This week highlights how quickly AI is moving from feature to foundation across consumer tech and the enterprise stack. Apple is preparing to recast Siri as a full AI chatbot, OpenAI is edging toward its first hardware device, and platforms like Spotify and YouTube are pushing AI deeper into everyday creation and discovery, signaling that competitive pressure is now forcing major consumer products to go fully AI-native rather than incrementally enhanced.
At the same time, research, policy, and capital markets illustrated the growing fault lines beneath that momentum. New analysis shows enterprises still struggling to turn AI ambition into revenue, regulators tightening scrutiny on misuse and governance, and geopolitical tensions rising over chips and compute access. Despite this, investors continue to pour billions into AI education, customer service, data infrastructure, and networking.
Industry & Enterprise
Apple Prepares AI Chatbot Overhaul of Siri for Future iOS Release
Apple is preparing a major overhaul of Siri that would reposition the assistant as a full AI chatbot, according to reporting by Mark Gurman, with a redesigned version internally codenamed Campos expected to support voice and text and debut at Worldwide Developers Conference in June ahead of integration into iOS 27. The shift reflects mounting competitive pressure on Apple, marking a departure from earlier positions by software chief Craig Federighi and coming as the company confirmed a partnership with Google’s Gemini after evaluating technologies from OpenAI and Anthropic, while OpenAI moves toward hardware ambitions with former Apple design chief Jony Ive. (AI Insider)
IBM Research: AI Will Drive ‘Smarter’ Business Growth Through 2030
By 2030, leading enterprises are expected to operate as AI-first organizations, embedding artificial intelligence into decision-making, products, workforce design, and governance, shifting advantage toward firms built to learn and adapt in real time. Research from IBM Institute for Business Value, based on a survey of more than 2,000 executives across 33 geographies and 23 industries, finds nearly 80% expect AI-driven revenue by decade’s end but fewer than 25% can identify its source, with the gap shaped by forces including larger strategic bets, reinvestment of productivity gains, multi-model AI architectures, the growing role of human judgment alongside agentic AI, and the longer-term impact of quantum computing. (AI Insider)
OpenAI Targets Second-Half Launch for First AI Hardware Device
OpenAI is on track to announce its first hardware product in the second half of this year, expanding beyond software distribution after acquiring io, the startup founded by former Apple design chief Jony Ive, according to comments by Chris Lehane at an Axios-hosted panel during the World Economic Forum. OpenAI chief executive Sam Altman has indicated the device will be more minimal than smartphones, with reporting pointing to a screen-free, pocketable or wearable form factor and potential manufacturing partnerships in Asia as the company seeks greater control over how its AI assistants are experienced. (AI Insider)
Spotify Launches AI-Powered Prompted Playlists for Premium Users in North America
Spotify has begun rolling out Prompted Playlists to Premium users in the United States and Canada, allowing listeners to generate playlists using natural-language prompts rather than predefined genres or moods, following earlier testing in New Zealand. The feature builds on Spotify’s 2024 AI playlist tools by combining users’ listening histories with real-time music trends and is currently available in English as a beta, according to the company and its head of global music curation and discovery, J.J. Italiano. (AI Insider)
YouTube Expands AI Tools for Shorts With Creator Likeness Capabilities
YouTube plans to let creators produce Shorts using AI-generated versions of their own likeness as part of an expanded creative AI toolkit, with chief executive Neal Mohan positioning the tools as aids to creative experimentation rather than replacements for human creators. The feature will add to existing AI tools for Shorts — now averaging about 200 billion daily views—and include creator controls and detection systems aimed at limiting unauthorized use and reducing low-quality AI-generated content. (AI Insider)
Research & Innovation
Study Finds Today’s AI Systems Almost Certainly Lack Consciousness — But The Door is Not Fully Closed
A new study from Rethink Priorities finds that the balance of evidence weighs against current large language models being conscious, while strongly supporting consciousness in chickens and very strongly supporting it in humans. Using a Bayesian “Digital Consciousness Model,” the researchers conclude AI consciousness remains unlikely but not impossible, warning that future advances in capabilities and system design could raise ethical and policy questions as certain features meaningfully increase that likelihood. (AI Insider)
