NASA has released details of a test it conducted in December in which it used generative AI to plan a route for the Perseverance rover. The test run seems to have gone rather well, prompting NASA to evaluate how it explores other planetary bodies in the future. The major problem facing any robotic exploration of a planet's surface is communication delay.

Fintech operators are pushing for a dedicated growth fund or credit guarantee scheme to unlock capital for innovation and expansion, but the Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN) says it cannot directly establish venture-style financing. The regulator disclosed this in its latest fintech sector report, which drew on a quantitative survey of leading fintech executives, a closed-door stakeholder workshop held in June 2025, and the CBN fintech roundtable convened in October 2025.

The Microsoft Cordless Phone System debuted quietly in late 1998, marking the company’s first move into hardware. It plugged directly into a Windows PC, aiming to combine ordinary calls with the power of home computers. This product was launched on October 6th, and by November, it was available in stores for an anticipated price of $199.95 ($395 today). The system consisted of three major components: a 900MHz cordless handset, a base unit, and a separate charging dock.

Facing the Atlantic Ocean, where the Lagos–Calabar coastal road stretches into the distance, a vast technology campus is taking shape. Spread across 42 hectares, the Kasi Cloud site feels less like a conventional industrial development and more like a long-term bet on Nigeria’s digital future.  Sea breeze cuts across concrete shells, steel frames, and cleared land, revealing the scale of ambition behind what its builders describe as Nigeria’s first data centre campus, purpose-built for artificial intelligence (AI).

OTTAWA – The University of Ottawa is launching a new center for research, education and innovation in medical Artificial Intelligence (AI) to facilitate cross-cutting collaborations while sharpening the university’s competitive edge in the this rapidly changing landscape. Led by Canada Research Chair in Medical Artificial Intelligence Dr. Khaled El Emam (pictured), the Ottawa Medical Artificial Intelligence Research Institute (OMARI) will serve as a resource hub for harnessing and scaling medical AI to expedite new research discoveries, enhance education, and help achieve better health equity with data-driven tools.

February 4 — ModelBest has officially open-sourced its latest multimodal flagship model, MiniCPM-o 4.5. As a native full-duplex multimodal large model, MiniCPM-o 4.5 enables AI to perceive, listen, and proactively respond in real time. This allows interactions to move beyond rigid, turn-based exchanges, positioning the model as the industry’s first to support “instant free conversation,” with uninterrupted perception, natural dialogue, and context-aware prompts.

Cellulant, a Pan-African payments processor, has picked Michael Muriuki as its chief product and technology officer (CPTO), promoting a long-serving insider as the company doubles down on product-led growth and infrastructure scale amid intensifying competition across Africa’s digital payments and banking sectors. Muriuki, who joined the Kenyan fintech over a decade ago as an implementation engineer, will assume end-to-end responsibility for product strategy, platform development, and software engineering, a consolidation of leadership that signals Cellulant’s push to align technology execution with its profitability push.

Automatic speech recognition (ASR) is becoming a core building block for AI products, from meeting tools to voice agents. Mistral’s new Voxtral Transcribe 2 family targets this space with 2 models that split cleanly into batch and realtime use cases, while keeping cost, latency, and deployment constraints in focus. The release includes: Voxtral Mini Transcribe V2 for batch transcription with diarization.

Cerebras raised $1.1bn in a previous round last September at an $8.1bn post-money valuation. Cerebras Systems, the AI chipmaker rivalling Nvidia, has raised $1bn in a Series H round led by Tiger Global with participation from AMD. The raise values the company at around $23bn – nearly tripling in price in just more than four months. Other backers in this round include Benchmark; Fidelity Management and Research Company; Atreides Management; Alpha Wave Global; Altimeter; Coatue; and 1789 Capital, among others.

Korea’s AI economy is entering its most revealing phase: one where innovation will be judged not by Seoul’s laboratories, but by what happens in Daegu, Jeonnam, or Gyeongnam’s factory floors. The Ministry of SMEs and Startups is betting that true transformation begins outside the capital—if local governments can turn policy grants into working AI infrastructure, not just another round of plans.

Image source: T2 Mobile After years of shrinking numbers, T2 Mobile, the telco that rebranded from 9mobile, has recorded its first full quarter of consecutive internet subscriber growth. The increase is modest, with just over 9,000 users added in December 2025, but in a market where the operator had been steadily losing ground, the direction matters. Why this is different: …

ALLISTON, Ont. – Infrastructure Ontario (IO) and The Stevenson Memorial Hospital have awarded a fixed-price contract valued at $174 million to Pomerleau Inc. to deliver the Stevenson Memorial Hospital Phase 1 Redevelopment Project in Alliston. Infrastructure Ontario and The Stevenson Memorial Hospital selected Pomerleau Inc. following extensive evaluations through an open, fair and competitive procurement process that began in August 2024.

