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)
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 (Marie Woolf/Globe and Mail)
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)
UpScrolled, a platform for sharing photos, videos, and text that claims political impartiality, says user growth has surged since TikTok's US takeover (Emma Roth/The Verge)
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)