Anthropic says its annualized revenue run rate has surpassed $30 billion and disclosed plans to secure roughly 3.5 gigawatts of next-generation Google TPU compute starting in 2027. Broadcom will supply the key chips and networking gear for the effort, the company announced. The Register reports: News of the two deals emerged today in a Broadcom regulatory filing that opens with two items of news. One is a "Long Term Agreement for Broadcom to develop and supply custom Tensor Processing Units ("TPUs") for Google's future generations of TPUs." Google and Broadcom have collaborated to produce custom TPUs. Broadcom CEO Hock Tan recently shared his opinion that hyperscalers don't have the skill to create custom accelerators and predicted Broadcom's chip business will therefore win over $100 billion of revenue from AI chips in 2027 alone.

Working on next-gen TPUs for Google will presumably help to make that prediction a reality. So will the second part of Broadcom's announcement: a "Supply Assurance Agreement for Broadcom to supply networking and other components to be used in Google's next-generation AI racks through up to 2031." Broadcom's filing also revealed one user of Google's next-gen TPU will be Anthropic, which starting in 2027, "will access through Broadcom approximately 3.5 gigawatts as part of the multiple gigawatts of next generation TPU-based AI compute capacity committed by Anthropic."

Walmart has secured patents for systems that use machine learning to forecast demand and automate pricing decisions, "pushing the U.S. retail behemoth into a debate over the use of algorithms to adjust product costs," reports the Financial Times. From the report: In January Walmart obtained a U.S. patent for a "system and method for dynamically and automatically updating item prices" to carry out markdowns in its ecommerce unit, a rapidly growing division that generated more than $150 billion in sales last year. Last week it received another patent for using machine learning to predict demand and recommend prices for goods. [...] Walmart said that both patents were "unrelated to dynamic pricing," as the patent issued in January was specific to markdowns and last week's patent was designed for merchant teams to make decisions, not the technology.

The patent granted in January involves an "end-to-end price markdown system" for ecommerce platforms such as Walmart.com based on data including predicted demand and consumers' price sensitivity. Last week's approved patent outlines ways to forecast demand and set prices at levels that will move stock over periods such as a week, a month or a quarter. "Example categories may include, for example, a food item, outdoor equipment, clothing, housewares, toys, workout equipment, vegetables, spices," according to the filing. The "demand forecasting and price recommendation" tool envisaged in the patent would incorporate sources including purchases, prices, methods of payment and customer ID, such as a passport or driver's license number. "Dynamic pricing or anything that smells like it is playing with fire," said Matt Hamory, a grocery industry consultant at AlixPartners, who cited "the goodwill that you can lose by getting customers to think or suspect or worry even slightly that you are doing things with pricing that are to your benefit and their detriment."

Van Allen Probe A, a 1,300-pound (600 kg) NASA satellite launched in 2012 to study Earth's radiation belts, is expected to re-enter Earth's atmosphere this week. While most of it is expected to burn up during descent, "some components may survive," reports the BBC. "The space agency said there is a one in 4,200 chance of being harmed by a piece of the probe, which it characterized as 'low' risk." From the report: The spacecraft is projected to re-enter around 19:45 EST (00:45 GMT) on Tuesday the U.S. Space Force predicted, according to Nasa, though there is a 24-hour margin of "uncertainty" in the timing. [...] The spacecraft and its twin, Van Allen Probe B, were on a mission to gather unprecedented data on Earth's two permanent radiation belts. It was not immediately clear where in Earth's atmosphere the satellite is projected to re-enter. NASA and the U.S. Space Force has said it will monitor the re-entry and update any predictions. [...] Van Allen Probe B is not expected to re-enter the Earth's atmosphere before 2030.

