SpaceX has acquired xAI. The combined company is valued at $1.25
trillion - the merger valued xAI at around $250 billion
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TLDR 2026-02-03
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📱
BIG TECH & STARTUPS
SPACEX, XAI TIE UP, FORMING $1.25 TRILLION COMPANY (3 MINUTE READ)
[9]
SpaceX has acquired xAI. The combined company is valued at $1.25
trillion - the merger valued xAI at around $250 billion. The merger is structured as a share exchange, with shares in xAI being converted
into 0.1433 shares of SpaceX stock. Employees will have the option to
cash out and sell their xAI shares back to the company.
ANTHROPIC IS ABOUT TO DROP SONNET 5 DURING SUPER BOWL WEEK (1 MINUTE
READ) [10]
Leaks show that a new model by Anthropic, branded as Claude Sonnet 5,
has an internal date string of February 3, 2026. It is unclear whether
this is a public launch date or an internal checkpoint. The timing
would coincide with the Super Bowl, which is an event where AI labs
have been ramping up mainstream marketing to chase consumer mindshare.
Early testing indicates the model already looks competitive on math
with today's frontier-tier models, and it shows even stronger coding
output than Claude Opus 4.5 in some workflows.
🚀
SCIENCE & FUTURISTIC TECHNOLOGY
WAYMO RAISES MASSIVE $16 BILLION ROUND AT $126 BILLION VALUATION,
PLANS EXPANSION TO 20+ CITIES (2 MINUTE READ) [11]
Waymo just closed a $16 billion funding round at a $126 billion
valuation. It plans to use the capital to expand to over 20 new cities
this year, including its first international markets, Tokyo and
London. The company's cars have driven 127 million fully autonomous
miles with a 90% reduction in serious injury crashes compared to human
drivers. It performed 15 million rides in 2025, a 3x growth from 2024.
GUINEA WORM ON TRACK TO BE 2ND ERADICATED HUMAN DISEASE; ONLY 10
CASES IN 2025 (2 MINUTE READ) [12]
The Guinea worm is a parasitic nematode found in waters that contain
small crustacean copepods. Humans can ingest them through contaminated
water, and this results in painful blisters, usually in the feet and
legs, that can cause searing pain as the worms fully emerge. The
disease can lead to complications such as secondary infections and
sepsis, which can in turn lead to temporary or permanent disability.
There were only 10 human cases in three countries in 2025 - down from
an estimated 3.5 million cases across 21 countries in 1986.
💻
PROGRAMMING, DESIGN & DATA SCIENCE
INTRODUCING THE CODEX APP (3 MINUTE READ) [13]
OpenAI has released a new macOS app for its Codex coding agent. The
app provides a nice UI over the capabilities of the Codex CLI agent
and adds new features, like first-class support for Skills and
Automations for running scheduled tasks. Automations are currently
restricted to only run when devices are powered on. OpenAI will enable cloud-based automations soon to resolve this limitation.
STOP BUILDING SYSTEMS FOR AGENTS (4 MINUTE READ) [14]
Today's systems are sub-optimal for AI agents as they waste context,
confuse models with unstructured output, and prioritize vision-based
human interaction over text-based LLMs. While some think this means we
need to build systems that treat LLMs as first-class citizens, that
approach is not totally required - if humans can live with it, LLMs
will eventually catch up. Real agent-native systems should be
radically observable and deterministic. It's better to focus on what
LLMs can do for humans rather than think about what humans can do for
LLMs.
🎁
MISCELLANEOUS
DISSECTING THE INTERNET'S MOST NOVEL CREATURE (6 MINUTE READ) [15]
Moltbook is an AI-only social network where tens of thousands of AI
agents post and comment while humans observe. The platform grew from
42 posts per day to 36,905 in 72 hours. Social networks typically have
90% of users lurking, 9% contributing occasionally, and 1% creating
the most content. AI agents are breaking that pattern. This post takes
a look at posts made on the platform and how they differ from
human-run social networks.
WHAT ORACLE HAS TO LOSE FROM OPENAI AND NVIDIA'S ROCKY RELATIONSHIP
(4 MINUTE READ) [16]
Nvidia's decision to potentially invest far less than $100 billion
into OpenAI raises big questions for Oracle, like whether OpenAI can
make good on its five-year, $300 billion contract with Oracle. Oracle
reported $523 billion of remaining performance obligations in
November, which represents contracted sales not yet recognized as
revenue. It plans to issue as much as $20 billion of common stock this
year as part of a broader plan to raise up to $50 billion through
equity and debt financing to expand its cloud-infrastructure business.
OpenAI has an estimated $1.4 trillion in commitments in total.
⚡
QUICK LINKS
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We are launching a brand new newsletter covering IT and enterprise
tech.
If you are an IT leader interested in writing for us, please send your
resume or LinkedIn to
itcurator@tldr.tech!
OPENAI AND THE NEW ANNOUNCEMENT ECONOMY (6 MINUTE READ) [17]
OpenAI's press releases are nothing more than strategic posturing.
INSIDE NVIDIA'S 10-YEAR EFFORT TO MAKE THE SHIELD TV THE MOST UPDATED
ANDROID DEVICE EVER (14 MINUTE READ) [18]
Nvidia released the first Shield Android TV in 2015, and support for
the set-top box is still going strong.
THE SHOVELWARE COMETH (2 MINUTE READ) [19]
Show HN posts per month more than doubled in the past year,
indicating that we may soon be overwhelmed by shovelware.
EXPLORING SOLUTIONS TO TACKLE LOW-QUALITY CONTRIBUTIONS ON GITHUB (2
MINUTE READ) [20]
GitHub is evaluating whether to add options to disable PRs entirely,
restrict PRs to collaborators, and delete a PR from the UI, and it is
exploring other ways to tackle low-quality contributions as AI
adoption increases.
TWO KINDS OF AI USERS ARE EMERGING. THE GAP BETWEEN THEM IS
ASTONISHING (8 MINUTE READ) [21]
There are power users, who are all in on adopting AI technology and
often not very technical, and then there are the people who generally
only use AI as a chatbot.
MOVE FAST, BUT OBEY THE RULES: CHINA'S VISION FOR DOMINATING AI (9
MINUTE READ) [22]
China's leadership has decided that AI will drive the country's
economic growth in the next decade, but it cannot allow the technology
to disrupt the stability of Chinese society and the Communist Party's
hold over it.
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