⚖️ Musk seeks $134B from OpenAI and Microsoft

📢 OpenAI officially bringing ads to ChatGPT

🔐 Signal co-founder launches ChatGPT rival focused on privacy

📱 Threads overtakes X on mobile, but the gap remains wide overall

🌕 NASA’s Artemis II Moon rocket rolls to the launch pad

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Elon Musk is seeking up to $134 billion from OpenAI and Microsoft, arguing in a federal court filing that both companies benefited enormously from his early funding, reputation, and operational guidance when OpenAI was founded between 2015 and 2018.

Musk claims OpenAI gained $65.5–$109.4 billion and Microsoft gained $13.3–$25.1 billion from his contributions, alleging OpenAI violated its original nonprofit mission by restructuring into a for-profit entity; OpenAI has called the lawsuit baseless and part of a harassment campaign.

OpenAI and Microsoft are challenging Musk’s damages calculations, asking the judge to exclude his expert’s analysis as unreliable, while a judge has ruled the case will go to a jury trial expected to begin in April.

OpenAI announced it will begin testing targeted ads in ChatGPT for free and Go-tier users in the U.S., marking a major monetization shift as the company prepares for a potential late-2026 IPO.

Ads will appear as “Sponsored Recommendations” below responses and be targeted using conversation context, with exclusions for health, politics, and underage users; higher-priced tiers will remain ad-free, and OpenAI says ads will not influence answers or involve selling user data.

The move aligns with the global rollout of the $8/month ChatGPT Go tier and reflects a softening stance from leadership on advertising, raising broader questions about how ads in AI assistants could shape user trust and the future of the industry.

Signal co-founder Moxie Marlinspike has launched Confer, a ChatGPT-style assistant designed to keep conversations private by default, with no logging, storage, or reuse of chats for model training.

Confer uses end-to-end encryption and runs messages inside a Trusted Execution Environment with remote attestation, allowing users to verify the system hasn’t been altered while ensuring sensitive data never leaves secure memory.

Marlinspike argues that conversational AI encourages unusually intimate disclosure, and that combining chatbots with advertising incentives creates serious privacy risks—positioning Confer as an alternative path for users and industries that prioritize trust over monetization.

Meta’s Threads has surpassed X in global daily mobile app users, reaching about 141.5 million iOS and Android users compared to X’s 125 million, according to Similarweb data cited by TechCrunch.

Threads’ growth has been steady since late October rather than driven by recent controversies, though X still leads on mobile in the U.S., even as its U.S. daily mobile usage has dropped to about half of last year’s level.

Despite the mobile win, X remains far ahead on the web, drawing roughly 145 million daily visitors versus Threads’ 8.5 million, leaving Meta with a steep climb to match X’s total daily audience of more than 270 million.

NASA successfully moved the Artemis II Space Launch System and Orion spacecraft to Launch Pad 39B at Kennedy Space Center, a 4-mile trip that took nearly 12 hours due to the rocket’s massive size and slow crawler-transporter pace.

Teams are preparing for a critical wet dress rehearsal on February 2, loading super-cold propellants and running a full countdown; if successful, the Space Launch System could launch as early as February 6 within a narrow five-day window.

Artemis II will be the first human lunar flight since Apollo, sending four astronauts on a 10-day journey around the far side of the Moon to test deep-space systems, marking a major step toward sustained lunar missions and future crewed trips to Mars.

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