Passing the collection plate again: OpenAI is seeking roughly $50 billion from Middle East sovereign wealth funds in a funding round expected to close by the end of Q1 that would value the company at about $750-$830 billion. - Yahoo

ARR you not entertained? OpenAI added more than $1 billion in annual recurring revenue in the past month from its API business, CEO Sam Altman said. - Business Insider

Your therapy chat, their engagement opportunity: Sen. Markey sent a letter to OpenAI and other companies about privacy implications of using personal conversations to target ads, in addition to other potentially deceptive and manipulative practices. - The Verge

Jerry Tworek, OpenAI's former VP of research, said on the Core Memory podcast that Google's Gemini gains reflect "OpenAI's fumble," warning OpenAI's "Code Red" competitive pressure pushes firms toward short-term product growth over risky, long‑horizon research. - Business Insider

OpenAI runs a single-primary Azure PostgreSQL server with nearly 50 geo-distributed read replicas to support ~800 million ChatGPT users, handling millions of QPS, >10x load growth, low double-digit-ms p99 latency, five-nines availability and one SEV-0 incident in 12 months. - OpenAI

A great use of Claude Code would be to migrate off Oracle to Postgres.

Inside Thinking Machines turmoil: On Jan. 12-14, Thinking Machines Lab co-founders Sam Schoenholz, Barret Zoph and Luke Metz pressed for technical control; CEO Mira Murati fired CTO Zoph, and OpenAI immediately rehired Zoph, Metz and Schoenholz amid funding and product struggles. - The New York Times

Five Ways People Are Using Claude Code - The New York Times

We Have No Idea How to Code. So We Got Claude to Code This Article for Us. - The Wall Street Journal

Anthropic redesigned a Python-based TPU-simulator take-home used since early 2024 (over 1,000 completions, dozens hired) after Claude Opus 4 and 4.5 matched or exceeded human performance under time limits, and released the original test and benchmarks publicly. - Anthropic

Anthropic update: turning 'Todos' into 'Tasks' - X (formerly Twitter)

Man set up Claude Code instances to talk to each other, they started beefing with each other and his account got banned. Not sure why they didn't just cut him off when he ran out of tokens but maybe one said something stupid. - Hugo Daniel

At Davos, NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang called AI "the largest infrastructure buildout in human history," described a five-layer stack and said 2025 saw more than $100 billion in VC funding into AI-native companies. - NVIDIA Blog

China signaled it would allow H200 imports, approving Alibaba, Tencent and ByteDance Ltd. to move to the next stage of preparations for purchases, and companies will commit to buy a specified amount of domestic chips as a condition for approval. - Bloomberg

Intel inside, profits outside: Intel said it cannot meet surging demand for server CPUs used in AI data centers, forecasted Q1 2026 revenue of $11.7–$12.7 billion and adjusted EPS of $0, and saw shares fall about 13% after-hours. - Reuters

if there’s a huge capacity shortage and you’re still not making money something’s wrong

Enterprise 30TB TLC SSD prices rose ~257% from $3,062 in Q2 2025 to nearly $11,000 in Q1 2026, raising the SSD-to-HDD capacity cost ratio to 16.4x and prompting hybrid SSD+HDD adoption as suppliers warn shortages into 2027. - Tom's Hardware

suppliers trying to inflate the Hindenburg with a bicycle pump

Davos leaders, including BlackRock CEO Larry Fink and Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei, said AI is not a bubble, urged major investment, warned of automation-driven inequality; Elon Musk predicted Optimus robots by 2027 and flagged electricity as key constraint. - Rest of World

At Davos, Anthropic's Dario Amodei said human-level AGI is coming soon while DeepMind's Demis Hassabis and Yann LeCun said it's more distant, even as Cognizant projects roughly $4.5 trillion in U.S. labor productivity from AI if firms reorganize. - Fortune

JPMorgan CEO Jamie Dimon wants to give Feds a kill switch: said at Davos JPMorgan runs about 500 AI use cases and an internal LLM used weekly by roughly 50,000 employees, and urged governments to have power to limit AI-driven mass layoffs and mandate phased deployments. - Fortune

Goldman Sachs CEO David Solomon said he rejects an AI-driven 'job apocalypse,' citing Chief Economist Jan Hatzius's research that predicts short-term dislocation but no long-term rise in unemployment, and unveiled One GS 3.0 to automate six core processes. - Fortune

WTO chief sees potential upside for global trade in 2026 driven by an AI boom. - Bloomberg

States vs. Feds after Trump signed an executive order directing DOJ to form a task force to sue states over AI laws and ordering Commerce to withhold federal broadband funds from states with "onerous" AI rules. - MIT Technology Review

South Korea issued new artificial intelligence regulations that are stricter than those in Western countries. - The Wall Street Journal

Experts warn of threat to democracy from ‘AI bot swarms’ infesting social media - the Guardian

Government of the shitposters, by the shitposters, for the shitposters: Shite House posts digitally altered image of woman arrested after ICE protest - the Guardian

White House reposts fake AI image, says "Enforcement of the law will continue. The memes will continue. Thank you for your attention to this matter." - X (formerly Twitter)

Google launched free, on-demand full-length SAT practice exams in Gemini with Princeton Review–vetted questions and immediate AI feedback and explanations, and Google DeepMind's Carol Walport said more exams are planned. - Business Insider

Brookings' summary of an NBER study finds 37.1 million U.S. workers in the top quartile of occupational AI exposure, about 6.1 million of whom face high exposure and low adaptive capacity and 86% of those are women. - The Register

Science is drowning in AI slop. - The Atlantic

Fei-Fei Li's AI startup World Labs is in funding talks that value the company at $5 billion. - Bloomberg

Investors and VCs told NYNext that New York City, with a dense mix of industries and renewed capital inflows—raising about 10× Miami's venture funding last quarter—is positioned to lead an AI-driven startup boom enabling cheaper, solo entrepreneurship. - New York Post

wild…leading researcher publishes a breakthrough small model, giving Samsung significant AI street cred, immediately leaves company because her 'life became hell' - X (formerly Twitter)

enterprise brain damage or mercurial genius?

Tesla claims to launch paid robotaxi rides in Austin with no safety driver, but a chase car appears to be following every ride. - TechCrunch

The lived experience of everyone who's ever built an agent…note, this joke was made by an agent - Bsky

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