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January 22, 2026, 2:10 PM
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memeorandum
WeSmirchTop News
| The Information: |
A look at Craig Federighi's approach to AI at Apple; sources say he led a push to use other companies' models to help launch a revamped Siri later in 2026 — Last fall, Apple's software chief, Craig Federighi, delivered a warm message to a meeting of the company's combined software and AI groups.
More: AppleInsider, 9to5Mac, MacRumors, iPhone in Canada, MacTech.com, Mercury News, DigiTimes, and Bloomberg Law
| Semafor: |
Sources: the US and China approve a deal to sell TikTok's US business to a group of mostly US investors led by Oracle and Silverlake, set to close this week — The US and China have signed off on a deal to sell TikTok's US business to a consortium of mostly US investors led by Oracle and Silverlake …
More: TechCrunch, Fox Business, iPhone in Canada, Investing.com, Benzinga, Hypebot, Crypto Briefing, and Digital Music News
X: @deitaone and @semaforben. LinkedIn: Bryan Rangel. Bluesky: @alanrozenshtein.com. Forums: r/worldnews
| Aisha Malik / TechCrunch: |
Google rolls out Personal Intelligence in AI Mode to access users' Gmail and Google Photos data for more tailored responses, for US Pro and Ultra subscribers — AI Mode, Google's conversational Search feature for complex questions, is getting more personalized.| New York Times: |
NYT and CCDH analysis: Grok created and shared 1.8M+ sexualized images of women between December 31 and January 8, after Elon Musk promoted the feature on X — Over nine days, Elon Musk's Grok chatbot generated and posted 4.4 million images, of which at least 41 percent were sexualized images of women.
More: The Guardian, Center for Countering …, Engadget, The Independent, Newser, and The Economic Times
Bluesky: @parismarx.com, @rmac, @counterhate.com, @adrianweckler, @counterhate.com, @dael, @reedfrich, @mims, and @mattburgess1
| Will Knight / Wired: |
An analysis of 5,290 AI research papers at NeurIPS: 141, or ~3%, had US-China AI lab collaboration, vs. 134/4,497 in 2024; Llama featured in 106 Chinese papers — WIRED analyzed more than 5,000 papers from NeurIPS using OpenAI's Codex to understand the areas where the US and China actually work together on AI research.
More: TechCrunch, AI Detection Resources, The Decoder, and Fortune
| Lora Kolodny / CNBC: |
Waymo launches its robotaxi service in Miami, its sixth market, initially covering a 60-square-mile area, and partners with Moove for fleet management — Alphabet's Waymo said Thursday that its robotaxi service is now open to paying riders in Miami, kicking off a 2026 market expansion.
More: Waymo, PCMag, TechCrunch, Engadget, Mercury News, Refresh Miami, New York Post, WebProNews, Electrek, CleanTechnica, Mashable, Axios, The Verge, Business Insider, EV, Traffic Technology Today, Dow Jones Newswires, Sherwood News, and Automotive World
X: @binarybits and @waymo
Forums: r/waymo, r/SelfDrivingCars, and r/Miami
| Mia Sato / The Verge: |
Cate Blanchett, Cyndi Lauper, and 800+ creatives launch “Stealing Isn't Innovation” to protest unauthorized AI training, backed by RIAA, SAG-AFTRA, and others — Cate Blanchett, Cyndi Lauper, George Saunders, and other creatives say that AI companies are … | On Substack: |
Substack launches its Substack TV app for Apple TV and Google TV in beta for free and paid subscribers, with access matched to their current subscription levels — Today we're launching the Substack TV app for Apple TV and Google TV. Substack is the home for the best longform …
More: TechCrunch, PCWorld, Deadline, The Ankler., and Pocket-lint