Astronomers have spotted a galaxy they believe is made of 99.9% dark matter, reports CNN — and it's so faint, it's almost invisible: CDG-2, which is about 300 million light-years from Earth, appears to be so rich in dark matter that it could belong to a hypothesized subset of low surface brightness galaxies called "dark galaxies," which are believed to contain few or no stars.... [Post-doctoral astrophysics/statistics fellow Dayi Li at the University of Toronto was lead author on a study about the discovery, and tells CNN] There is no strict definition of dark galaxies... but their existence is predicted by dark matter theories and cosmological simulations. "Where exactly do we draw the line in terms of how many stars they should have is still ambiguous, because not everything in astronomy is as clear-cut as we like," he said. "To be technically correct, CDG-2 is an almost-dark galaxy. But the importance of CDG-2 is that it nudges us much closer to getting to that truly dark regime, while previously we did not think a galaxy this faint could exist."

To observe CDG-2, the researchers used data from three telescopes — Hubble, the European Space Agency's Euclid space observatory and the Subaru Telescope in Hawaii — along with a novel approach that involved looking for objects called globular clusters. "These are very tight, spherical groupings of very olds stars, basically the relics of the first generation of star formation," Li said. Globular clusters are bright even if the surrounding galaxy is not, and previous observations have shown a relationship between them and the presence of dark matter in a galaxy, Li added. Because CDG-2 appears to have very few stars, there must be something else providing the mass that the clusters need to hold themselves together. Li and his colleagues assume that the source of the mass is dark matter.

The researchers found a set of four globular clusters in the Perseus Cluster, a group of thousands of galaxies immersed in a cloud of gas and one of the most massive objects in the universe. Further observations revealed a glow or halo around the globular clusters, suggesting the presence of a galaxy... Astronomers believe, Li explained, that after the formation of the clusters early in the galaxy's existence, larger surrounding galaxies stripped it of the hydrogen gas required to make more individual stars like our sun. "The material that this galaxy needed to continue to form stars was no longer there, so it was left with basically just a dark matter halo and the four globular clusters." The process, he added, would leave behind a skeleton or ghost of "a galaxy that pretty much just failed." As a result of this formation mechanism, the galaxy only has 0.005% of the brightness of our own galaxy, Li said...

Studying potential dark galaxies is important because they provide nearly pristine views of the behavior of dark matter, according to Neal Dalal, a researcher at the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics in Waterloo, Ontario, Canada, who was not involved with the study.
Robert Minchin, an astronomer at New Mexico's National Radio Astronomy Observatory, told CNN that "it seems likely that other very dark galaxies will be found by this method in the future."

BrianFagioli shares a report from NERDS.xyz: An international team of scientists has done something chemistry has never seen before. IBM, working alongside researchers from the University of Manchester, Oxford University, ETH Zurich, EPFL, and the University of Regensburg, has created and characterized a molecule whose electrons travel through its structure in a corkscrew-like pattern, fundamentally altering its chemical behavior. The findings were published today in Science. The molecule, known as C13Cl2, is the first experimental observation of what scientists call a half-Mobius electronic topology in a single molecule. To the researchers' knowledge, nothing like it has ever been synthesized, observed, or even formally predicted. And proving why it behaves the way it does required something equally extraordinary -- a quantum computer.

The whole thing started at IBM, where the molecule was assembled atom by atom from a custom precursor synthesized at Oxford. Working under ultra-high vacuum at near-absolute-zero temperatures, researchers used precisely calibrated voltage pulses to remove individual atoms one at a time. The result is an electronic structure that undergoes a 90-degree twist with each circuit through the molecule, requiring four complete loops to return to its starting phase. That is a topological property that has no counterpart anywhere in chemistry's existing record. What makes it even more interesting to folks who follow materials science is that this topology can be switched. The molecule can move reversibly between clockwise-twisted, counterclockwise-twisted, and untwisted states. That means electronic topology is not just a curiosity to be stumbled upon in nature -- it can be deliberately engineered. That is a big deal.

