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A PwC survey of more than 4,500 CEOs found that over half report no revenue growth or cost savings from their AI investments so far, despite massive spending. Of the 4,454 business leaders surveyed, only 12% saw both lower costs and higher revenue, while 56% saw neither benefit. "26% saw reduced costs, but nearly as many experienced cost increases," adds The Register. From the report: AI adoption remains limited. Even in top use cases like demand generation (22 percent), support services (20 percent), and product development (19 percent), only a minority are deploying AI extensively. Last year, a separate PwC study found that only 14 percent of workers indicated they were using generative AI daily in their work. Despite the CEOs' repsonses, PwC concludes more investment is required. It claims that "isolated, tactical AI projects" often don't deliver measurable value, and that tangible returns instead come from enterprise-wide deployments consistent with business strategy. [...] In terms of the broader picture, PwC says it found CEO confidence has hit a five-year low, with only 30 percent optimistic about revenue growth (down from 38 percent last year). This points to growing geopolitical risk and intensifying cyber threats, as well as uncertainty over the benefits and downsides of AI. Unsurprisingly, concern remains over tariffs as the Trump administration continues its erratic approach to policy, with almost a third of company chiefs saying tariffs are expected to reduce their company's profit margin in the year ahead. In the U.S., 22 percent indicate their corporation is highly or extremely exposed to tariffs. PwC warns that companies avoiding major investments due to geopolitical uncertainty underperform peers by two percentage points in growth and three points in profit margins.

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This is totally not because China is giving away its best models away for free, right?

Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei isn’t happy about the US allowing Nvidia to sell GPUs to Chinese companies, and likened the decision to giving nuclear weapons to an adversary.…

An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: Meta's Oversight Board is tackling a case focused on Meta's ability to permanently disable user accounts. Permanent bans are a drastic action, locking people out of their profiles, memories, friend connections, and, in the case of creators and businesses, their ability to market and communicate with fans and customers. This is the first time in the organization's five-year history as an oversight body that permanent account bans have been a subject of the Oversight Board's focus, the organization notes. The case being reviewed isn't exactly one of an everyday user. Instead, the case involves a high-profile Instagram user who repeatedly violated Meta's Community Standards by posting visual threats of violence against a female journalist, anti-gay slurs against politicians, content depicting a sex act, allegations of misconduct against minorities, and more. The account had not accumulated enough strikes to be automatically disabled, but Meta made the decision to permanently ban the account. The Board's materials didn't name the account in question, but its recommendations could impact others who post content that targets public figures with abuse, harassment, and threats, as well as users who have their accounts permanently banned without receiving transparent explanations. Meta referred this specific case to the Board, which included five posts made in the year before the account was permanently disabled. The Board says it's looking for input about several key issues: how permanent bans can be processed fairly, the effectiveness of its current tools to protect public figures and journalists from repeated abuse and threats of violence, the challenges of identifying off-platform content, whether punitive measures effectively shape online behaviors, and best practices for transparent reporting on account enforcement decisions. [...] Whether the Oversight Board has any real sway to address issues on Meta's platform continues to be debated, of course. [...] After the Oversight Board issues its policy recommendations to Meta, the company has 60 days to respond. The Board is also soliciting public comments on this topic. The report notes that Meta's Oversight Board is able to overturn individual moderation decisions and offer recommendations, but largely sidelined from major policy shifts driven by Mark Zuckerberg.

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Sure it's a bubble and the deals are circular - that doesn't mean Amazon's not going to try to extract value from it

Could one of the most prominent tech company leaders be less-than-enthused about the AI economy? In an interview, Amazon CEO Andy Jassy didn't dismiss the idea that the AI bubble could pop, despite his company's massive investments in the technology. …

More than half of companies haven't seen any financial benefit from their AI investments, according to PwC's latest Global CEO Survey [PDF], and yet the spending shows no signs of slowing down. Some 56% of the 4,454 chief executives surveyed across 95 countries said their companies have realized neither higher revenues nor lower costs from AI over the past year. Only 12% reported getting both benefits -- and those rare winners tend to be the ones who built proper enterprise-wide foundations rather than chasing one-off projects. CEO confidence in near-term growth has taken a notable hit. Just 30% feel strongly optimistic about revenue growth over the next 12 months, down from 38% last year and nowhere near the 56% who felt that way in 2022.

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Keeping models on the Assistant Axis improves AI safety

Researchers from Anthropic and other orgs have observed situations in which LLMs act like a helpful personal assistant, and are trying to study the phenomenon further to make sure chatbots don't go off the rails and cause harm.…

MacPaw, the Ukraine-based developer, has announced that Setapp Mobile -- its alternative iOS app store for European Union users that launched in open beta in September 2024 -- will shut down on February 16, 2026, citing "still-evolving and complex business terms" for alternative marketplaces that don't fit its current business model. Alternative iOS stores became possible under the Digital Markets Act but face challenges including Apple's controversial Core Technology Fee, which Epic Games CEO Tim Sweeney has called "ruinous for any hopes of a competing store getting a foothold."

