OpenAI’s rivals are cutting into ChatGPT’s lead. From a report: The top chatbot’s market share fell from 69.1% to 45.3% between January 2025 and January 2026 among daily U.S. users of its mobile app. Gemini, in the same time period, rose from 14.7% to 25.1% and Grok rose from 1.6% to 15.2%. The data, obtained by Big Technology from mobile insights firm Apptopia, indicates the chatbot race has...

Walmart’s market cap surpassed $1 trillion on Tuesday, putting the largest U.S. retail chain in an exclusive club dominated by tech groups. Bloomberg adds: The Bentonville, Arkansas-based chain — a longtime favorite of bargain-hunting consumers — has flexed its massive scale and supplier network to keep prices low and grab market share across the income spectrum. While Walmart has maintained...

An anonymous reader shares a report: Google Home users, your long nightmare is over. The platform has finally added support for buttons. The release notes for a February 2 update state that several new starter conditions for automations are now available, including “Switch or button pressed.” Smart buttons are physical, programmable switches that you can press to trigger automations or control...

Senators asked Ted Sarandos about whether the acquisition would raise prices, squeeze talent and degrade the moviegoing experience.

Ultra-processed foods (UPFs) have more in common with cigarettes than with fruit or vegetables, and require far tighter regulation, according to a new report. The Guardian: UPFs and cigarettes are engineered to encourage addiction and consumption, researchers from three US universities said, pointing to the parallels in widespread health harms that link both. UPFs, which are widely available...

ClickOnThis writes: NASA has delayed the Artemis II launch to March of this year, after a wet dress-rehearsal uncovered a hydrogen leak. From the NASA article: During tanking, engineers spent several hours troubleshooting a liquid hydrogen leak in an interface used to route the cryogenic propellant into the rocket’s core stage, putting them behind in the countdown. Attempts to resolve the issue...

Alphabet is plotting to dramatically expand its presence in India [non-paywalled source], with the possibility of taking millions of square feet in new office space in Bangalore, India’s tech hub. From a report: Google’s parent company has leased one office tower and purchased options on two others in Alembic City, a development in the Whitefield tech corridor, totaling 2.4 million square feet,...

Four economists across Central European University, Bielefeld University and the Kiel Institute have built a general equilibrium model of the open-source software ecosystem and concluded that vibe coding — the increasingly common practice of letting AI agents select, assemble and modify packages on a developer’s behalf — erodes the very funding mechanism that keeps open-source projects alive....

YouTube has confirmed that it is blocking background playback — the ability to keep a video’s audio running after minimizing the browser or locking the screen — for non-Premium users across third-party mobile browsers including Samsung Internet, Brave, Vivaldi and Microsoft Edge. Users began reporting the issue last week, noting that audio would cut out the moment they left the browser,...

A group of cryptocurrency investors backing a memecoin hopes the statue will soon be installed at one of Mr. Trump’s golf courses in Florida.

An anonymous reader shares a report: PayPal said on Tuesday it was booting its CEO and replacing him with its board chair Enrique Lores, sparing no ambiguity as to why: “The pace of change and execution was not in line with the Board’s expectations,” it said in a statement. One group that was blindsided was HP, where Lores was until Tuesday serving as CEO, according to people familiar with the...