The quantum computing angle here is not just a supporting role. Electrons within C13Cl2 interact in deeply entangled ways, each influencing the others simultaneously. Modeling that requires tracking every possible configuration of those interactions at once -- something that causes computational demands to grow exponentially and can quickly overwhelm classical machines. A decade ago, researchers could exactly model 16 electrons classically. Today that number has crept to 18. Using IBM's quantum computer, the team was able to explore 32 electrons. Quantum computers can represent these systems directly rather than approximate them, because they operate according to the same quantum mechanical laws that govern electrons in molecules. In this case, that capability helped reveal helical molecular orbitals for electron attachment -- a fingerprint of the half-Mobius topology -- and exposed the mechanism behind the unusual structure: a helical pseudo-Jahn-Teller effect.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Register: Ballooning memory prices are forecast to kill off entry-level PCs, leading to a decline in global shipments this year -- and a similar effect is going to hit smartphones. Analyst biz Gartner is projecting a drop in PC shipments of more than 10 percent during 2026, and a decline of around 8 percent for smartphones, all due to the AI-driven memory shortage. Some types of memory have doubled or quadrupled in price since last year, and Gartner believes DRAM and NAND flash used in PCs and phones is set for a further 130 percent rise by the end of 2026.

The upshot of this is that the budget PC will disappear, simply because vendors won't be able to build them at a price that will satisfy cost-conscious buyers, according to Gartner research director Ranjit Atwal. "Because the price of memory is increasing so much, vendors lose the ability to provide entry-level PCs -- those below about $500," he told The Register. PC makers could just raise the price of their cheap and cheerful boxes to above that level to compensate for the memory hike, however, price-sensitive buyers simply won't bite, he added.

Another factor expected to add to declining fortunes of the PC industry this year is AI devices -- systems equipped with special hardware for accelerating AI tasks, typically via a neural processing unit (NPU) embedded in the CPU. These systems were predicted to take the market by storm, but they require more memory to support AI processing and vendors like to mark them up to a premium price. "Historically, downgrading specifications was the way to go when prices were being squeezed, but that's difficult here," Atwal said. "The thinking was that the average price [of AI PCs] would fall this year, and lead to more adoption," said Atwal, "but that's not happening." The lack of killer applications isn't helping either.

"A surprisingly ravenous black hole from the dawn of the universe is breaking two big rules," reports Live Science. "It's not only exceeding the 'speed limit' of black hole growth but also generating extreme X-ray and radio wave emissions — two features that are not predicted to coexist..."

"How is this rule-breaking behavior even possible? In a paper published Jan. 21 in The Astrophysical Journal, an international team of researchers observed ID830 in multiple wavelengths to find an answer...." As they attract gas and dust, this material accumulates in a swirling accretion disk. Gravity pulls the material from the disk into the black hole, but the infalling material generates radiation pressure that pushes outward and prevents more stuff from falling in. As a result, black holes are muzzled by a self-regulating process called the Eddington limit... Its X-ray brightness suggests that ID830 is accreting mass at about 13 times the Eddington limit, due to a sudden burst of inflowing gas that may have occurred as ID830 shredded and engulfed a celestial body that wandered too close. "For a supermassive black hole (SMBH) as massive as ID830, this would require not a normal (main-sequence) star, but a more massive giant star or a huge gas cloud," study co-author Sakiko Obuchi, an observational astronomer at Waseda University in Tokyo, told Live Science via email. Such super-Eddington phases may be incredibly brief, as "this transitional phase is expected to last for roughly 300 years," Obuchi added.

ID830 also simultaneously displays radio and X-ray emissions. These two features are not expected to coexist, especially because super-Eddington accretion is thought to suppress such emissions. "This unexpected combination hints at physical mechanisms not yet fully captured by current models of extreme accretion and jet launching," the researchers said in a statement. So while ID830 is launching massive radio jets, its X-ray emissions appear to originate from a structure called a corona, produced as intense magnetic fields from the accretion disk create a thin but turbulent billion-degree cloud of turbocharged particles. These particles orbit the black hole at nearly the speed of light, in what NASA calls "one of the most extreme physical environments in the universe." Altogether, ID830's rule-breaking behaviors suggest that it is in a rare transitional phase of excessive consumption — and excretion. This incredible feeding burst has energized both its jets and its corona, making ID830 shine brightly across multiple wavelengths as it spews out excess radiation.