| Will Knight / Wired: |
Source: Google DeepMind signs a licensing deal with Hume AI, which builds emotionally intelligent voice interfaces, to hire CEO Alan Cowen and ~7 top engineers — Hume AI's CEO, Alan Cowen, will join Google DeepMind along with several top engineers as part of a major licensing deal.| Bloomberg: |
Mistral CEO Arthur Mensch calls claims that Chinese AI startups lag behind the US a “fairy tale”, and China's open-source tech is “probably stressing” US CEOs — Claims that Chinese technology for artificial intelligence lags the US are a “fairy tale,” Arthur Mensch …
More: The Economic Times, Le Monde, and Tom's Hardware
| Bloomberg: |
Sources: the US Senate's crypto market structure bill is likely to be delayed by several weeks as key lawmakers shift their focus to a housing legislation push — A sweeping US crypto market bill is likely to be delayed by at least several weeks as key lawmakers shift their focus … | AJ Dellinger / Gizmodo: |
xAI engineer Sulaiman Ghori says he has “left” the startup, after saying on a podcast last week that xAI has skirted regulations while building its data centers — Interesting timing. — Sulaiman Ghori, an engineer at Elon Musk's AI startup xAI, went on the podcast Relentless …
More: Relentless on YouTube, BBC, Politico, eWeek, Business Insider, Semafor, and Moneycontrol
X: @sulaimanghori, @mrbeast, @sethcronin, and @andrewcurran_
| Caiwei Chen / MIT Technology Review: |
Q&A with Yann LeCun on his new Paris-based startup Advanced Machine Intelligence, leaving Meta, real-world applications for world models, robotics, and more — Yann LeCun is a Turing Award recipient and a top AI researcher, but he has long been a contrarian figure in the tech world.
More: WebProNews, DigiTimes, and Forbes
| Business Insider: |
The US BOP releases Caroline Ellison, the former FTX executive and ex-girlfriend of Sam Bankman-Fried, after about 14 months; she had a two-year sentence — - Caroline Ellison, the exec involved in the FTX scandal, has been released from federal custody. — The former Alameda Research CEO …
More: The Block, Cryptonews, Bitcoin Magazine, Benzinga, Crypto Briefing, and Bloomberg Law
| New York Times: |
Inside the turmoil at Thinking Machines; sources say Meta discussed buying TML, and CTO Barret Zoph had been in talks since October 2025 about an OpenAI return — Defections, secret conversations, deal talks that fizzled and a battle for control: The turmoil at Thinking Machines Lab …
More: The Information, The Independent, New York Post, and Wall Street Journal
| Financial Times: |
Japanese NAND flash maker Kioxia's stock is up ~800% over the past 12 months, as AI demand and constrained NAND flash supply boost the chipmaker's pricing power — Kioxia's stock has gained around 800 per cent in the past 12 months — For all Japan's image as a high-tech economy …
More: DigiTimes, PC Gamer, VideoCardz.com, Tom's Hardware, Ars Technica, Club386, and OC3D
| Laura Mandaro / The Information: |
Yelp acquires Hatch, which charges a monthly fee for AI-powered agents that can respond to customer inquiries and make appointments, for $300M — Recommendation app Yelp on Wednesday said it agreed to acquire AI agent startup Hatch for $300 million, or roughly 12 times the startup's annual recurring revenue.
More: MediaPost, Business Wire, PYMNTS.com, Skift, and Pulse 2.0
| Sarah Perez / TechCrunch: |
Spotify expands its AI-powered Prompted Playlists beta to Premium subscribers in the US and Canada, following initial testing in New Zealand — Spotify is rolling out Prompted Playlists, a new AI playlist creation tool, to Premium subscribers in the U.S. and Canada.
