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AI will displace so many jobs that it will eliminate the need for mass immigration, according to Palantir CEO Alex Karp. Bloomberg: "There will be more than enough jobs for the citizens of your nation, especially those with vocational training," said Karp, speaking at a World Economic Forum panel in Davos, Switzerland on Tuesday. "I do think these trends really do make it hard to imagine why we should have large-scale immigration unless you have a very specialized skill." Karp, who holds a PhD in philosophy, used himself as an example of the type of "elite" white-collar worker most at risk of disruption. Vocational workers will be more valuable "if not irreplaceable," he said, criticizing the idea that higher education is the ultimate benchmark of a person's talents and employability.

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Cointelegraph, once one of the most-visited cryptocurrency news sites, has seen its monthly traffic plummet from roughly 8 million visits to 1.4 million -- an 80% drop in three months -- after Google issued a manual penalty in October 2025 for the outlet's partnership with a blackhat SEO firm that used Cointelegraph's domain authority to promote affiliate links to offshore casinos and betting platforms. The CEO, who had no prior media experience, proceeded despite warnings from Google earlier in 2025 and repeated objections from the outlet's three most senior editorial staff members throughout the year. The penalty removed Cointelegraph from Google News, Discover and search results entirely; a search for "Cointelegraph" now returns CoinDesk as the top result. Jon Rice, the former editor-in-chief, resigned on December 31st and described the situation as an "existential threat to business."

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He Jiankui, the Chinese scientist who served three years in prison after creating the world's first gene-edited babies in 2018, is now preparing for another attempt at germline editing -- this time to prevent Alzheimer's disease. In an interview, He said he has established an independent lab in south Beijing and raised $7 million from private donors to fund research into introducing a protective genetic mutation found in Icelandic populations. The three girls born from his original experiment are now in primary school and healthy, according to He. Since germline editing remains banned in China, He said he plans to conduct future human trials in South Africa and has already spoken with contacts there. He estimates he needs two more years to complete mouse and monkey studies before seeking regulatory approval abroad. He said his lab is developing techniques to make 12 simultaneous genetic edits in a single embryo, targeting genes associated with cancer, cardiovascular disease, HIV, and other conditions. He is currently working on human cell lines and has not yet begun embryo experiments.

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An anonymous reader shares a report: Europe must invest in its own open source artificial intelligence labs and address soaring energy prices, or it will quickly find itself dependent on Chinese models, former Google chief executive and tech investor Eric Schmidt said. "In the US, the companies are largely moving to closed source, which means they'll be purchased and licensed and so forth. And it is also the case that China is largely open weight, open source in its approach," Schmidt said at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, on Tuesday. "Unless Europe is willing to spend lots of money for European models, Europe will end up using the Chinese models. It's probably not a good outcome for Europe."

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