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Russian President VLADIMIR PUTIN (L) and U.S. President DONALD TRUMP (right) during a bilateral meeting at the Group of 20 (G20) leaders summit in 2019.
Hard Numbers: Ukrainian refugees in Alaska brace for Putin’s arrival, Migrant ship capsizes, No such thing as food poisoning free lunch, and the Kremlin cracks down on messaging platforms
1,000: Around 1,000 Ukrainian refugees in Alaska will be watching closely when Russian President Vladimir Putin arrives on Friday to meet with US President Donald Trump. Those Alaskan refugees are just a small percentage of the 240,000 Ukrainian refugees who came to the US under Biden’s Uniting for Ukraine program, which was suspended after Trump took office earlier this year.
26: At least 26 migrants died and others remain missing after an overloaded boat from Libya capsized off Italy’s Lampedusa. The tragedy comes amid a 16% rise in Mediterranean crossings this year — a deadly reminder that Europe’s migration crisis shows no sign of easing.
360: Over 360 people were left with food poisoning in the Indonesian town of Sragen this week, after eating meals linked to President Prabowo Subianto's ambitious “free school lunch” initiative. The program has been plagued by food safety concerns, with over 1,000 reported cases of food poisoning recorded since its launch in January.
97.3 million: The Kremlin announced that it began restricting calls for some WhatsApp and Telegram users on Wednesday, after the platforms refused to share information with law enforcement. WhatsApp – which has 97.3 million users in Russia – has accused authorities of trying to block citizens rights to secure communications.
Perplexity AI apps on a smartphone and a computer screen.
Hard Numbers: Perplexity’s fundraising drive, CoreWeave prepares for an IPO, Next stop: India, Aardvark will forecast the weather, Bowdoin’s big AI gift
26 billion: CoreWeave, which is expected to start trading next Friday on the Nasdaq stock exchange, updated its prospectus on Thursday to disclose that it’s targeting up to a $26 billion valuation from its initial public offering. The Nvidia-backed company is a New Jersey-based cloud computing company that specializes in offering infrastructure to AI developers.
85: OpenAI and Meta are seeking partnerships with India’s Reliance Industries to expand their AI presence in the subcontinent, according to a report in The Information published Saturday. OpenAI, in particular, has floated the idea of distributing ChatGPT through Reliance’s wireless carrier, Jio, and even cutting subscription prices up to 85% for Indian customers.
10: Researchers have developed an AI weather prediction system called “Aardvark Weather,” which operates thousands of times more efficiently than conventional forecasting methods. This breakthrough from the University of Cambridge, Alan Turing Institute, Microsoft Research, and ECMWF can run on a desktop computer instead of supercomputers and uses just 10% of the input data that existing systems need. Aardvark is currently a research model and not yet available for public use.
50 million: Billionaire Reed Hastings, co-founder of Netflix, announced a donation to his alma mater, Bowdoin College, to the tune of $50 million on Monday. It’s a large gift for the small liberal arts college in Maine — the largest since its founding in 1794, according to the New York Times. Hastings said he wants Bowdoin to use the money to become a leader in studying the risks of AI and ethical questions associated with the technology.
The Meta logo, a keyboard, and robot hands are seen in this illustration taken on Jan. 27, 2025.
Meta’s next AI goal: building robots
The company behind Facebook is now plotting a major investment in building humanoid robots, according to an internal memo seen by various media outlets and first reported on Friday. The company is establishing a new robotics division to help people with physical tasks. The robots will be powered by Meta’s own Llama models and will be run by Marc Whitten, the former CEO of the autonomous vehicle company Cruise.
Meta’s robots will initially focus on aiding people with household chores, according to Bloomberg. But it has a long-term goal not only to sell to consumers but also to make the “underlying AI, sensors and software for robots that will be manufactured and sold by a range of companies.”Open AI CEO Sam Altman, left, and SoftBank Group CEO Masayoshi Son attend a marketing event in Tokyo, Japan, on Feb. 3, 2025.
Hard Numbers: OpenAI monster funding round, Meta’s glasses sales, Teens fall for AI too, The Beatles win at the Grammys, Anthropic’s move to reduce jailbreaking
1 million: Meta said that it sold 1 million units of its AI-enabled Ray-Ban smart glasses in 2024. It’s the first time the company has revealed sales numbers for its glasses, which retail between $299-$379.
35: Even young people get tricked by AI. A new report from Common Sense Media, a nonprofit advocacy group, found that 35% of teenagers aged 13–18 self-report being deceived by fake content online, including AI-generated media.
8: The Beatles won their eighth competitive Grammy Award on Sunday for the AI-assisted song “Now and Then.” A production team used AI to turn an unreleased John Lennon demo from the late 1970s into a polished track.
95: Anthropic announced a new “constitutional classifiers” system that in a test was 95% effective in blocking users from eliciting harmful content from its Claude models — up from 14% without the classifiers. Similar to the “prompt shields” Microsoft introduced last year, this is the latest effort to reduce “jailbreaking,” where users coerce AI models into ignoring their own content rules.A 3D-printed miniature model of U.S. President-elect Donald Trump and TikTok logo are seen in this illustration.
