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Source: Amazon plans to expand Haul, the ultracheap Temu-like shopping site it launched in the US in November, to countries in Europe starting this year (Theo Wayt/The Information)

NYT Connections hints and answers for Saturday, March 1 (game #629)

Memo: Sergey Brin says Google could reach AGI if employees worked harder and were in the office more, saying "60 hours a week is the sweet spot of productivity" (Nico Grant/New York Times)

Mozilla responds to backlash over Firefox's new Terms of Use, which critics have called out for being overly broad, and says it won't use people's data for AI (Sarah Perez/TechCrunch)

Sources: Apollo Global is in talks to lead a ~$35B financing package for Meta to help develop US data centers; Meta outlined plans to invest $65B on AI in 2025 (Bloomberg)

Apple unveils new child safety features, including updated age ratings, simplified setup for Child Accounts, and an API to let developers confirm age range (Juli Clover/MacRumors)

Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang says next-generation AI models will need 100 times more compute than older models as a result of new reasoning approaches (Kif Leswing/CNBC)

Google redesigns Results About You, its tool for requesting the removal of Search results with personal info, adding a new hub and the ability to update results (Jeremy Gan/Engadget)

NYT Connections hints and answers for Thursday, February 27 (game #627)

Letter: US DNI Tulsi Gabbard calls the UK's order for Apple to add an iCloud backdoor an "egregious" violation of Americans' rights and plans a legal review (Joseph Menn/Washington Post)

Microsoft rolls out unlimited access to Voice and Think Deeper, powered by Open AI's o1 model, to all Copilot users for free (Tom Warren/The Verge)

Resignation letter: 21 DOGE staffers, who previously worked at the USDS, say they won't use their technical expertise to "dismantle critical public services" (Associated Press)

Sensor Tower: during Grok 3's release week, Grok mobile app downloads rose over 10x week over week; Similarweb: US web app daily visits rose from ~189K to 900K+ (Kyle Wiggers/TechCrunch)

Perplexity teases a web browser "for agentic search" called Comet that is "coming soon" (Kyle Wiggers/TechCrunch)

As the Trump administration neuters the PCLOB and reviews the EO behind the EU-US Data Privacy Framework, the EU should stop moving to US clouds (Bert Hubert's writings)

Alibaba pledges to invest more than $53B on AI infrastructure, including new data centers, over the next three years (Bloomberg)

xAI's Grok had "Ignore all sources that mention Elon Musk/Donald Trump spread misinformation" in its instruction set for generating search results (Wes Davis/The Verge)

Google prices Veo 2, its new AI video model, at $0.50 per second of generated video; in December 2024, OpenAI offered Sora to its ChatGPT Plus and Pro subs (Anthony Ha/TechCrunch)

Filing: Amazon estimated the fair value of its stake in Anthropic at $14B at the end of December 2024, after agreeing to invest $8B in Anthropic so far (Eugene Kim/Business Insider)

DefiLlama: Bybit experienced a "bank run" of over $4B after the ~$1.5B hack, leading to a ~$5.5B total outflow; CEO says "about 50%" of funds were withdrawn (Francisco Rodrigues/CoinDesk)

X is rolling out Grok-powered AI tools for advertisers to generate ready-to-use ad copy and imagery and provide campaign performance analysis (Kendra Barnett/Adweek)

An investigation details how Chinese cybercrime groups are turning phished payment card data into new Apple or Google wallets for online and in-store use (Brian Krebs/Krebs on Security)

OpenAI says it found evidence of an AI-powered surveillance tool used by a Chinese security operation to identify anti-China posts on social media in the West (Cade Metz/New York Times)

Sources: SoftBank VF and others marked up ByteDance's valuation to $400B+; SoftBank puts zero value on TikTok's US operations but factored in AI business Doubao (Bloomberg)

FTC Chair Andrew Ferguson announces an inquiry into "Big Tech censorship", which he says is "un-American" and "potentially illegal" (Emily Birnbaum/Bloomberg)