Techmeme
February 1, 2026, 8:50 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
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 …
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 …
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 …
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
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.

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More News

Earlier Picks

Bloomberg:
More: PYMNTS.comX: @thestalwart and @thestalwart
LinkedIn: Antoine L. and Rachel GrafBluesky: @zachweinersmithForums: r/singularity
Debby Wu / Bloomberg: