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Vlad Savov / Bloomberg: Appfigures: DeepSeek has topped the list of the most downloaded mobile apps across 140 markets, with India accounting for 15.6% of all downloads since launch  —  - The chatbot is most-downloaded app across Android and iPhone  — Chinese startup has upended thinking about AI development

Kirsten Korosec / TechCrunch: California DMV: a total of 4.5M autonomous vehicle test miles were logged in 2024, down 50% YoY, with driverless testing falling 83% YoY to just 552,895 miles  —  Tech companies developing self-driving vehicle technology have tapped the brakes on testing on California's public roads …

MK Manoylov / The Block: Web3 domain infrastructure firm D3 Global raised a $25M Series A led by Paradigm, and plans to launch a decentralized network called Doma Protocol  —  - D3 Global is building tools for domain-based lending, fractional ownership, digital identity and other financial use cases.

Daniel Kuhn / The Block: Coinbase acquires Spindl, the on-chain advertising platform founded by Antonio Garcia-Martinez, an ex-Facebook staffer and the author of the book Chaos Monkeys  —  - Coinbase has acquired Spindl, the onchain advertising platform founded by famous tech commentator Antonio Garcia-Martinez.

Deepa Seetharaman / Wall Street Journal: When asked in an AMA if OpenAI would release model weights and research, Sam Altman said “we are discussing” and “it's also not our current highest priority”  —  CEO of the ChatGPT maker says his company has been ‘on the wrong side of history’ with open-source software

The Information: OpenAI told some shareholders ChatGPT had 15.5M paid subscribers in 2024, up from 5.8M in 2023, and usage of OpenAI's API increased seven times  —  Paid subscribers to ChatGPT nearly tripled to 15.5 million last year from 5.8 million a year earlier, OpenAI recently told some shareholders …

Simon Willison's Weblog: OpenAI's o3-mini costs $1.10 per 1M input tokens and $4.40 per 1M output tokens, cheaper than GPT-4o, which costs $2.50 and $10, and o1, which costs $15 and $60  —  OpenAI's o3-mini is out today.  As with other o-series models it's a slightly difficult one to evaluate …

Bloomberg: Docs: Amazon will spend $16B to build two Mississippi data center campuses, up from $10B it announced a year ago, underscoring rising AI infrastructure costs  —  - Project tally includes $7.2 billion for servers and other gear  — Majority of 1,000 data center jobs created will be contractors

Austin American-Statesman: Texas Gov. Greg Abbott issues a ban on the use of Chinese-backed apps DeepSeek, Lemon8, Moomoo, RedNote, Tiger Brokers, and Webull on government-issued devices  —  Texas Gov. Greg Abbott issued a ban on the use of Chinese-backed artificial intelligence and social media apps on government-issued devices Friday afternoon.

Jamie Crawley / CoinDesk: CCData: the supply of stablecoins on Solana jumped by 112% in January to a record high of $11.1B, as the launch of the TRUMP memecoin caused a wave of inflows  —  This coincided with the launch of Donald Trump's memecoin $TRUMP which caused a wave of inflows to the network  —  What to know:

Wired: Researchers: DeepSeek's R1 failed to detect or block any of the 50 malicious prompts that were tested; Adversa: R1 is vulnerable to many jailbreaking tactics  —  Security researchers tested 50 well-known jailbreaks against DeepSeek's popular new AI chatbot.  It didn't stop a single one.

Mark Gurman / Bloomberg: Sources: Apple canceled a project to build AR glasses that would pair with the Mac; the company is still working on successors to the Vision Pro  —  - Headset group struggles to find path forward after Vision Pro  — Canceled device would have rivaled Meta's future AR glasses

Tom Warren / The Verge: O3-mini will be available to all ChatGPT users, the first time free users of the chatbot will be able to try out OpenAI's reasoning models  —  o3-mini should outperform o1 and provide faster, more accurate answers.  —  o3-mini should outperform o1 and provide faster, more accurate answers.