Techin' Geek

On Wednesday, xAI took the rare step of publishing a full 45-minute all-hands meeting video on X, making it publicly accessible. Details of the Tuesday night meeting were previously reported by The New York Times, which may have influenced xAI’s decision to post the video online.

The full video reveals significant new details about Musk’s plans for the AI lab, including its product roadmap and its ongoing ties to the X platform.

The most immediate revelation concerned a string of departing employees, which Musk described as layoffs resulting from a changing organizational structure at the company. While reorganizations are common, the breadth of the departures has caused significant confusion, particularly as it has meant the loss of a significant portion of the founding team.

“As a company grows, especially as quickly as xAI, the structure must evolve,” Musk said on X. “This unfortunately required parting ways with some people. We wish them well in future endeavors.”

The new organizational system splits xAI into four primary teams: one focused on the Grok chatbot (including voice), another for the app’s coding system, another for the Imagine video generator, and finally a team focused on the Macrohard project, which spans from simple computer use simulation to modeling entire corporations.

“[Macrohard] is able to do anything on a computer that a computer is able to do,” Toby Pohlen, who will lead the project under the new organizational structure, told his colleagues. “There should be rocket engines fully designed by AI.”

The all-hands also featured claims about new usage and revenue figures for xAI and X. Nikita Bier, X’s head of product, said X had “just crossed” $1 billion in annual recurring revenue from subscriptions, which he attributed to a marketing push during the holidays.

Additionally, executives said the xAI’s Imagine tool is generating 50 million videos a day, and more than 6 billion images over the past 30 days, according to their internal metrics.

But it’s difficult to separate those figures from the flood of deepfake pornography that overtook X during that same period. The X platform saw engagement skyrocket as AI-generated explicit images became more prevalent, and with an estimated 1.8 million sexualized images generated over just nine days, the image-generation figures likely include substantial amounts of this controversial content.

The most eye-catching part of the presentation came at the end, when Musk reemphasized the importance of space-based data centers despite the technical challenges involved. Musk went still further, envisioning a moon-based factory for AI satellites, including a lunar mass driver — essentially an electromagnetic catapult — to launch them. With such infrastructure, Musk said, one could launch an AI cluster capable of capturing significant portions of the sun’s total energy output or even expanding to other galaxies.

“It’s difficult to imagine what an intelligence of that scale would think about,” Musk said, “but it’s going to be incredibly exciting to see it happen.”

Samsung sent out invites Tuesday to its next Galaxy Unpacked event, scheduled for February 25 in San Francisco, where the company is expected to launch its Galaxy 26 series of smartphones.

AI features will be at the forefront again, as the company said the upcoming phones are “built to simplify everyday interactions, inspire confidence and make Galaxy AI feel seamlessly integrated from the moment it’s in hand.”

A standout feature the company has teased is a privacy display expected to debut on the Galaxy S26 Ultra.This feature will allow users to hide certain areas of the phone’s screen from onlookers to protect sensitive information. For instance, users will be able to hide the notification area from prying eyes.

Reports suggest that the top phone in the lineup will run Qualcomm’s latest Snapdragon Elite Gen 5 processor in the U.S. and China. Samsung will likely opt for its own Exynos 2600 processor in other regions. The distinction matters, but increasingly less so. Snapdragon processors have historically outperformed Samsung’s Exynos chips in benchmarks and thermal efficiency, but the performance gap has been narrowing.

According to a report from the tech site SamMobile, the S26 will also have a 5,100 mAh (milliamp-hour, a standard unit of battery capacity) battery and will support 60W wired charging along and 25W wireless charging.

In addition to phones, Samsung is likely to release updated Galaxy Buds 4 wireless earbuds. The company plans to update the design from the previous generation, which drew widespread comparisons to Apple’s AirPods.

The event will begin at 10 AM PT/ 1 PM ET/ 7 PM CET, and will be streamed live on Samsung’s website and its YouTube channel.

Samsung is offering a $30 promotional credit to anyone who pre-registers interest it its upcoming devices. Pre-registering is merely an expression of interest; consumers will still get the credit as a discount toward other Samsung products even if they don’t end up buying the new devices. If you pre-register and then pre-order one of the devices, the company will increase that to a $150 credit — no trade-in required.

As AI data centers drive up electricity prices, London-based startup Tem thinks AI might be able to help solve it, too.

