- The TikTok ban forced a dilemma on US tech companies: risk alienating a mercurial president or risk breaking federal law and face up to billions in penalties (New York Times)
- In email to X staff, Musk says "user growth is stagnant, revenue is unimpressive, and we're barely breaking even"; sources: banks plan to sell their debt in X (Wall Street Journal)
- Sources: ElevenLabs closed a $250M Series C led by ICONIQ Growth at a valuation of between $3B to $3.3B; it was initially looking for funding at a $4B valuation (TechCrunch)
- An interview with Google DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis on why he doesn't believe we will have AGI in 2025, putting Google's assistants in smart glasses, and more (Alex Kantrowitz/Big Technology)
- Similarweb: RedNote's DAUs in the US fell by 54% on January 20 when the TikTok ban was put on hold, after reaching a high of 32.5M DAUs on the day of the ban (Sarah Perez/TechCrunch)
- Apptopia: Meta's engagement is steady despite some calls for a Meta boycott over fact-checking and DEI changes; TikTok ban may have overshadowed user concerns (Pranav Dixit/Business Insider)
- ShopMy, which lets brands run influencer marketing efforts, raised a $77.5M Series B led by Bessemer and Bain, sources say at a $410M valuation vs. $80M in 2024 (Katie Deighton/Wall Street Journal)
- Retro Biosciences, the Sam Altman-backed startup that wants to use AI to develop therapies for extending human lifespan by a decade, is raising a $1B Series A (Financial Times)
- Zuckerberg says Meta is building an AI engineer that will "start contributing increasing amounts of code to our R&D efforts" and is planning a 2GW+ data center (Meghan Bobrowsky/Wall Street Journal)
- Sources: Trump's team members don't buy Zuckerberg's right-wing conversion as entirely genuine; one senior official says he has a "lot more ass-kissing" to do (Rolling Stone)
- Meta begins a "limited, early test" of ads in Threads in the US and Japan, with the goal of making the ads "as interesting as organic content" (Ivan Mehta/TechCrunch)
- Sources: Apple moved Kim Vorrath, a company veteran known for fixing troubled products, to its AI group to help improve Siri and Apple Intelligence (Mark Gurman/Bloomberg)
- The FBI warns that North Korean IT workers are abusing their access to steal source code and extort US companies that have been tricked into hiring them (Sergiu Gatlan/BleepingComputer)
- X refuses to remove a video of the stabbing of a Sydney bishop watched by Axel Rudakubana minutes before murdering three kids in UK's Southport last summer (Financial Times)
- The US SEC revokes SAB 121, a controversial accounting rule that forced banks to treat bitcoin and other tokens as a liability on their balance sheets (MacKenzie Sigalos/CNBC)