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2026-01-30 07:41:35

Apple shared its latest quarterly financial results today and the news is once again very, very good for the Cupertino company. The quarter ending December 27, 2025 marked "the best-ever quarter" for iPhones, which generated a record high revenue of nearly $85.27 billion for the business. Apple doesn't disclose the number of devices sold any more, but even with the prices for many of its latest generation of smartphones surpassing $1,000 a pop, that's still got to be a heck of a lot of iPhones. 

"The demand for iPhone was simply staggering," CEO Tim Cook said on the conference call to discuss the results. "This is the strongest iPhone lineup we've ever had and by far the most popular."

That wasn't the only massive number in the earnings report. Services revenue also logged its biggest quarter yet, growing 14 percent over the same period last year to reach just over $30 billion. It was also Apple's biggest quarter to date for total revenue, which was nearly $143.76 billion for the already fabulously wealthy company.

2026-01-30 06:47:49

The National Center for Missing and Exploited Children said it received more than 1 million reports of AI-related child sexual abuse material (CSAM) in 2025. The "vast majority" of that content was reported by Amazon, which found the material in its training data, according to an investigation by Bloomberg. In addition, Amazon said only that it obtained the inappropriate content from external sources used to train its AI services and claimed it could not provide any further details about where the CSAM came from. 

"This is really an outlier," Fallon McNulty, executive director of NCMEC’s CyberTipline, told Bloomberg. The CyberTipline is where many types of US-based companies are legally required to report suspected CSAM. “Having such a high volume come in throughout the year begs a lot of questions about where the data is coming from, and what safeguards have been put in place.” She added that aside from Amazon, the AI-related reports the organization received from other companies last year included actionable data that it could pass along to law enforcement for next steps. Since Amazon isn’t disclosing sources, McNulty said its reports have proved “inactionable.”

"We take a deliberately cautious approach to scanning foundation model training data, including data from the public web, to identify and remove known [child sexual abuse material] and protect our customers," an Amazon representative said in a statement to Bloomberg. The spokesperson also said that Amazon aimed to over-report its figures to NCMEC in order to avoid missing any cases. The company said that it removed the suspected CSAM content before feeding training data into its AI models. 

Safety questions for minors have emerged as a critical concern for the artificial intelligence industry in recent months. CSAM has skyrocketed in NCMEC's records; compared with the more than 1 million AI-related reports the organization received last year, the 2024 total was 67,000 reports while 2023 only saw 4,700 reports. 

In addition to issues such as abusive content being used to train models, AI chatbots have also been implicated in several dangerous or tragic cases involving young users. OpenAI and Character.AI have both been sued after teenagers planned their suicides with those companies' platforms. Meta is also being sued for alleged failures to protect teen users from sexually explicit conversations with chatbots.

2026-01-30 05:17:40

Two Elon Musk companies are reportedly planning to merge. On Thursday, Reuters reported that SpaceX and xAI are holding merger talks ahead of a planned IPO. Part of their plan is to launch AI data centers into space (but unfortunately, only as far as Earth's orbit).

Last week, it was reported that Musk planned to take SpaceX public despite having once said it wouldn’t happen until the company had a presence on Mars. Now, the IPO could happen as early as this year. Shares of xAI would reportedly be exchanged for shares in SpaceX under the merger. Reuters reports that two entities were set up in Nevada on January 21 to facilitate the deal.

If the idea of two Musk companies becoming one sounds familiar, that's because it happened less than a year ago. In March 2025, xAI bought X, putting Grok (known for nonconsensual "nudifying" images) and X (infamous for being a far-right hellscape) together under one unholy roof.

The latest idea Musk is pitching is blasting AI data centers off into space. At last week's gathering of the rich and powerful in Davos, Switzerland, he said, "The lowest cost place to put AI will be in space. And that will be true within two years, maybe three at the latest." The idea is that data centers in orbit could harness solar power and reduce cooling costs. However, industry analysts and executives consider it a risky bet, questioning whether the savings would warrant the massive investment. If or when the AI bubble bursts, the plan could go down in flames — if not literally, then figuratively.

