Bluesky releases its first transparency report: users rose 60% in 2025 to 41.2M, including AT Protocol accounts; moderation reports from users grew 54% to 9.97M — Bluesky released its first transparency report this week documenting the actions taken by its Trust & Safety team and the results …
Poetiq, which leverages existing LLMs to create “expert agents” for specific tasks, and spent just $40K to achieve high ARC-AGI-2 scores, raised a $45.8M seed — Poetiq, a less-than-one-year-old A.I. startup just crushed the ARC A.G.I. benchmark, beating Anthropic and Google with only six people and $40,000.
OpenAI has hired 7+ employees from AI coding startup Cline, including Nik Pash, who left Cline after posting “imagine the smell” on X regarding an xAI hackathon — OpenAI has recently hired more than a half dozen employees from Cline, a startup that develops an open-source …
Apple acquires Q.ai, whose tech can analyze facial expressions and could enable non-verbal discussions with AI assistants; sources: the deal values Q.ai at ~$2B — iPhone-maker strikes deal for secretive group that creates technology that analyses facial expressions
Google updates Gemini in Chrome with a new side panel, an auto browse feature that can navigate pages and take actions for AI Pro and AI Ultra users, and more — ZDNET's key takeaways — Google Chrome is being upgraded with Gemini 3 and a revamped sidepanel UX.
Canada says it is talking to Meta to restore news to Facebook and Instagram as the Online News Act is put on the table as part of trade negotiations with the US — Save for later — Log in or create a free account to listen to this article. — Government officials are in talks …
The UK government says it recruited a team of AI specialists to build AI tools to improve transport, public safety and defense, backed by Meta's funding — The British government said on Tuesday it had recruited a team of artificial intelligence specialists to build AI tools to improve transport …
Zocks, which offers an AI assistant for financial advisers, raised a $45M Series B co-led by Lightspeed and QED Investors, taking its total funding to $65M — Zocks, which has built an AI assistant for financial advisers, has raised $45 million in a Series B funding co-led by Lightspeed Venture Partners …
Qwen releases Qwen3-Max-Thinking, its flagship reasoning model that it says demonstrates performance comparable to models such as GPT-5.2 Thinking and Opus 4.5 — · QwenTeam丨Translations:.体ä¸æ–‡ — Introduction# — We present Qwen3-Max-Thinking, our latest flagship reasoning model.
Meta's decision to deprioritize VR in favor of AI and internet-connected glasses has chilled the VR industry, leading to concerns about its future — Meta's deprioritizing virtual reality in favor of artificial intelligence and Internet-connected smart glasses has chilled the industry, leading to concerns about its future.
Microsoft confirms it does provide BitLocker recovery keys for encrypted data if it receives a valid legal order and the user has stored the keys on its servers — The tech giant said it receives around 20 requests for BitLocker keys a year and will provide them to governments in response to valid court orders.
Source: smart ring maker Oura plans a tender offer for early investors at a 25% discount to its $11B valuation from Series E, aiming to stay private longer — Oura Health Oy, the maker of popular smart rings, is working on a tender offer for existing investors at a discount to its latest funding round …
Meta says it is pausing teens' access to its AI characters globally across all its apps as it develops a special version of an AI character for teens — Meta today said that it is pausing teens' access to its AI characters globally across all its apps. The company mentioned that it is not abandoning …
Inferact, founded by the creators of vLLM to create a commercial AI product for cross-hardware efficiency, raised a $150M seed led by a16z at an $800M valuation — Inferact, an AI startup formed by the creators of open-source software vLLM, has raised $150 million in a seed funding round that values the company at $800 million.
Meta plans to expand ads on Threads to all users globally starting next week; Threads began testing ads in the US and Japan a year ago — Meta on Wednesday announced it's expanding ads on Threads to all users globally. The expansion, which starts next week, will be gradual …
Demis Hassabis says Chinese AI companies are about six months behind leading western labs and the response to DeepSeek's R1 was a “massive overreaction” — Google DeepMind Chief Executive Officer Demis Hassabis said Chinese artificial intelligence companies haven't been able …
The World Economic Forum in Davos is now dominated by tech giants, whose interests shunt aside topics like climate change, as Trump and AI take center stage — The World Economic Forum is now dominated by global technology companies whose interests shunt aside most others.
Anthropic's Claude Cowork launch has revived fears about disruption that weighed on SaaS stocks in 2025; Morgan Stanley SaaS index is down 15% so far in 2026 — The new year was supposed to bring opportunities for beaten-down software stocks. Instead, the group is off to its worst start in years.
The UK government will take a £25M stake in Octopus Energy's tech spin-off Kraken, last valued at $8.65B, in an effort to encourage Kraken to list in London — Investment aims to persuade tech business to list in London as it gears up for IPO — The UK government will take a £25mn stake …
Sources: Seoul-based AI chip designer FuriosaAI seeks to raise a $300M-$500M Series D to fund mass production of its 2nd-gen RNGD chip and is eyeing a 2027 IPO — Artificial intelligence chip designer FuriosaAI is seeking to raise as much as $500 million in a funding round …
CoinGecko: over 53% of the 20.2M crypto tokens launched since 2021 are now inactive, with 7.7M tokens failing in Q4 2025, after Oct. 10 “liquidation cascade” — Over 13.4 million tokens have been erased between mid-2021 and 2025, according to a new analysis by CoinGecko. — What to know:
Similarweb: Threads had 141.5M DAUs on iOS and Android as of January 7, driven by Instagram promotions, while X had 125M DAUs; X continues to lead on the web — A report from market intelligence firm Similarweb suggests that Meta's Threads is now seeing more daily usage than Elon Musk's X on mobile devices.
Luminate 2025 report: the global music industry hit 5.1T streams, up 9.6% YoY and a single-year record; AI artist Xania Monet had 125M on-demand audio streams — The global music industry hit 5.1 trillion streams in 2025. It's a new single-year record, up 9.6% from 2024, which held the previous record.
ZachXBT: a crypto user lost $282M+ in BTC and LTC in a hardware wallet social engineering scam; XMR jumped as the attacker began converting the funds to Monero — Partner offers — Quick Take — XMR hit an all-time high of $797.73 on Jan. 14, coinciding with a series …
OpenAI plans to test ads below ChatGPT replies for users of free and Go tiers in the US; source: OpenAI expects to make “low billions” from ads in 2026 — $500bn start-up seeks ways to fund expansion and fend off competition from rivals Google and Anthropic
Unsealed docs from Elon Musk's OpenAI lawsuit, set for a jury trial on April 27: Sutskever's concerns about treating open-source AI as a “side show”, and more — This is an excerpt of Sources by Alex Heath, a newsletter about AI and the tech industry, syndicated just for The Verge subscribers once a week.