Tem has built an energy transaction engine that relies on AI to cut prices relative to other energy traders. The company has signed up more than 2,600 business customers throughout the U.K. on the promise that buying energy from its utility division can save them up to 30% on their energy bills.

The startup recently closed an oversubscribed $75 million Series B led by Lightspeed Venture Partners with participation from AlbionVC, Allianz, Atomico, Hitachi Ventures, Revent, Schroders Capital, and Voyager Ventures, TechCrunch has exclusively learned. 

The round values Tem at more than $300 million, a source familiar with the deal told TechCrunch. The startup plans to use the funding to help expand to Australia and the U.S., starting with Texas.

“We’re in a nice position where we kind of have control over our own profitability. So I could have chosen not to raise at all and had a lovely, nice bootstrap business in some ways,” Joe McDonald, co-founder and CEO of Tem, told TechCrunch. “Well, we’re not that kind of business. We know what we want to achieve as someone who wants to go public over the years.”

Tem is a classic marketplace play, matching electricity generators with consumers. The company intentionally started by focusing almost exclusively on renewable energy generators and small businesses to fill both sides of the ledger. “The more decentralized and the more distributed, the better it is for the algorithms,” McDonald said. “But this works all the way up to enterprise.”

The company’s customers include fast-fashion retailer Boohoo Group, soft drink company Fever-Tree, and Newcastle United FC. 

Currently, Tem is running what amounts to two different businesses. One, called Rosso, is the transaction engine that matches suppliers with buyers. Here, machine learning algorithms and LLMs help predict supply and demand. 

The goal with Rosso, McDonald said, is to cut costs by eliminating several layers that are present in current energy markets. “In each of them, you’ve got different teams doing different jobs, taking different levels of profit from back office to trading, trading desks to other trading desks, and probably five to six intermediaries in total that enable the flow of money to move from one side to the other,” he said.

With AI, he said, “you now have an opportunity to replace the humans, the labor costs, and the disparate systems into one single transaction infrastructure.” The goal is to make the price that customers pay for electricity closer to the wholesale cost.

The other part of Tem, called RED, is a “neo-utility” built to prove the value of Rosso.

“When we first started, we tried to sell our infrastructure to the energy companies, and we got nowhere,” he said. RED is currently the only utility using Rosso, and McDonald said its growth has pushed the company to prioritize it over opening Rosso to others.

At some point, though, Tem plans to allow other utilities in.

“In reality, it doesn’t matter how good [RED] is; it’s not going to get above a 40% market share. And it shouldn’t, because that becomes a monopoly in itself. So, me, I’d much rather go to get access to all the transaction flow,” McDonald said.

“Long term, we really don’t mind who owns the customer, who owns the generation as long as our infrastructure is being used,” he said. “This is just an infrastructure play in the same way AWS was, or Stripe was.”

YouTube megastar MrBeast announced on Monday that his company, Beast Industries, is buying Step, a teen-focused banking app.

Step, which raised half a billion in funding and has grown to over 7 million users, offers financial services geared toward Gen Z to help them build credit, save money, and invest. The company has attracted celebrity investors like Charli D’Amelio, Will Smith, The Chainsmokers, and Stephen Curry, in addition to venture firms like General Catalyst, Coatue, and the payments company Stripe.

If the company wants to continue getting its fintech product in front of young eyes, then partnering with Gen Z phenom MrBeast is wise. MrBeast, whose real name is Jimmy Donaldson, is the most-subscribed creator on YouTube, with over 466 million subscribers, but his ambitions stretch beyond his over-the-top videos.

“Nobody taught me about investing, building credit, or managing money when I was growing up,” the 27-year-old said. “I want to give millions of young people the financial foundation I never had.”

I’m so excited to share that we are acquiring the financial services app, @step

Nobody taught me about investing, building credit, or managing money when I was growing up. That’s exactly why we’re joining forces with Step! I want to give millions of young people the financial…

— MrBeast (@MrBeast) February 9, 2026

This acquisition makes sense, considering that a leaked pitch document from last year showed this was an area of interest for Beast Industries. The company is also reportedly interested in launching a mobile virtual network operator (MVNO), a lower-cost cell phone plan similar to Ryan Reynolds’ Mint Mobile.