Additionally, based on UV-brightness analysis, quasars like ID830 may be unexpectedly common, the researchers said. Models predict that only around 10% of quasars have spectacular radio jets, but these energetic objects could be significantly more abundant in the early universe than previously suggested. Most importantly, ID830 also shows how SMBHs can regulate galaxy growth in the early universe. As a black hole gobbles matter at the super-Eddington limit, the energy from its resultant emissions can heat and disperse matter throughout the interstellar medium — the gas between stars — to suppress star formation. As a result, ancient SMBHs like ID830 may have grown massive at the expense of their host galaxies.

Microsoft AI CEO Mustafa Suleyman expects "human-level performance on most, if not all professional tasks" from AI, and believes most work involving "sitting down at a computer" -- accounting, legal, marketing, project management -- will be fully automated within the next year or 18 months. He pointed to exponential growth in computational power and predicted that creating a new AI model will soon be as easy as "creating a podcast or writing a blog."

An anonymous reader shares a report: Israel has arrested several people, including army reservists, for allegedly using classified information to place bets on Israeli military operations on Polymarket. Shin Bet, the country's internal security agency, said Thursday the suspects used information they had come across during their military service to inform their bets.

One of the reservists and a civilian were indicted on a charge of committing serious security offenses, bribery and obstruction of justice, Shin Bet said, without naming the people who were arrested. Polymarket is what is called a prediction market that lets people place bets to forecast the direction of events. Users wager on everything from the size of any interest-rate cut by the Federal Reserve in March to the winner of League of Legends videogame tournaments to the number of times Elon Musk will tweet in the third week of February.

The arrests followed reports in Israeli media that Shin Bet was investigating a series of Polymarket bets last year related to when Israel would launch an attack on Iran, including which day or month the attack would take place and when Israel would declare the operation over. Last year, a user who went by the name ricosuave666 correctly predicted the timeline around the 12-day war between Israel and Iran. The bets drew attention from other traders who suspected the account holder had access to nonpublic information. The account in question raked in more than $150,000 in winnings before going dormant for six months. It resumed trading last month, betting on when Israel would strike Iran, Polymarket data shows.

The American economy's most valuable companies are now worth trillions of dollars more than their predecessors were a generation ago, yet they employ a fraction of the workers -- and a new analysis by the Wall Street Journal argues that this widening gap between capital and labor is the defining economic story of our time.

Labor received 58% of gross domestic income in 1980; by the third quarter of 2025, that figure had fallen to 51.4%. Corporate profits' share rose from 7% to 11.7% over the same period. Nvidia, the most valuable US company in 2026, is nearly 20 times as valuable as IBM was in 1985 in inflation-adjusted terms and employs roughly a tenth as many people. Since the end of 2019, real average hourly wages have risen 3% while corporate profits have climbed 43%.

Household stock wealth now equals almost 300% of annual disposable income, up from 200% in 2019. Yale economist Pascual Restrepo predicted that AI integration will shrink labor's share of revenue further, just as factory automation did for blue-collar workers in decades past.

A new NBER working paper from researchers at the Federal Reserve, Northwestern's Kellogg School and Johns Hopkins finds that Kalshi -- the largest federally regulated prediction market in the U.S., overseen by the CFTC -- produces macroeconomic forecasts that match or beat those of professional forecasters and traditional financial instruments like fed funds futures.

