115 – Breaking News & Latest Updates 2026
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Richard Lawler

Richard Lawler

Senior News Editor

Senior News Editor

    More From Richard Lawler

    Richard Lawler
    Richard Lawler
    The Final Fantasy VII Rebirth demo is getting a graphics update.

    After the FFVII Rebirth demo arrived last week, some players complained of “early PS3” era textures while playing in its default 1440p performance mode instead of the higher quality Graphics mode.

    Now Square Enix says that a planned “part two” update adding a Junon episode area to the demo on February 21st will also bring improved graphics for performance mode, which will be included in the retail game when it’s released on the 29th.

    Richard Lawler
    Richard Lawler
    AI expert Andrej Karpathy confirms he’s left OpenAI.

    As first reported by The Information, which says he’d been working on an AI assistant. Karpathy’s exit comes a year after rejoining OpenAI, where he was a founding member, with stops at Apple and Tesla in between.

    Karpathy’s path has taken him from Google’s If I Had Glass competition to obtaining a Vision Pro, and tonight, he tweeted, “My immediate plan is to work on my personal projects and see what happens.”

    Richard Lawler
    Richard Lawler
    Another long-tenured Apple designer is leaving the company.

    Mark Gurman reports for Bloomberg that Bart Andre, Apple’s “longest-service industrial designer” who helped run the team after Evans Hankey exited, has announced he’s leaving too. Andre, like Hankey and several others who have departed from the team that now reports to Apple COO Jeff Williams, worked closely with chief design officer Jony Ive until he left, and started his Lovefrom design firm in 2019.

    Richard Lawler
    Richard Lawler
    Overwatch 2 and Apex Legends hit the reset button.

    Over the next couple of hours, the two games I play the most are releasing massive updates, with changes to ranked tier systems, character abilities, and either 120Hz refresh rates or new bullet sizes.

    With games like Baldur’s Gate 3 and Spider-Man 2 atop the sales charts, these live service games need something new to keep going — and hopefully, with these changes they find it.

    Apex Legends Breakout season starts at 1PM ET, and Overwatch 2 starts season 9 at 2PM ET

    Season promo images for Overwach and Apex Legends
    Image: EA / Blizzard
    Richard Lawler
    Richard Lawler
    X will allow advertisers to only run ads on selected profiles.

    Elon Musk’s revamped X ad business has included a “revenue sharing” program that requires payment to have the potential of getting paid and shown ads alongside white nationalist profiles.

    X, as it attempts to become a YouTube alternative, says it has over 80,000 creators monetizing their posts and is trying to address brand safety issues with Creator Targeting:

    This means giving advertisers more control to be able to use the self-serve X Ads Manager to run pre-roll video ads against the video content of their chosen creator(s) in both the home timeline and profile.

    Soon we’ll add the ability to serve ads only on an individual creator’s profile – completely eliminating the unlikely event of unwanted adjacencies while aligning your brand to creators you love most.

    It didn’t say how big of a cut creators will get if their profile is targeted or if they can choose which advertisers are shown.

    Richard Lawler
    Richard Lawler
    Netflix teases us with 48 seconds of F1: Drive to Survive.

    Season six of Netflix’s Formula 1 docuseries (that all of the others are trying to copy) arrives on February 23rd, ready to recap last season’s action (and inevitable ending) that set up the offseason madness racing fans are currently dealing with.

    We’ll see if it has any hints about Lewis Hamilton’s upcoming Ferrari switch, Guenther Steiner’s exit from Haas, or whatever is being investigated about Christian Horner. In the meantime, has anyone watched the NASCAR attempt, Full Speed?

    Richard Lawler
    Richard Lawler
    Next season’s streaming-only NFL playoff game might be on Prime Video.

    Amazon isn’t part of the incoming ESPN / Fox Sports / Warner Bros. streaming juggernaut, but it has the NFL.

    The Wall Street Journal and Deadline report Prime Video will be home to the next streaming exclusive postseason football game, beating out NBCU’s attempt at a Peacock repeat thanks to a right of first refusal clause in its Thursday Night Football deal.

    Peacock’s stream peaked at more than 24 million viewers for a game last month between Kansas City and Miami.

    Richard Lawler
    Richard Lawler
    As the Super Bowl rolls into Las Vegas, X cuts a deal to advertise gambling odds.

    Besides its arrangement for weekly 5-minute WWE matches, X is partnering with BetMGM to slap gambling odds at the top of event pages for sporting events, starting with the Super Bowl.

    The platform formerly known as Twitter is far from the only one suddenly flooded with odds and gambling promos (see ESPN Bet). A recent 60 Minutes report dug into how the services use data to target when someone’s most likely to place a bet.

    A screenshot of the X event page for the Super Bowl that prominently displays gambling infor linked to BetMGM.
    The Super Bowl event page inside the X app with betting odds above tweets.
    Image: Screenshot by Richard Lawler
    Richard Lawler
    Richard Lawler
    The latest rumor about Sam Altman’s AI chip-building dream could require up to $7 trillion.

    For context, here’s how the Wall Street Journal describes OpenAI’s once-again leader’s trillion dollar effort to “reshape the global semiconductor industry:”

    Such a sum of investment would dwarf the current size of the global semiconductor industry. Global sales of chips were $527 billion last year and are expected to rise to $1 trillion annually by 2030.

    The money is needed to fuel AI’s growth and solve the scarcity of expensive AI chips required to train the large language models that underpin systems like ChatGPT. According to the WSJ, Altman is pitching a chip-making partnership to investors from the UAE, SoftBank CEO Masayoshi Son (again), and TSMC.

    Richard Lawler
    Richard Lawler
    WWE Speed will stream 5-minute wrestling matches on X this spring.

    In addition to the WWE’s 2025 switch to Netflix, it will also broadcast timed matches via the platform formerly known as Twitter.

    Like Tucker Carlson’s two-hour interview with Vladimir Putin, these will be produced live to tape exclusively for the platform, but they’ll only be five minutes long and will feature “your favorite WWE Superstars.” THR notes their agreement is for two years of weekly episodes.