Polymarket is disputing that the US mission to capture NicolΓ‘s Maduro constituted an "invasion", refusing to pay out bets on a contract with $10.5M in wagers (Financial Times)
Chinese AI startups Zhipu and MiniMax are set to go public in Hong Kong on January 8 and 9, respectively; MiniMax has 210M+ users, and Zhipu has 8,000+ clients (Bloomberg)
GWI: LinkedIn's 2025 revenue rose to $17B from $7B in 2020 as users doubled to 1.3B; 4.7% of US users checked more than once per day in 2025, from 3.9% in 2020 (Stu Woo/Wall Street Journal) https://www.wsj.com/tech/personal-tech/three-reasons-we-cant-get-enough-of-linkedin-31333eff?st=rCoDpi&reflink=desktopwebshare_permalink
A look at Kalshi and Polymarket's lucrative shift toward sports, as high-profile real-world bets raise questions about access, integrity, and US CFTC regulation (Bloomberg)
As data center development pressures power grids, officials have proposed requiring data centers to power down or switch to a backup when blackout risks rise (Katherine Blunt/Wall Street Journal) https://www.wsj.com/business/energy-oil/ai-data-center-blackouts-electric-grid-1fed9803?st=9sebJC&reflink=desktopwebshare_permalink
An interview with Google DeepMind CTO Koray Kavukcuoglu on his new role as Google's chief AI architect, Gemini 3, progress toward the goal of AGI, and more (Melissa HeikkilΓ€/Financial Times)
How Google's ambitious approach to training Gemini on text, code, audio, images, and video helped it stage a powerful comeback, triggering a Code Red at OpenAI (Katherine Blunt/Wall Street Journal) https://www.wsj.com/tech/ai/google-ai-openai-gemini-chatgpt-b766e160?st=cx7Uav&reflink=desktopwebshare_permalink
PitchBook-NVCA: global VC investments hit $512B in 2025 with AI accounting for 50%+; VC fundraising fell to a 10-year low of $118.6B, ~$100B less than in 2024 (Duncan Riley/SiliconANGLE)
Dutch fintech Bunq applies to become a US bank; the OCC conditionally approved national trust bank charters for several crypto firms in 2025, including Circle (Paige Smith/Bloomberg) https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-01-07/dutch-fintech-bunq-reapplies-to-become-a-bank-in-the-us
The US FDA says it will limit regulation of non-medical wellness wearables and AI software, provided they don't make claims about disease diagnosis or treatment (Puyaan Singh/Reuters) https://www.reuters.com/business/healthcare-pharmaceuticals/us-fda-limit-regulation-health-fitness-wearables-commissioner-says-2026-01-07/