The study compared Kalshi-implied forecasts for the federal funds rate, CPI inflation and unemployment against the New York Fed's Survey of Market Expectations and Bloomberg consensus. Kalshi's modal forecast correctly predicted the federal funds rate on the day before every FOMC meeting since 2022, something neither the survey nor fed funds futures achieved. For headline CPI, Kalshi's median and mode produced a statistically significant improvement over Bloomberg consensus.

Kalshi also fills a gap no other financial market covers: real-time probability distributions for GDP growth, core CPI, unemployment, and payrolls. The paper documented how these distributions shift in response to macro news -- positive CPI surprises moved the mean of the fed funds rate distribution four times more than negative ones. Trading volumes on the platform have grown to nearly 100 million contracts for a single FOMC meeting, supported by liquidity from Susquehanna, Citadel, and Two Sigma.

Elon Musk told podcast host Dwarkesh Patel and Stripe co-founder John Collison that space will become the most economically compelling location for AI data centers in less than 36 months, a prediction rooted not in some exotic technical breakthrough but in the basic math of electricity supply: chip output is growing exponentially, and electrical output outside China is essentially flat.

Solar panels in orbit generate roughly five times the power they do on the ground because there is no day-night cycle, no cloud cover, no atmospheric loss, and no atmosphere-related energy reduction. The system economics are even more favorable because space-based operations eliminate the need for batteries entirely, making the effective cost roughly 10 times cheaper than terrestrial solar, Musk said. The terrestrial bottleneck is already real.

Musk said powering 330,000 Nvidia GB300 chips -- once you account for networking hardware, storage, peak cooling on the hottest day of the year, and reserve margin for generator servicing -- requires roughly a gigawatt at the generation level. Gas turbines are sold out through 2030, and the limiting factor is the casting of turbine vanes and blades, a process handled by just three companies worldwide.

Five years from now, Musk predicted, SpaceX will launch and operate more AI compute annually than the cumulative total on Earth, expecting at least a few hundred gigawatts per year in space. Patel estimated that 100 gigawatts alone would require on the order of 10,000 Starship launches per year, a figure Musk affirmed. SpaceX is gearing up for 10,000 launches a year, Musk said, and possibly 20,000 to 30,000.

Comcast's attempt to slow broadband customer losses still isn't stopping the bleeding as fiber and fixed wireless competition intensifies. In Q4 2025 alone, Comcast lost 181,000 broadband subscribers, even as it leans harder into wireless bundling and other business lines like Peacock and theme parks. Ars Technica reports: The Q4 net loss is more than the 176,000 loss predicted by analysts, although not as bad as the 199,000-customer loss that spurred [Comcast President Mike Cavanagh's] comment about Comcast "not winning in the marketplace" nine months ago. The Q4 2025 loss reported today is also worse than the 139,000-customer loss in Q4 2024 and the 34,000-customer loss in Q4 2023.

"Subscriber losses were 181,000, as the early traction we are seeing from our new initiatives was more than offset by continued competitive intensity," Comcast CFO Jason Armstrong said during an earnings call today, according to a Motley Fool transcript. Comcast's residential broadband customers dropped to 28.72 million, while business broadband customers dropped to 2.54 million, for a total of 31.26 million.

Armstrong said that average revenue per user grew 1.1 percent, "consistent with the deceleration that we had previewed reflecting our new go-to-market pricing, including lower everyday pricing and strong adoption of free wireless lines." Armstrong expects average revenue per user to continue growing slowly "for the next couple of quarters, driven by the absence of a rate increase, the impact from free wireless lines, and the ongoing migration of our base to simplified pricing." Comcast Connectivity & Platforms chief Steve Croney said the firm is facing "a more competitive environment from fiber" and continued competition from fixed wireless. "The market is going to remain intensely competitive," he said.

