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Jan 22, 2026
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Happy Thursday! Apple is developing an AI wearable pin. Anthropic lowers its gross margin projection to 40% from 50%. OpenAI CFO responds to Google's criticism of ChatGPT's move to introduce ads.
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Apple is developing an AI-powered wearable pin that could be released as early as 2027, according to people with direct knowledge of the matter. The device would position Apple to compete more effectively with OpenAI, which is planning its own AI-powered devices, and Meta Platforms, which is already selling smart glasses. Apple’s pin is a thin, flat, circular disc with an aluminum-and-glass shell and features two cameras—a standard lens and a wide-angle lens—on its front face, designed to capture photos and videos of the user’s surroundings. It includes three microphones to pick up sounds in the area surrounding the person wearing it. It also has a speaker, a physical button along one of its edges and a magnetic inductive charging interface on its back,
similar to the one used on the Apple Watch. Apple engineers are aiming to make the pin the same size as an AirTag, only slightly thicker.
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Anthropic last month projected it would generate a 40% gross profit margin from selling AI to businesses and application developers in 2025, 10 percentage points lower than its earlier optimistic expectations, The Information reported late Wednesday. The lower-than-expected gross profit margin resulted
from the costs of running Anthropic models for paying customers, in a process known as inference, on servers from Google and Amazon. Those inference costs were 23% higher than the company had anticipated, the projections showed. Anthropic calculates gross margins by subtracting inference costs and other costs of selling its products. Its margin still improved from the year earlier.
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OpenAI CFO Sarah Friar said the company’s custom inference chip is being “taped out”—the final step before manufacturing—and touted the progress of its more than $500 billion Stargate infrastructure project in a panel at the World Economic Forum Wednesday. In a conversation I moderated, Friar also pushed back against shots fired at OpenAI by Google Deep Mind CEO Demis Hassabis at Davos. In interviews with multiple media outlets, Hassabis said he was “surprised” that OpenAI was moving to introduce ads. In response to the criticism, Friar said: “I am trying to create as much optionality as possible.” “Early is a weird word because in ad models you have to be at scale,” she added. On Stargate, which was announced one year ago, she said that the project is “well over halfway built out” and
OpenAI is already training models on servers at Oracle’s Stargate campus. “It’s gone better than we all dreamed,” she said.
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Jeff Bezos’ space company Blue Origin is planning to build an ultra-fast satellite internet service aimed at large companies, data centers and governments, the company said Wednesday. The service, called TeraWave, would put Blue Origin in competition with SpaceX’s Starlink and Amazon Leo. Blue Origin plans to launch the first TeraWave satellites in the fourth quarter of 2027. Unlike Starlink or Leo, which are targeting both individual consumers and enterprise customers, TeraWave is aimed only at large customers who need especially fast internet speeds. Blue Origin said it plans to launch more than 5,000 satellites to support the service, which will provide internet speeds of up to 6 terabits per second. Currently, SpaceX’s Starlink is by far the leader in satellite internet, with more than 9 million customers and billions of dollars in revenue. Amazon Leo has launched 180 satellites and began an “enterprise preview” in November, but has yet to make its service widely available.
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Alibaba Group is preparing to list its chipmaking unit T-Head, taking advantage of strong investor demand for companies developing AI processors to reduce China’s reliance on Nvidia, Bloomberg reported. Alibaba will first restructure the unit as a business partly owned by employees, before exploring an initial public offering, the timing of which is uncertain, the report said, citing people familiar with the matter. Several Chinese chip designers, including Moore Threads, MetaX Integrated Circuits, Biren Technology and Iluvatar Corex, went public in stock exchanges in Hong Kong and Shanghai over the past month, as China seeks to indigenize the supply of AI chips. Baidu also is poised to list its chipmaking subsidiary Kunlunxin.
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Shopify has told merchants that use its commerce software that it will open up sales through AI chatbots like ChatGPT later this month, according to its site and communications with sellers. Merchants will pay OpenAI a 4% fee on sales made through ChatGPT’s checkout feature, a Shopify spokesperson confirmed, on top of typical transaction fees Shopify charges such as payments processing. OpenAI, Google and Microsoft have all announced chatbot checkout features in recent months. Beginning Jan. 26, Shopify will begin making its merchants’ products available for purchase through the checkout features in AI apps including ChatGPT, Google’s AI Mode and Gemini and Microsoft Copilot, the company told merchants. As part of that rollout, most Shopify merchants’ product details will be available to the AI apps through a data-sharing setup that Shopify announced late last
year. Merchants’ products will be available for purchase by default in AI checkout features that don’t charge an additional fee. For now, sales made through Google and Microsoft’s chatbot checkouts will not carry additional fees, the Shopify spokesperson said. For checkouts that charge a fee, such as ChatGPT, merchants will need to opt in to make their products available for purchase. Merchants can toggle AI platforms on or off individually to choose which channels to sell in, but their products will still appear in AI responses with links to their own websites. To keep products from appearing in AI responses, merchants must contact the AI companies or prevent their listings from being indexed by web crawlers.
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