In line with other top creators, Beast Industries’ business is much more than YouTube ad revenue. (In fact, the company reinvests much of that money back into the content.) The company’s cash cow is the chocolate brand Feastables, which is more profitable than both the MrBeast YouTube channel and the Prime Video show “Beast Games,” according to leaked documents reported on by Bloomberg. Some of his other ventures, like Lunchly and MrBeast Burger, have struggled.

“We’re excited about how this acquisition is going to amplify our platform and bring more groundbreaking products to Step customers,” Step founder and CEO CJ MacDonald said in a statement.

When a startup announced plans last fall to recreate lost footage from Orson Welles’ classic film “The Magnificent Ambersons” using generative AI, I was skeptical. More than that, I was baffled why anyone would spend time and money on something that seemed guaranteed to outrage cinephiles while offering negligible commercial value.

This week, an in-depth profile by the New Yorker’s Michael Schulman provides more details about the project. If nothing else, it helps explain why the startup Fable and its founder Edward Saatchi are pursuing it: It seems to come from a genuine love of Welles and his work.

Saatchi (whose father was a founder of advertising firm Saatchi & Saatchi) recalled a childhood of watching films in a private screening room with his “movie mad” parents. He said he first saw “Ambersons” when he was twelve.

The profile also explains why “Ambersons,” while much less famous than Welles’ first film “Citizen Kane,” remains so tantalizing — Welles himself claimed it was a “much better picture” than “Kane,” but after a disastrous preview screening, the studio cut 43 minutes from the film, added an abrupt and unconvincing happy ending, and eventually destroyed the excised footage to make space in its vaults.

“To me, this is the holy grail of lost cinema,” Saatchi said. “It just seemed intuitively that there would be some way to undo what had happened.”

Saatchi is only the latest Welles devotee to dream of recreating the lost footage. In fact, Fable is working with filmmaker Brian Rose, who already spent years trying to achieve the same thing with animated scenes based on the movie’s script and photographs, and on Welles’ notes. (Rose said that after he screened the results for friends and family, “a lot of them were scratching their heads.”)

So while Fable is using more advanced technology — filming scenes in live action, then eventually overlaying them with digital recreations of the original actors and their voices — this project is best understood as a slicker, better-funded version of Rose’s work. It’s a fan’s attempt to glimpse Welles’ vision.

Notably, while the New Yorker article includes a few clips of Rose’s animations, as well as images of Fable’s AI actors, there’s no footage showing the results of Fable’s live action-AI hybrid.

By the company’s own admission, there are significant challenges, whether that’s fixing obvious blunders like a two-headed version of the actor Joseph Cotten, or the more subjective task of recreating the rich lighting and shadows found in Welles’ footage. (Saatchi even described a “happiness” problem, with the AI tending to make women characters look inappropriately happy.)

As for whether this footage will ever be released to the public, Saatchi admitted it was “a total mistake” not to speak to Welles’ estate before his announcement. Since then, he has reportedly been working to win over both the estate and Warner Bros., which owns the rights to the film. Welles’ daughter Beatrice told Schulman that while she remains “skeptical,” she now believes “they are going into this project with enormous respect toward my father and this beautiful movie.”

The actor and biographer Simon Callow — who’s currently writing the fourth book in his multi-volume Welles biography — has also agreed to advise the project, which he described as a “great idea.” (Callow is a family friend of the Saatchis.)

But not everyone has been convinced. Melissa Galt said her mother, the actress Anne Baxter, would “not have agreed with that at all.”

“It’s not the truth,” Galt said. “It’s a creation of someone else’s truth. But it’s not the original, and she was a purist.”

And while I’ve become more sympathetic to Saatchi’s aims, I still agree with Galt: At its best, this project will only result in a novelty, a dream of what the movie might have been.

I was also reminded of a recent essay in which the writer Aaron Bady compared AI to the vampires in “Sinners.” Bady argued that when it comes to art, both vampires and AI will always come up short, because “what makes art possible” is a knowledge of mortality and limitations.

“Without death, without loss, and without the space between my body and yours, separating my memories from yours, we cannot make art or desire or feeling,” he wrote.

In that light, Saatchi’s insistence that there must be “some way to undo what had happened” feels, if not outright vampiric, then at least a little childish in its unwillingness to accept that some losses are permanent. It may not, perhaps, be that different from a startup founder claiming they can make grief obsolete — or a studio executive insisting that “The Magnificent Ambersons” needed a happy ending.