Amazon appears to have prematurely acknowledged layoffs inside AWS after an internal email referencing "organizational changes" and "impacted colleagues" was mistakenly sent to cloud employees. CNBC reports: "Changes like this are hard on everyone," Colleen Aubrey, senior vice president of applied AI solutions at Amazon Web Services, wrote in an email viewed by CNBC. "These decisions are difficult and are made thoughtfully as we position our organization and AWS for future success." The note also references a post from Amazon's HR boss Beth Galetti and said the company notified "impacted colleagues in our organization." The subject of the email mentions "Project Dawn," and the email says it was "canceled," possibly indicating it was recalled by the sender after the fact. It's unclear what Project Dawn refers to.

The job cuts come after Amazon announced in October that it would lay off 14,000 corporate employees. At the time, the company indicated the cuts would continue in 2026 as it found "additional places we can remove layers." Amazon CEO Andy Jassy said the layoffs were meant to reduce management layers and bureaucracy inside the company. He also predicted last June that efficiency gains from AI would shrink Amazon's corporate staff in the coming years.

An anonymous reader shared this report from Fortune The large language models (LLMs) that have captivated the world are not a path to human-level intelligence, two AI experts asserted in separate remarks at Davos. Demis Hassabis, the Nobel Prize-winning CEO of Google DeepMind, and the executive who leads the development of Google's Gemini models, said today's AI systems, as impressive as they are, are "nowhere near" human-level artificial general intelligence, or AGI. [Though the artilcle notes that later Hassabis predicted there was a 50% chance AGI might be achieved within the decade.] Yann LeCun — an AI pioneer who won a Turing Award, computer science's most prestigious prize, for his work on neural networks — went further, saying that the LLMs that underpin all of the leading AI models will never be able to achieve humanlike intelligence and that a completely different approach is needed... ["The reason ... LLMs have been so successful is because language is easy," LeCun said later.]

Their views differ starkly from the position asserted by top executives of Google's leading AI rivals, OpenAI and Anthropic, who assert that their AI models are about to rival human intelligence. Dario Amodei, the CEO of Anthropic, told an audience at Davos that AI models would replace the work of all software developers within a year and would reach "Nobel-level" scientific research in multiple fields within two years. He said 50% of white-collar jobs would disappear within five years. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman (who was not at Davos this year) has said we are already beginning to slip past human-level AGI toward "superintelligence," or AI that would be smarter than all humans combined...

The debate over AGI may be somewhat academic for many business leaders. The more pressing question, says Cognizant CEO Ravi Kumar, is whether companies can capture the enormous value that AI already offers. According to Cognizant research released ahead of Davos, current AI technology could unlock approximately $4.5 trillion in U.S. labor productivity — if businesses can implement it effectively.

A new study shows that earthquake monitoring networks can track falling space debris by detecting the sonic booms produced during atmospheric reentry, sometimes more accurately than radar. The Associated Press reports: Scientists reported Thursday that seismic readings from sonic booms that were generated when a discarded module from a Chinese crew capsule reentered over Southern California in 2024 allowed them to place the object's path nearly 20 miles (30 kilometers) farther south than radar had predicted from orbit. Using this method to track uncontrolled objects plummeting at supersonic speeds, they said, could help recovery teams reach any surviving pieces more quickly -- crucial if the debris is dangerous.

"The problem at the moment is we can track stuff very well in space," said Johns Hopkins University's Benjamin Fernando, the lead researcher. "But once it gets to the point that it's actually breaking up in the atmosphere, it becomes very difficult to track." His team's findings, published in the journal Science, focus on just one debris event. But the researchers already have used publicly available data from seismic networks to track a few dozen other reentries, including debris from three failed SpaceX Starship test flights in Texas. [...]

Fernando is looking to eventually publish a catalog of seismically tracked, entering space objects, while improving future calculations by factoring in the wind's effect on falling debris. In a companion article in Science, Los Alamos National Laboratory's Chris Carr, who was not involved in the study, said further research is needed to reduce the time between an object's final plunge and the determination of its course. For now, Carr said this new method "unlocks the rapid identification of debris fall-out zones, which is key information as Earth's orbit is anticipated to become increasingly crowded with satellites, leading to a greater influx of space debris."