More: PCMag, XDA Developers, Engadget, Thurrott, CNBC, WebProNews, How-To Geek, Reuters, ZDNET, 9to5Mac, Android Central, Android Authority, Digital Trends, Hypebot, MakeUseOf, Mashable, Pocket-lint, The AI Economy, and GSMArena.com. X: @spotifynews
| Core Memory: |
Q&A with recently departed OpenAI VP of Research Jerry Tworek, who claims OpenAI's shift toward more conservative ways made high-risk, pioneering work harder — Are all the AI superpowers playing it too safe? — ∙ Paid — On January 5th, famed AI researcher Jerry Tworek stunned world+dog …
X: @ashleevance, @kyliebytes, @apples_jimmy, @daniel_mac8, @millionint, @ddeming_, and @kyliebytes. LinkedIn: Ashlee Vance
Bluesky: @carnage4life and @kylierobison.com
| Kyu-Seok Shim / Reuters: |
South Korea enacts the AI Basic Act, which it says includes the world's first comprehensive set of laws regulating AI, as startups warn of compliance burdens — South Korea introduced on Thursday what it says is the world's first comprehensive set of laws regulating artificial intelligence …
More: Türkiye Today, Oman Observer, and Telecompaper
| Chris Metinko / Axios: |
Railway, a cloud platform for software deployment, raised a $100M Series B led by TQ Ventures, bringing its total funding to $130M+, says it has ARR of $10M+ — Railway, a cloud platform for software deployment, raised a $100 million Series B led by TQ Ventures, founder and CEO Jake Cooper tells Axios Pro.
More: Railway Blog, FinSMEs, WebProNews, and Crypto Briefing
| Bloomberg: |
A US House panel okays a bipartisan bill pushing congressional oversight of AI chip exports and banning Nvidia Blackwell sales to China for at least two years — Congress is one step closer to gaining the authority to review artificial intelligence chip sales to China … | Aisha Malik / TechCrunch: |
Snap updates its Family Center tool to let parents view daily screen time averages and a breakdown of time spent by specific app segment like Snap Map — Two days after settling a lawsuit accusing Snapchat of causing social media addiction and mental health issues, Snap announced that it's introducing new parental controls.| Lindsay Ellis / Wall Street Journal: |
Survey: over 40% of executives said AI saved them more than eight hours per week, while two-thirds of non-management staff said they saved less than two hours — How much time workers say the technology saves them on the job is vastly different from what executives report — Largest divergence:
More: Implicator.ai, NewsMax.com, and PR Daily
Bluesky: @metacurity.com, @carnage4life, and @prietschka
| Edward Ludlow / Bloomberg: |
Austin-based Neurophos, which develops a photon-based “Optical Processing Unit” to replace GPUs in AI training, raised $110M led by Bill Gates' Gates Frontier — Bill Gates' VC fund, Microsoft Corp.'s investment arm and Saudi Arabia's Aramco Ventures are investing $110 million in Neurophos Inc. … | Mark Gurman / Bloomberg: |
Sources: Apple expanded the job of hardware chief John Ternus to manage design teams at the end of 2025, solidifying his status as a leading CEO candidate — Apple Inc. has expanded the job of hardware chief John Ternus to include design work, solidifying his status as a leading contender …
X: @markgurman, @markgurman, and @markgurman
| Bloomberg: |
BitGo raises $212.8M in its IPO, selling 11.8M+ shares at $18 each, above the $15 to $17 range, giving it a ~$2.1B market value, in 2026's first crypto US IPO — BitGo Holdings Inc. and some of its backers raised $212.8 million in a US initial public offering, pricing its shares above the marketed range.
More: Business Wire, Decrypt, DL News, CoinDesk, Yahoo Finance, Reuters, Axios, Benzinga, The Crypto Times, Coinspeaker, crypto.news, Cointelegraph, Blockonomi, BeInCrypto, CoinGape, Dow Jones Newswires, Tech in Asia, SiliconANGLE, Cryptonews, The Block, Reuters, and Tech Funding News. X: @teddyfuse
| Sri Muppidi / The Information: |
Sources: Anthropic projected a 40% gross margin from selling AI to companies and developers in 2025, down from est. of 50%, due to 23% higher inference costs — Anthropic last month projected it would generate a 40% gross profit margin from selling AI to businesses and application developers in 2025 … | Anjli Raval / Financial Times: |
A look at the entry-level hiring squeeze in marketing, communications, and customer service as executives increasingly argue AI can absorb much of the workload — Economic uncertainty and the arrival of AI have brought a reduction in entry-level roles, with potentially disastrous consequences for young peopleSponsor Posts
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