January 31, 2026

Waymo robotaxi hits a child near an elementary school in Santa Monica: The child, whose age is not public, sustained minor injuries according to Waymo. The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration is investigating. Read More

HomeBoost's app will show you where to save on your utility bills: The startup is partnering with utilities to help homeowners determine the best upgrades to cut their energy use. Read More

Spotify rolls out group chats: Spotify users can now share the podcasts, playlists, and audiobooks they're listening to with up to 10 people. Read More

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Bluesky issues its first transparency report, noting rise in user reports and legal demands: Bluesky's first transparency reports tackle moderation, regulatory compliance, account takedowns, and more. The number of government legal requests went up fivefold. Read More

OpenClaw's AI assistants are now building their own social network: The viral personal AI assistant formerly known as Clawdbot has a new shell — again. After briefly rebranding as Moltbot, it has now picked OpenClaw as its new name. Read More

Apple buys Israeli startup Q.ai as the AI race heats up: Q.ai is an Israeli startup specializing in imaging and machine learning, particularly technologies that enable devices to interpret whispered speech and enhance audio in noisy environments. Read More

The price gap between Waymo and Uber is narrowing: A trip in a Waymo robotaxi still costs more, on average, than a comparable ride in a human-driven Uber or a Lyft. But that gap is narrowing, according to new data published Tuesday by Obi, a company that aggregates real-time pricing and pickup times across multiple ride-hailing services. Read More

Elon Musk's SpaceX, Tesla, and xAI in talks to merge, according to reports: This merger would bring the Grok chatbot, Starlink satellites, and SpaceX rockets together under one corporation. Read More

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Tiny startup Arcee AI built a 400B-parameter open source LLM from scratch to best Meta's Llama: 30-person startup Arcee AI has released a 400B model called Trinity, which it says is one of the biggest open source foundation models from a U.S. company. Read More