AI Moves From Experiment to Infrastructure as 2026 Forces a Reckoning for Tech Builders and Investors
Artificial intelligence is shifting from an optional feature to core infrastructure, with competitive advantage in 2026 increasingly determined by whether systems can operate reliably at scale, meet regulatory requirements, and deliver measurable outcomes in production. The analysis points to a widening divide between organizations stalled in pilot projects and those rebuilding operations around AI-native architectures, as constraints such as security-by-design, governance, data sovereignty, and the complexity of deploying agentic and physical AI become decisive factors for both investors and founders. (AI Insider)
Policy & Governance
Regulatory Pressure Mounts on xAI as Musk Escalates Legal Battle With OpenAI and Microsoft
California regulators have intensified scrutiny of xAI, ordering it to halt the generation of nonconsensual sexual imagery by its Grok chatbot, as the California Attorney General’s Office under Rob Bonta investigates alleged large-scale production of deepfake intimate content, including material involving minors, amid parallel probes abroad and temporary bans in parts of Asia. At the same time, Elon Musk is pursuing tens of billions of dollars in damages from OpenAI and Microsoft, arguing they abandoned OpenAI’s nonprofit mission, underscoring escalating legal and regulatory pressure on frontier AI developers over governance, control, and misuse. (AI Insider)
Anthropic CEO Criticises U.S. Approval of AI Chip Exports to China at Davos
Following the U.S. administration’s approval of high-performance AI chip sales from Nvidia and AMD to approved Chinese customers, debate over AI export controls has intensified, with Dario Amodei of Anthropic warning at the World Economic Forum that exporting advanced processors used to train AI models could pose long-term national security risks to the United States. His remarks, notable given Nvidia’s role as a core GPU supplier to leading AI developers and a major investor in Anthropic, highlight growing tensions among AI labs, chipmakers, and policymakers as AI competition takes on increasing geopolitical weight. (AI Insider)
Startups & Capital
Preply Raises $150M to Shape the Future of Education through Human-Led, AI-Enhanced Learning
Preply raised $150 million in a Series D led by WestCap, valuing the company at $1.2 billion, with Goldman Sachs International acting as sole placement agent. The platform, which connects more than 100,000 tutors with learners in 180 countries across 90+ languages, said it has become EBITDA positive and will use the funding to deepen AI and data capabilities, expand product and engineering teams, and accelerate global growth. (AI Insider)
Parloa Secures $350M Series D at $3B Valuation to Scale Enterprise AI Customer Service
Parloa raised $350 million in a Series D led by General Catalyst, valuing the Berlin-based company at $3 billion just eight months after a $120 million round at a $1 billion valuation, with participation from EQT Ventures, Altimeter Capital, Durable Capital, and Mosaic Ventures. Led by co-founder and CEO Malte Kosub, Parloa said it surpassed $50 million in annual recurring revenue and will use the funding to build multi-model, context-aware AI agents for enterprise contact centers across voice, web, and app channels, serving customers including Allianz, Booking.com, SAP, and Swiss Life. (AI Insider)
ClickHouse Secures $400M Series D Led by Dragoneer to Accelerate Expansion Across Analytics and AI Infrastructure
ClickHouse raised $400 million in a Series D led by Dragoneer, citing rapid growth with more than 3,000 ClickHouse Cloud customers and annual recurring revenue up over 250% year over year. The company is expanding its platform to support AI production workloads—including unified transactional and analytical data and LLM observability following its acquisition of Langfuse—as it uses the funding to accelerate global expansion and position itself as core real-time data infrastructure for AI systems at scale. (AI Insider)
From $100M Seed to Unicorn in Months: Upscale AI Closes Oversubscribed $200M Series A to Build the First Pure-Play AI Networking Company
Upscale AI raised $200 million in a Series A led by Tiger Global, Premji Invest, and Xora Innovation, bringing total funding to more than $300 million as it targets a core bottleneck in scaling AI systems. The company is building an open, rack-scale AI networking platform that unifies GPUs, accelerators, memory, storage, and networking, with the new capital funding team expansion and commercial deployment ahead of broader adoption by hyperscalers and AI infrastructure operators. (AI Insider)
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