Contemplations News
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- The US DOJ says at least two DOGE employees accessed Social Security data that was off-limits under a court ruling and shared agency data on third-party servers (April Rubin/Axios)
- The US FTC plans to appeal to revive its case accusing Meta of bolstering an illegal monopoly by acquiring Instagram and WhatsApp; Meta won the case in 2025 (Jody Godoy/Reuters)
- OpenAI rolls out age prediction on ChatGPT globally to identify users under 18 and apply automatic content protections as it prepares to introduce adult content (Juby Babu/Reuters)
- Filings from Elon Musk's OpenAI lawsuit detail Microsoft's decade-long OpenAI relationship, like establishing a new subsidiary for Sam Altman while he was fired (Todd Bishop/GeekWire)
- Greg Yang, one of the co-founders of xAI, is stepping down from the company after being diagnosed with Lyme disease (Carmen Arroyo/Bloomberg)
- Sources: AI inference startup Baseten raised $300M led by IVP and CapitalG at a $5B valuation, more than doubling its valuation; Nvidia invested $150M (Kate Clark/Wall Street Journal)
- World Economic Forum panel: Palantir CEO Alex Karp says AI-driven job displacement will "make it hard to imagine why we should have large-scale immigration" (Shona Ghosh/Bloomberg)
- Netflix adds a real-time voting feature for its Star Search reboot, available on mobile, smart TVs, and streaming devices, but not on a browser (Ivan Mehta/TechCrunch)
- Demis Hassabis says Chinese AI companies are about six months behind leading western labs and the response to DeepSeek's R1 in 2025 was a "massive overreaction" (Bloomberg)
- The World Economic Forum in Davos is now dominated by tech giants, whose interests shunt aside topics like climate change, as Trump and AI take center stage (Peter S. Goodman/New York Times)
- Setapp Mobile, one of the first alt iOS app stores launched in 2024 after the EU's DMA, plans to shut down, blaming "still-evolving and complex business terms" (Tim Hardwick/MacRumors)
- Ethernovia, which builds automotive ethernet chips and software, raised a $90M+ Series B led by Maverick Silicon (Duncan Riley/SiliconANGLE)
- Substack challenger Beehiiv expects to nearly double its annual revenue to $50M in 2026; it now has over 40,000 MAUs, including nearly 15,000 paying subscribers (Jaspreet Singh/Reuters)
- Ukraine says it plans to share nearly four years of combat data, including millions of hours of drone footage, with allies to help train AI models (Max Hunder/Reuters)
- Filings: Michael Saylor's Strategy has bought more than $3B in Bitcoin since January 5, marking its biggest two-week purchase since December 2024 (Melos Ambaye/Bloomberg)
- Legal AI startup Ivo, which aims to reduce hallucinations by breaking legal reviews into 400+ tasks, raised a $55M Series B, a source says at a $355M valuation (Aditya Soni/Reuters)
- Nielsen: Christmas Day 2025 set a record for US streaming usage with 55.1B minutes, or 54% of all TV viewing for the day, up by 3.9B minutes on Christmas 2024 (Rick Porter/The Hollywood Reporter)
- Portugal orders Polymarket to stop operations and blocks it in the country after heavy activity tied to its recent presidential election, with €110M+ in volume (Naga Avan-Nomayo/The Block)
- Humans&, founded by ex-Anthropic, xAI, and Google staff to build collaborative AI, raised a $480M seed from Nvidia, Jeff Bezos, and others at a $4.48B valuation (Cade Metz/New York Times)
- Sensor Tower: Reels accounted for 50%+ of all Instagram ads in 2025, up from 35% in 2024; Reels accounted for 46% of time spent on Instagram in the US in 2025 (Zach Vallese/CNBC)