Sources: no major players behind online scam centers in Myanmar were taken down in the recent China-led raids, and the construction of new centers continues (Hannah Beech/New York Times)

Hannah Beech / New York Times:
Sources: no major players behind online scam centers in Myanmar were taken down in the recent China-led raids, and the construction of new centers continues  —  A China-led crackdown on online fraud rescued thousands from Myanmar this month.  But this massive business of grift keeps growing.

Q&A with Jürgen Schmidhuber, the controversial AI pioneer and director of AI at Saudi Arabia's KAUST, on the kingdom's AI ambitions, DeepSeek, AGI, and more (Anup Kaphle/Rest of World)

Anup Kaphle / Rest of World:
Q&A with Jürgen Schmidhuber, the controversial AI pioneer and director of AI at Saudi Arabia's KAUST, on the kingdom's AI ambitions, DeepSeek, AGI, and more  —  With a long track record of groundbreaking research, outspoken opinions, and grand visions, Jürgen Schmidhuber …

Alibaba releases Wan 2.1, a family of open-source AI models for generating images and videos, available globally on Alibaba Cloud's ModelScope and Hugging Face (Reuters)

Reuters:
Alibaba releases Wan 2.1, a family of open-source AI models for generating images and videos, available globally on Alibaba Cloud's ModelScope and Hugging Face  —  Chinese e-commerce leader Alibaba (9988.HK) said on Wednesday its video- and image-generating artificial intelligence model Wan 2.1 …

The ECMWF says its new weather model broke ground by making global predictions freely available; testing shows it outperforms other models up to 15 days ahead (Clive Cookson/Financial Times)

Clive Cookson / Financial Times:
The ECMWF says its new weather model broke ground by making global predictions freely available; testing shows it outperforms other models up to 15 days ahead  —  Predictions for up to 15 days ahead expected to improve tracking of extreme events  —  Improved weather prediction using …

The EU's Court of Justice says Google's refusal to let Italian energy company Enel host an EV charging app on Android Auto might break EU competition rules (Edith Hancock/Wall Street Journal)

Edith Hancock / Wall Street Journal:
The EU's Court of Justice says Google's refusal to let Italian energy company Enel host an EV charging app on Android Auto might break EU competition rules  —  The ruling comes after a years-long dispute between the Italian energy company and the tech giant over how it manages access to Android Auto

CoinGecko: crypto trading volume on India's four largest exchanges more than doubled QoQ to $1.9B in Q4 2024, as many young Indians trade to supplement income (Jaspreet Kalra/Reuters)

Jaspreet Kalra / Reuters:
CoinGecko: crypto trading volume on India's four largest exchanges more than doubled QoQ to $1.9B in Q4 2024, as many young Indians trade to supplement income  —  Like thousands of his countrymen in far-flung places, flower-shop owner Ashish Nagose has been learning about trading cryptocurrencies …

An analysis of the $1.46B Bybit hack, by far the largest crypto heist of all time, ahead of Poly Network's $611M in 2021, and possibly the biggest theft ever (Elliptic)

Elliptic:
An analysis of the $1.46B Bybit hack, by far the largest crypto heist of all time, ahead of Poly Network's $611M in 2021, and possibly the biggest theft ever  —  On February 21st 2025, approximately $1.46 billion in cryptoassets were stolen from Bybit, a Dubai-based exchange.

Apple says it will spend $500B in the US over the next four years, hire 20,000 new US workers, and produce AI servers in Texas, after Tim Cook met with Trump (Mark Gurman/Bloomberg)

Mark Gurman / Bloomberg:
Apple says it will spend $500B in the US over the next four years, hire 20,000 new US workers, and produce AI servers in Texas, after Tim Cook met with Trump  —  - Company to begin producing Apple Intelligence servers in Texas  — $500 billion planned to be invested in US over next four years

Some hair stylists, bridal shops, and hardware stores say AI generated "inspo", taken from platforms like Pinterest, is warping customers' sense of reality (Tatum Hunter/Washington Post)

Tatum Hunter / Washington Post:
Some hair stylists, bridal shops, and hardware stores say AI generated “inspo”, taken from platforms like Pinterest, is warping customers' sense of reality  —  From bridal shops to med-spas to hardware stores, AI-generated photos are warping our sense of reality and hurting small businesses along the way.

China is increasingly pooling resources from the state and private sectors, including startups like Infinigence AI, to accelerate adoption of AI data centers (Financial Times)

Financial Times:
China is increasingly pooling resources from the state and private sectors, including startups like Infinigence AI, to accelerate adoption of AI data centers  —  Beijing is pooling resources from the private and state sectors to accelerate adoption of the fast-developing technology

Sources: Shein's 2024 sales were up 19% YoY to $38B, far below the forecasts made in 2023; some investors push Shein to cut pre-IPO valuation from $66B to ~$30B (Financial Times)

Financial Times:
Sources: Shein's 2024 sales were up 19% YoY to $38B, far below the forecasts made in 2023; some investors push Shein to cut pre-IPO valuation from $66B to ~$30B  —  Competition from Temu adds to pressure on fast-fashion group's valuation as it seeks approval for UK listing

Apple abandons the budget phone market with the iPhone 16e; sources: the M4 MacBook Air may launch in March and Apple may eventually meld the modem and main CPU (Mark Gurman/Bloomberg)

Mark Gurman / Bloomberg:
Apple abandons the budget phone market with the iPhone 16e; sources: the M4 MacBook Air may launch in March and Apple may eventually meld the modem and main CPU  —  Last week, Apple introduced the long-awaited successor to the iPhone SE: the iPhone 16e.  In doing so, it all but abandoned the budget smartphone market.

Some US school districts are adopting Sonny, an AI "wellbeing companion," to provide mental health support to students when there aren't enough counselors (Julie Jargon/Wall Street Journal)

Julie Jargon / Wall Street Journal:
Some US school districts are adopting Sonny, an AI “wellbeing companion,” to provide mental health support to students when there aren't enough counselors  —  Is a human-AI texting service the future of mental-health care for students?  —  Teens around the country are confiding …

A look at India's Svamitva Scheme, which has digitally mapped out landholdings using drones in 300K+ villages as of January 2025, as concerns mount over errors (Scroll.in)

Scroll.in:
A look at India's Svamitva Scheme, which has digitally mapped out landholdings using drones in 300K+ villages as of January 2025, as concerns mount over errors  —  The Svamitva scheme seeks to use drones to map out landholdings in inhabited rural areas.  But so far, work has been opaque and riddled with errors.

An investigation details how Chinese cybercrime groups are turning phished payment card data into new Apple or Google wallets for online and in-store use (Brian Krebs/Krebs on Security)

Brian Krebs / Krebs on Security:
An investigation details how Chinese cybercrime groups are turning phished payment card data into new Apple or Google wallets for online and in-store use  —  Carding — the underground business of stealing, selling and swiping stolen payment card data — has long been the dominion of Russia-based hackers.