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Sources: Waymo nears a $16B round, valuing it at $110B; Alphabet will contribute $12B+, with a16z, Dragoneer, Mubadala, Sequoia, and DST Global participating (Financial Times)

Bitcoin has fallen to ~$78K, down ~7% in 24 hours, over 12% in the past week, and down ~37% since its ATH in Oct. 2025; Ethereum dropped ~18% in the past week (Bloomberg)

How the music industry is split over AI; some labels signed licensing deals for AI that mirror revenue splits they use with YouTube for user-generated content (Anna Nicolaou/Financial Times)

Filing: SpaceX is seeking FCC approval to launch 1M satellites into space; SpaceX claims the fleet will orbit the Earth and use the sun to power AI data centers (Reuters)

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 (Sarah Perez/TechCrunch)

Social media app UpScrolled hits #1 on Apple's US app store following allegations that TikTok suppresses anti-ICE videos; its founder says it crossed 1M users (Conor Murray/Forbes)

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 (Financial Times)

Decagon, which offers AI-powered customer service agents, raised a $250M Series D led by Coatue and Index Ventures at a $4.5B valuation, up from $1.5B in June (Shirin Ghaffary/Bloomberg)

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 (Kyle Kucharski/ZDNET)

Following UK CMA's proposals, Google says it is exploring controls to let websites opt out of AI Overviews and AI Mode (Barry Schwartz/Search Engine Roundtable)

The UK CMA proposes measures to let publishers opt out of content scraping for Google's AI Overviews and AI training without losing visibility in search results (Robert Booth/The Guardian)

OpenAI for Science launches Prism, a free LaTeX-based text editor that embeds GPT-5.2 to assist in scientific paper drafting and citation management (Will Douglas Heaven/MIT Technology Review)

Google expands its AI Plus subscription to 35 new countries and territories, including the US at $7.99/month, with "enhanced access" to Gemini 3 Pro and more (Abner Li/9to5Google)

DeepSeek launches DeepSeek-OCR 2, an upgraded optical character recognition model that replaces OpenAI-developed CLIP framework with Alibaba's Qwen2-0.5b (Ben Jiang/South China Morning Post)

In a 38-page essay, Dario Amodei warns of civilization-level damage from superintelligent AI, questioning whether humanity has the maturity to handle such power (Axios)

Many AI founders now find it necessary to raise at valuations requiring absolute domination of the field; Brex, once valued at $12B, shows the downsides of this (Jason Lemkin/SaaStr)

A profile of Mercor, which pays about $2M daily to ~30K experts training AI models at $95/hour on average, with roles like radiologists earning up to $375/hour (Bethan Staton/Financial Times)

Power prices surge in Virginia, home to the world's largest data center hub; record demand is expected during the winter storm, partly due to data center needs (Tim McLaughlin/Reuters)

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 (Jonathan Vanian/CNBC)

Tests show GPT-5.2 on ChatGPT citing Grokipedia as a source on a wide range of queries, including on Iranian conglomerates and Holocaust deniers (Aisha Down/The Guardian)

Source: OpenAI mulls new tools to help business users understand the financial benefits of using its products and has made changes to its sales force strategy (The Information)

SanDisk's stock has surged ~1,000% in the past five months, driven by AI demand for its chips, which have a cost advantage thanks to its 20-year JV with Kioxia (Matt Phillips/Sherwood News)

Nifty Gateway, the NFT trading platform which had facilitated $300M in sales by mid-2021, enters withdrawal-only mode and plans to shut down on Feb. 23, 2026 (CoinDesk)

Source: Databricks obtained $1.8B in fresh debt and now has over $7B in debt ahead of a potential IPO; it raised $4B+ in December at a $134B valuation (Jordan Novet/CNBC)

Source: Binance considers reintroducing stock tokens after removing them in 2021; OKX, Kraken, Bitget, and others are expanding their tokenized stock offerings (Yueqi Yang/The Information)