Apple has announced that it plans to invest over $500 billion in the US the next 4 years. Arstechnica.com reports that Apple claims this is the ‘largest ever’ spending commitment in the US, and that if supports a ‘wide range of initiatives,’ focused on artificial intelligence, chip manufacturing, advanced research and development, and worker training. About 20,000 jobs will be created over those four years…of which the vast majority will be focused on R&D, silicon engineering, software development, and AI and machine learning.” Most analysts see the initiative as a way for Apple to avoid the heavy tariffs the Trump administration is putting on China and other nations.

Something interesting is going on at Microsoft. According to gizmodo.com, on Friday, TD Cowen noticed that the partner to OpenAI seemed to be cancelling data center leases. Reportedly, Redmond felt it had an ‘oversupply problem.’ TD Cowen published its quick take on February 21 and said its research into Microsoft’s data center business had turned up something interesting. “Our channel checks indicate that [Microsoft] has 1) cancelled leases in the U.S. totalling ‘a couple of hundreds [megawatts]’ with at least two private data center operators, 2) has pulled back on the conversion of [statements of qualification] to leases, and 3) has re-allocated a considerable portion of its international spend to the U.S.” Microsoft is still promising to spend around $80 billion on US data centers as of this past January. 

Mr Totally Open With No Censorship Elon Musk apparently doesn’t mean it when it comes to himself…or Donald Trump. Techcrunch.com notes that Grok 3, the latest flagship large language model from xAI, when it was introduced in a live stream last Monday, was presented as a ‘maximally truth seeking AI’ by Musk. Well, maybe not so much. Grok 3 was briefly censoring unflattering facts about President Donald Trump — and Musk himself. Over the weekend, users on social media reported that, asked “Who is the biggest misinformation spreader?” with the “Think” setting enabled, Grok 3 noted in its “chain of thought” that it was explicitly instructed not to mention Donald Trump or Elon Musk. The chain of thought is the “reasoning” process the model uses to arrive at an answer to a question. By Sunday morning, the Grok 3 model was again allowing mentions of both Musk and Trump in the misinformation category. 

Google is planing to ditch SMS codes for two factor identification and start using QR Codes. Androidauthority.com reports that Google sees SMS codes as being Phishable, and at any rate, people might not always have access to the device where the codes are sent. In addition, they rely on the carrier’s security practices. No hard dates yet, but it will be simple enough to use…you will just scan the QR code with your camera app.

I’m Clark Reid and you’re ‘Technified’ for now.