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An anonymous reader shares a report: Anthropic Chief Executive Dario Amodei predicted a future in which AI will spur significant economic growth -- but could lead to widespread unemployment and inequality. Amodei is both "excited and worried" about the impact of AI, he said in an interview at Davos Tuesday. "I don't think there's an awareness at all of what is coming here and the magnitude of it." Anthropic is the developer of the popular chatbot Claude. Amodei said the government will need to play a role in navigating the massive displacement in jobs that could result from advances in AI. He said there could be a future with 5% to 10% GDP growth and 10% unemployment. "That's not a combination we've almost ever seen before," he said. "There's gonna need to be some role for government in the displacement that's this macroeconomically large." Amodei painted a potential "nightmare" scenario that AI could bring to society if not properly checked, laying out a future in which 10 million people -- 7 million in Silicon Valley and the rest scattered elsewhere -- could "decouple" from the rest of society, enjoying as much as 50% GPD growth while others were left behind. "I think this is probably a time to worry less about disincentivizing growth and worry more about making sure that everyone gets a part of that growth," Amodei said. He noted that was "the opposite of the prevailing sentiment now," but the reality of technological change will force those ideas to change.

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More packaging options for the leading all-FOSS browser

If you can't wait to get the bleeding-edge version of Firefox, we have good news. Mozilla is offering native RPM packages of Firefox Nightly for Linux distros in the greater Red Hat and SUSE families.…

Signal Foundation president Meredith Whittaker warned that AI agents that autonomously carry out tasks pose a threat to encrypted messaging apps [non-paywalled source] because they require broad access to data stored across a device and can be hijacked if given root permissions. Speaking at Davos on Tuesday, Whittaker said the deeper integration of AI agents into devices is "pretty perilous" for services like Signal. For an AI agent to act effectively on behalf of a user, it would need unilateral access to apps storing sensitive information such as credit card data and contacts, Whittaker said. The data that the agent stores in its context window is at greater risk of being compromised. Whittaker called this "breaking the blood-brain barrier between the application and the operating system." "Our encryption no longer matters if all you have to do is hijack this context window," she said.

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AI + skilled malware developers = security threat

VoidLink, the newly spotted Linux malware that targets victims' clouds with 37 evil plugins, was generated "almost entirely by artificial intelligence" and likely developed by just one person, according to the research team that discovered the do-it-all implant.…

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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Still or sparkling? Either way, the problem of scale remains

Lithium-ion batteries are everywhere, and recycling them cleanly and safely at scale is still hard. Now, a Chinese research team claims to have discovered a way to recycle Li-ion batteries using carbon dioxide and water. Just don't expect it to revolutionize the market overnight.…

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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Plus, one in three bit barns expected to exceed 1 GW by 2035

Everything's bigger in Texas, including the amount of available power. That's why the Lone Star State is set to become the leading bit barn market within a few years, and why hyperscalers and colocation providers now expect roughly a third of datacenter campuses to rely entirely on onsite power by 2030.…

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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An anonymous reader shares a report: Ukraine will establish a system allowing its allies to train their AI models on Kyiv's valuable combat data collected throughout the nearly four-year war with Russia, newly appointed Defence Minister Mykhailo Fedorov has said. Fedorov -- a former digitalisation minister who last week took up the post to drive reforms across Ukraine's vast defence ministry and armed forces -- has described Kyiv's wartime data trove as one of its "cards" in negotiations with other nations. Since Russia's invasion in February 2022, Ukraine has gathered extensive battlefield information, including systematically logged combat statistics and millions of hours of drone footage captured from above. Such data is important for training AI models, which require large volumes of real-world information to identify patterns and predict how people or objects might act in various situations.

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Energy costs will be key to deciding which country wins the AI race, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella has said. CNBC: As countries race to build AI infrastructure to capitalize on the technology's promise of huge efficiency gains, Nadella told the World Economic Forum (WEF) on Tuesday that "GDP growth in any place will be directly correlated" to the cost of energy in using AI. He pointed to a new global commodity in "tokens" -- basic units of processing that are bought by users of AI models, allowing them to run tasks. "The job of every economy and every firm in the economy is to translate these tokens into economic growth, then if you have a cheaper commodity, it's better." "I would say we will quickly lose even the social permission to actually take something like energy, which is a scarce resource, and use it to generate these tokens, if these tokens are not improving health outcomes, education outcomes, public sector efficiency, private sector competitiveness across all sectors," Nadella said.

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Mailbox costs leap overnight as longtime users vent their frustration

Rackspace is giving a masterclass in how to annoy customers after an eye-watering price hike for email hosting.…