Techmeme
February 4, 2026, 4:25 PM

Top News

Alphabet:
Alphabet reports Q4 revenue up 18% YoY to $113.8B, Google Cloud revenue up 48% to $17.7B, Google Services revenue up 14% to $95.9B, net income up 30% to $34.46B  —  MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif. - February 4, 2026 - Alphabet Inc. (NASDAQ: GOOG, GOOGL) today announced financial results for the quarter ended December 31, 2025.
Anthropic:
Suzanne Vranica / Wall Street Journal:
Anthropic plans a 30-second ad during the Super Bowl that parodies the prospect of intrusive ads in AI conversations, and will also air a 60-second pregame ad  —  Chatbot wars are heating up, with Anthropic's Claude highlighting the potential frustration of bringing ads into ChatGPT
Sam Altman / @sama:
Sam Altman says Anthropic's Super Bowl ads are funny but “dishonest”, and Anthropic serves a “product to rich people” while OpenAI is “committed to free access”  —  First, the good part of the Anthropic ads: they are funny, and I laughed. But I wonder why Anthropic would go for something so clearly dishonest. Our most important principle for ads says that we won't do exactly this; we would obviously never run ads in the way Anthropic
Connor Hart / Wall Street Journal:
Uber reports Q4 revenue up 20% YoY to $14.37B, Gross Bookings up 22% YoY to $54.1B, trips up 22% YoY to 3.8B, and a $296M net income, below est.; UBER falls 5%+  —  Ride-hailing company's quarterly profit falls on hefty charge  —  Uber Technologies fourth-quarter profit fell …
Ram Iyer / TechCrunch:
Abner Li / 9to5Google:
Google teases the Pixel 10a in a new 15-second video, revealing a completely flat dual-camera system on the back, and says preorders begin on February 18  —  Google this morning officially announced the Pixel 10a via a video teaser emphasizing the updated design.
Jennifer Pattison Tuohy / The Verge:
Amazon rolls out Alexa+ to all Prime members in the US via any Alexa-enabled device, Alexa.com, and the Alexa app, and launches a free tier for non-Prime users  —  Amazon's revamped AI-powered assistant is now available to everyone in the US, with new tiers that include a free option for non-Prime users.
Kate Clark / Wall Street Journal:
AI voice startup ElevenLabs raised a $500M Series D led by Sequoia at an $11B valuation, taking its total funding to nearly $800M, and reports $330M in 2025 ARR  —  The startup is increasingly joining with creative stars and expanding its work with business customers
Nick Turner / Bloomberg:
Texas Instruments agrees to acquire US chip company Silicon Labs for ~$7.5B, paying $231/share in cash, closing in H1 2027; Silicon Labs has a ~$4.5B market cap  —  Texas Instruments Inc. has reached an agreement to buy the US chip firm Silicon Laboratories Inc. for about $7.5 billion …
Jordan Novet / CNBC:
Microsoft says cybersecurity head Charlie Bell will move into a position focused on engineering quality; Hayete Gallot will return from Google to run security  —  Microsoft said Wednesday that top security leader Charlie Bell will take on a new role and that Hayete Gallot will return …
Sam Reynolds / CoinDesk:
A US judge sentences Rui-Siang Lin, who pled guilty to operating the $105M+ dark web narcotics marketplace Incognito Market, to 30 years in US federal prison  —  U.S. prosecutors say the Taiwanese operator of the $105 Million Incognito Market used cryptocurrency and anonymity tools …
Ian King / Bloomberg:
AI chipmaker Cerebras raised a ~$1B Series H led by Tiger Global at a $23B valuation, up from $8.1B in September 2025; Benchmark, Fidelity, and AMD invested too  —  AI chip provider Cerebras Systems Inc. has raised about $1 billion in a new funding round, bolstering the company's efforts to compete with Nvidia Corp.
Jill R Shah / Financial Times:
Sabrina Ortiz / The Deep View:
Mistral debuts Voxtral Transcribe 2, a family of speech-to-text models with speaker diarization and ultra-low latency, under the Apache 2.0 open-weight license  —  AI assistants are going voice-first, and Mistral AI just launched its models to compete.  —  On Wednesday, the French AI startup …
More: VentureBeat, Mistral AI, and Wired
X: @simonw, @mistralai, and @mistralaiForums: Hacker News
Leo Schwartz / Fortune:
TRM Labs, which helps law enforcement and companies track crypto and blockchains, raised a $70M Series C led by Blockchain Capital at a $1B valuation  —  When TRM Labs cofounders Esteban Castaño and Rahul Raina moved to San Francisco in 2018 to create a startup, their mentors told …
Coco Liu / Bloomberg:
Lunar Energy, which develops software that syncs batteries across homes into “virtual power plants” and began deploying its own batteries in 2025, raised $232M  —  Lunar Energy wants to expand its home storage business at a time when the grid is increasingly under strain.
Jason Schreier / Bloomberg:
A profile of game studio Obsidian, which Microsoft acquired in 2018, as it seeks to shorten development times and cut costs after releasing three titles in 2025  —  Microsoft's Obsidian Entertainment is searching for ways to make games more quickly and on smaller budgets.
Chris Tapsell / Eurogamer.net:
An interview with Epic Games Store VP Steven Allison, who says “we have a lot of things” to fix and “the launcher sucks”, on 2026 updates like social features  —  Steven Allison acknowledges some people will always say “F— Epic", as focus finally shifts to player experience.
Jyoti Mann / The Information:
Internal memos: Meta said Avocado is its “most capable pre-trained base model” and achieves 10x compute efficiency “wins” on text tasks vs. Llama 4 Maverick  —  Meta Platforms is sounding an increasingly bullish note about the first major AI model expected to emerge from its new AI group.
Financial Times:
Sources: the US Commerce Department finished reviewing Nvidia's H200 China license, but the State Department wants tougher restrictions, delaying final approval  —  The state department has pushed for close scrutiny before approving export licences  —  Michael Acton in San Francisco …

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Jay Peters / The Verge:
Wall Street Journal:
Max Knoblauch / Sherwood News: