, ordering a previous decision to be reversed; the US sanctioned Tornado Cash in August 2022  —  - A U.S. District Court has ordered the sanctions on Tornado Cash to be reversed.  — The price of TORN jumped over 140% following the news.
Financial Times:
UK CMA Chair Marcus Bokkerink plans to leave the antitrust agency, after pressure from UK ministers; the CMA appoints ex-Amazon exec Doug Gurr as interim chair  —  Marcus Bokkerink replaced at CMA with government saying it wants pro-business decisions to drive prosperity and growth

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