Hard Numbers: Could Microsoft buy TikTok?, Get me the Operator, Meta and ByteDance spend on AI, ElevenLabs’ billions, Ready for “Humanity’s Last Exam”?
2020: Microsoft is in talks to acquire TikTok, according to President Donald Trump. If that rings a bell it’s because Microsoft sought to buy the social media app in 2020, the last time Trump tried to ban the app. The deal fell through, and Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella later called the attempted TikTok takeover the “strangest thing I've ever worked on.” This time around, all the company has said on the matter is that it “has nothing to share at this time.” Meanwhile, Trump has also nodded to there being “great interest in TikTok” from several companies.
200: OpenAI announced Operator, its AI “agent,” in an experimental “research preview,” on Thursday. The point is that this model can not only chat with you but can actually perform tasks for you, like booking a restaurant reservation or ordering food for delivery. It’s currently available to subscribers of ChatGPT Pro, a $200-a-month subscription.
65 billion: Meta said Friday it expects to spend up to $65 billion in 2025, up from $40 billion in 2024, to fuel its growing AI ambitions. Meanwhile, TikTok’s Chinese parent company ByteDance has reportedly earmarked $21 billion, including $12 billion on AI infrastructure.
3 billion: The AI voice-cloning company ElevenLabs has raised a new $250 million funding round announced Friday that values it at around $3 billion. We tried out ElevenLabs’ software last year to clone our author’s voice and translate it into different languages.
3,000: Researchers at the Center for AI Safety and Scale AI released “Humanity’s Last Exam” on Thursday, a 3,000-question multiple-choice and short-answer test designed to evaluate AI models’ capabilities. With AI models succeeding at most existing tests, the researchers strived to create one that will be able to stump most — or at least show when they’ve become truly superintelligent. For now, they’re struggling: All of the current top models fail the exam with OpenAI’s o1 model scoring the highest at 8.3%.
Are we heading for a dystopian AI future?
“It’s a dystopian future where you no longer know if you’re talking to a person or you’re talking to a bot, and the bot knows more about you than you know about yourself,” Thompson warns, “The bot does not love you but does want your money, and knows to communicate so you feel love, give money, and the bot gets what it wants. That’s the worst future.”
Watch full episode: Big Tech under Trump 2.0
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Big Tech and Trump 2.0: Nicholas Thompson on AI, Media, and Policy
Listen: What will the future of tech policy look like in a second Trump administration? And how will changes in the tech world—everything from the proliferation of AI and bots to the fragmentation of social media—impact how people talk, interact, and find information online? On the GZERO World Podcast, Nicholas Thompson, CEO of The Atlantic, joins Ian Bremmer to discuss the intersection of technology, media, and politics as Donald Trump prepares to return to the White House. Trump had a contentious relationship with the tech industry in his first term, but this time around, tech leaders are optimistic Trump 2.0 will be good for business, buoyed by hopes of loosening AI regulations, a crypto boom, and a more business-friendly administration. What does Big Tech stand to gain–or lose–from a second Trump presidency? Will Elon Musk help usher US tech policy into a new era, or will he create more chaos in the White House? And how concerned should we be about the dangers of AI-generated content online? Thompson and Bremmer break down the big changes in Big Tech and where the industry goes from here.
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Los Angeles City firemen spray water to protect houses threatened by a brush fire in Griffith Park, Los Angeles May 8, 2007. The fire broke out in the hills above Los Angeles forcing evacuation of the city's largest park and zoo. Local media reported that authorities have arrested an arson suspect who was badly burned.
Hard Numbers: LA faces more fires, Meta makes big cuts, US inflation ticks up, Zaijian TikTok
6 million: Fire officials in Southern California said over 6 million people are still in danger from four major fires burning in the hills around Los Angeles, with hot, dry winds expected to worsen conditions over the weekend. Herculean efforts from fire crews have contained large sections of the Palisades and Eaton fires, but they are racing against time to save as many lives and houses as possible in America’s second-largest metropolis.
5: Meta, the company behind Facebook and Instagram, says it will lay off 5% of staff this year, amounting to about 3,600 jobs. The announcement comes amid major policy changes at the social media giant, including the end of content moderation for the US and the replacement of its public policy chief with a prominent Republican.
2.9: US inflation rose from 2.7% in November to 2.9% in December, the third straight month of accelerating price hikes while rates remain well above their target levels. That said, underlying pressures of inflation appear to be easing, and analysts still believe the Federal Reserve will be able to proceed with planned interest rate cuts in 2025 – though how the Trump administration’s planned tariffs will skew plans is yet to be seen.
700,000: Have you paid your cat tax? You’ll need to share a cute pic of your favorite feline if you join the 700,000 TikTok users who have set up shop over at rival Chinese video streaming app Xiaohongshu, also known by its English name RedNote. (The literal translation, “Little Red Book” was also the nickname of the collection of Mao Zedong’s sayings that Red Guards used to justify atrocities during the Cultural Revolution). So far, the “refugees” have had a playful welcome, with Chinese netizens teaching the newcomers Mandarin and engaging in absurdist humor in exchange for coveted pet pics.