GitHub has just made a massive play for the hearts and minds of developers by officially bringing Anthropic’s Claude and OpenAI’s Codex into the fold. Starting today in public preview, these high-powered AI agents are now accessible directly within GitHub and VS Code for those on premium subscriptions. This move follows the launch of Agent HQ last year, which was designed to solve the growing headache of managing a fragmented AI tool stack.

BOSTON – Artificial intelligence helps doctors spot more cases of breast cancer when reading routine scans, a world-first trial found. The results suggest countries should roll out programs taking advantage of AI’s scanning power to ease the workload of short-staffed radiologists, the Swedish lead researchers said. Well before the release of ChatGPT in 2022 raised global awareness about AI, scientists had been testing out the technology’s capacity to read medical scans.

Ride-hailing platform Uber has appointed Indian-origin executive Balaji Krishnamurthy as its chief financial officer. A graduate of Manipal Institute of Technology, Krishnamurthy has been with Uber for more than six years and will assume his new role from February 16, following the resignation of the present chief financial officer Prashanth Mahendra-Rajah. "Prashanth Mahendra-Rajah, Chief Financial Officer, will step down from his role on February 16, 2026.

A little Japanese Kei truck has been turned into an electric vehicle and features a faux battery pack in the bed that resembles a giant cordless drill battery. Ron Grosinger, often known as Mr. G to his students, is a high school auto shop and welding teacher who spearheaded the modification of a 1999 Daihatsu Hijet with his students. Years ago, Grosinger acquired the truck for a rust repair job and to give his students some hands-on welding experience.

NVIDIA has released VIBETENSOR, an open-source research system software stack for deep learning. VIBETENSOR is generated by LLM-powered coding agents under high-level human guidance. The system asks a concrete question: can coding agents generate a coherent deep learning runtime that spans Python and JavaScript APIs down to C++ runtime components and CUDA memory management and validate it only through tools.

OWEN SOUND, Ont. – Brightshores Health System is introducing a new digital call bell system designed to make it easier for patients to communicate with their nursing team and help nurses respond to the most urgent needs first. Developed in Waterloo, Ont., this technology replaces the traditional one-button call bell with an easy-to-use app. Patient requests are automatically sorted and prioritized, giving nurses quick, useful information at a glance.

February 4 — Tencent’s Hunyuan AI Infrastructure team announced the open-source release of HPC-Ops, a production-grade, high-performance operator library designed for large language model inference. Built from scratch to address real-world production bottlenecks, HPC-Ops leverages architectural abstraction, deep micro-architecture adaptation, and instruction-level optimization to push core operators closer to hardware performance limits. In real-world tests, Tencent reports that HPC-Ops boosted inference throughput (QPM) of Hunyuan models by 30%, and improved DeepSeek model QPM by 17%.

Hexnode today announced a major upgrade to Hexnode GenieAI, its AI-powered assistant designed to simplify and accelerate endpoint management operations across organisations in the UAE, a global leader in AI adoption where nearly 60% of the workforce now uses AI tools, driving demand for intelligent, automated IT systems The enhanced Genie AI introduces a conversational interface within the Hexnode Unified Endpoint Management (UEM) console, enabling IT teams to access real-time device insights, execute commands, and automate troubleshooting through natural language interactions.

The Google Pixel 9a is without a doubt the best option for anyone wishing to purchase a flagship smartphone without breaking the bank in 2026. At $399 for the 128 GB model, which is $100 less than the original price, this device far exceeds its price in terms of what it offers, pushing the limits of how much a phone should cost.

After years of valuation correction and investor restraint, Korea’s startup capital market is stirring again. January 2026 data suggests that the country’s venture ecosystem is slowly exiting its post-pandemic slump, with early-stage funding returning and national investment priorities sharpening around AI, energy, and future manufacturing — the technologies expected to anchor Korea’s next innovation decade. January 2026 Snapshot: 94 Deals, 435.9 Billion KRW in New Capital…

VANCOUVER – Arya Health , a leading provider of EMR solutions for healthcare administration and clinical workflows, announced that it has entered into an agreement to acquire HippoAI , a clinical decision support platform powered by advanced artificial intelligence. The acquisition brings together Arya’s operational EMR with HippoAI’s medical knowledge engine to deliver an integrated solution that enhances both administrative efficiency and clinical decision-making for healthcare providers.

Members of the AWS Prototyping Team delivered a tutorial for MassRobotics residents and participants in the Physical AI Working Group. The session covered the team’s mission and provided an overview of AWS tools for developing and deploying physical AI systems. The team will return on February 12 for an extended, in-person presentation and a deeper Q&A. The AWS Prototyping Team offers hands-on support to startups and companies exploring AWS.

Glowing a striking turquoise from diatomic carbon (C2) emission, Kreutz comet C/2026 A1 (MAPS) was only at magnitude 17 when this photo was taken on Jan. 17th. The comet will remain relatively dim except for a few days centered on its April 4th perihelion, when it may reach negative magnitudes for several hours. Gerald Rhemann and Michael Jaeger Want to see a comet watcher's eyes light up?