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Microsoft creates the Advanced Planning Unit within its Microsoft AI division to help the company understand the societal, health, and work implications of AI (Kyle Wiggers/TechCrunch)

WhatsApp says it disrupted a campaign in which 90 journalists and other members of civil society were targeted using spyware from Israel-based Paragon (Stephanie Kirchgaessner/The Guardian)

Sources: bankers trying to offload ~$3B in X debt claim X had $1.2B in adjusted EBITDA in 2024, roughly flat from before Elon Musk's buyout, a sign of recovery (Bloomberg)

First Dungeons & Dragons VR trailer teases a beginner-friendly tabletop game – but I’m just begging for a custom game mode

DeepSeek makes US export controls to China even more important, and DeepSeek-V3 is not a unique breakthrough but an expected point on a cost reduction curve (Dario Amodei)

Nearly two months after GM said it would stop funding Cruise robotaxi development, GM says it expects to save up to $1B annually thanks to the move (Rebecca Bellan/TechCrunch)

Garmin smartwatch users report their devices are bricking after starting any activity that uses GPS; Garmin says it is looking into the issue (Victoria Song/The Verge)

Valencia-based Quibim, which is developing foundational AI models for medical imaging, raised a $50M Series A co-led by Asabys and Buenavista (Paul Sawers/TechCrunch)

Sources: some banks led by Morgan Stanley are in talks to sell up to $3B of senior secured debt tied to Twitter's buyout, boosted by a claim to a ~$6B xAI stake (Bloomberg)

Meta says Meta AI will now use account info from across Meta's apps to give personalized suggestions; users can also ask Meta AI to "remember" specific things (Kyle Wiggers/TechCrunch)

DeepSeek debuts a family of multimodal, MIT-licensed open-source models including Janus-Pro-7B, which it claims beats OpenAI's DALL-E 3 in GenEval and DPG-Bench (Kyle Wiggers/TechCrunch)

Sources: Meta set up four war rooms to analyze DeepSeek's tech, two focusing on how High-Flyer reduced training costs, one on what data High-Flyer may have used (The Information)

Betting data from Illinois, New Jersey, and Colorado shows how parlays are driving revenue growth for FanDuel, DraftKings, and other US sports betting companies (Wall Street Journal)

A bear case for Nvidia: competition from hardware startups, inference-heavy "reasoning" models, DeepSeek's training and inference efficiency breakthroughs, more (Jeffrey Emanuel/YouTubeTranscript ...)

A look at the growing prevalence of LLM-written posts that have been backdated and attributed to human authors on Physics Forums, which was founded in 2001 (Hall of Impossible Dreams)

DeepSeek, which started as a deep-learning research branch of Chinese quant hedge fund High-Flyer, is now giving US AI giants a run for their money (Zeyi Yang/Wired)

After pouring tens of millions into Trump's campaign, the crypto industry has been paid back handsomely during his first week back, with EOs, rule changes, more (MacKenzie Sigalos/CNBC)

Rather than weakening China's AI capabilities, US sanctions appear to be driving startups like DeepSeek to innovate by prioritizing efficiency and collaboration (Caiwei Chen/MIT Technology Review)

Some crypto executives worry Trump's memecoin undercut the industry's credibility at the very moment crypto is seeking a prominent place in mainstream finance (New York Times)

Similarweb: RedNote's DAUs in the US fell by 54% on January 20 when the TikTok ban was put on hold, after reaching a high of 32.5M DAUs on the day of the ban (Sarah Perez/TechCrunch)

Retro Biosciences, the Sam Altman-backed startup that wants to use AI to develop therapies for extending human lifespan by a decade, is raising a $1B Series A (Financial Times)

Perplexity launches Perplexity Assistant in its Android app, which can take "multi-app actions" like hailing a ride, initially free for users in 15 languages (Kyle Wiggers/TechCrunch)

Sam Altman denies Musk's Stargate claim that "they don't" have the money, adding "what is great for the country isn't always what's optimal for your companies" (Kyle Wiggers/TechCrunch)

DeepSeek's new MIT-licensed AI models can be accessed via DeepSeek's API at a fraction of the cost of comparable OpenAI models but there are censorship concerns (Radhika Rajkumar/ZDNET)

Parrot Analytics estimates Severance season 1 earned $200M+, with ~50% coming in the year following the finale; Ted Lasso generated $609.4M from Q3'20 to Q3'24 (Max Goldbart/Deadline)

Stuttgart-based robotics startup Sereact, which develops Vision Language Action Models and whose customers include BMW and Daimler Truck, raised a $26M Series A (PYMNTS.com)

Metropolis, an AI-powered parking service, acquires Oosto, formerly known as AnyVision, for just $125M in stock, well under the $380M it raised over the years (Ingrid Lunden/TechCrunch)