2026-01-30 04:40:01

The Internet Archive has often been a valuable resource for journalists, from it's finding records of deleted tweets or providing academic texts for background research. However, the advent of AI has created a new tension between the parties. A few major publications have begun blocking the nonprofit digital library's access to their content based on concerns that AI companies' bots are using the Internet Archive's collections to indirectly scrape their articles.

"A lot of these AI businesses are looking for readily available, structured databases of content," Robert Hahn, head of business affairs and licensing for The Guardian, told Nieman Lab. "The Internet Archive’s API would have been an obvious place to plug their own machines into and suck out the IP."

The New York Times took a similar step. "We are blocking the Internet Archive's bot from accessing the Times because the Wayback Machine provides unfettered access to Times content — including by AI companies — without authorization," a representative from the newspaper confirmed to Nieman Lab. Subscription-focused publication the Financial Times and social forum Reddit have also made moves to selectively block how the Internet Archive catalogs their material.

Many publishers have attempted to sue AI businesses for how they access content used to train large language models. To name a few just from the realm of journalism:

• The New York Times sued OpenAI and Microsoft

• The Center for Investigative Reporting sued OpenAI and Microsoft

• The Wall Street Journal and New York Post sued Perplexity

• A group of publishers including The Atlantic, The Guardian and Politico sued Cohere

• Penske Media sued Google

• The New York Times and the Chicago Tribune sued Perplexity

Other media outlets have sought financial deals before offering up their libraries as training material, although those arrangements seem to provide compensation to the publishing companies rather than the writers. And that's not even delving into the copyright and piracy issues also being fought against AI tools by other creative fields, from fiction writers to visual artists to musicians. The whole Nieman Lab story is well worth a read for anyone who has been following any of these creative industries’ responses to artificial intelligence.

2026-01-30 03:29:13

As fans and media prepare to descend on the Bay Area for Super Bowl LX, what does a high-tech city like San Francisco do? Why, call in the robotaxis, of course. On Thursday, Alphabet's Waymo began offering fully autonomous rides at San Francisco International Airport (SFO).

There are some limits. For now, SFO access is restricted to "a select number of riders." However, access will gradually expand over the coming months. The service is also limited to the SFO Rental Car Center (pickups and drop-offs) at launch. Waymo says it will expand to other airport locations, including terminals, "in the future."

The San Francisco Standard notes that SFO is now the third airport in Waymo's repertoire. The San Francisco launch follows the company's service at Phoenix Sky Harbor and San Jose Mineta. As for the Bay Area, Waymo now serves more than 260 square miles in the region.

Unfortunately, this isn't Waymo's only appearance in the news this week. On Wednesday, the company said one of its robotaxis struck a child, who sustained minor injuries. The incident took place on January 23 in Santa Monica. The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) has opened an investigation.

2026-01-30 03:00:17

Apple has acquired Israel-based startup Q.ai, a move that could provide a much-needed boost to the tech giant's capabilities in artificial intelligence. Although Apple has not disclosed terms of the deal, sources told Financial Times that the arrangement is reportedly valued at nearly $2 billion. If that figure is accurate, the Q.ai acquisition marks Apple's second largest acquisition to date, followed by its purchase of Beats for $3 billion back in 2014.

Johny Srouji, Apple’s senior vice president of hardware technologies, said in a statement that Q.ai "is a remarkable company that is pioneering new and creative ways to use imaging and machine learning." Apple hasn't shared any specifics about how it plans to leverage the startup, but its past work indicates the possibility of Apple moving deeper into AI-powered wearables. "Patents filed by Q.ai show its technology being used in headphones or glasses, using 'facial skin micro movements' to communicate without talking," the Times reported. 

The startup's founding team, including CEO Aviad Maizels, will join Apple as part of the deal. This acquisition marks Maizels' second sale to Apple; he previously founded a three-dimensional hearing business called PrimeSense that Apple bought back in 2013.

For several months, many tech insiders have speculated that an acquisition might be Apple's best path forward to catching up in the AI race. In the company's Q3 earnings call in July 2025, CEO Tim Cook acknowledged that "We’re open to M&A that accelerates our roadmap." A deal like this one could eventually lead to Apple developing its own fully in-house AI chatbot rather than relying on a competitor like Google to power artificial intelligence in its Siri assistant.