Top Stories of the Week: Feb. 2-6, 2026

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Editor's Picks from Other Websites

We hope you enjoy the articles on Electronic Design, but there's a lot going on and we can't cover everything. In this section, Electronic Design editors highlight articles they found this week that you might be interested in as well.

Andy's Picks From Around the Web

DuckDuckGo poll says 90% of responders don’t want AI

https://www.pcworld.com/article/3044488/90-of-duckduckgo-users-dont-want-ai.html

Extended use of LLM-based AI leads to atrophy in the pre-frontal cortex, which creates dummified users and higher dependence on....AI. Meanwhile, all  available data has been mined, so AI is now training on AI and increased processing power is no longer scaling.

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=z2TH5ietCZQ

Unlike the popular media's take, this video by Nate Jones alleges that the recent Amazon layoffs of 30,000 people is merely a trade of human capital for infrastructure capital—buying GPUs at a time when the company had a miserable -$4.8B (a net outflow) in free cash flow:

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=7sk3qmIQZnI

Mediocre guitar player incrementally designs a magnetically suspended guitar bridge which sort-of works. He doesn't seem to understand that force can be increased by decreasing magnet gap length and relies on weak materials in high tensile strength materials tasks:

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=ueCO4spGNPs

Watch Top Gear's "Stig" drive McMurtry Automotive's EV to clean up both an F1 car's record and the track itself like a vacuum cleaner:

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=NDfKhBcGh9w

Nvidia’s plan to invest up to $100 billion in OpenAI to help it train and run its latest artificial-intelligence models has stalled after some inside the chip giant expressed doubts about the deal:

https://archive.ph/BXlAP#selection-558.0-558.1

Court orders restart of all US offshore wind construction. Trump admin’s “it’s classified” ploy put on hold in five different cases allowing wind farm construction to proceed. All five farms are expected to be completed before the appellate courts can act.

https://arstechnica.com/science/2026/02/court-orders-restart-of-all-us-offshore-wind-construction/

Cue the meme of the guy holding a woman's hand and turning and admiring a woman they had just passed...Despite its latest software having almost zero improvement over the prior release, glass-housed OpenAI throws stones and is allegedly unsatisfied with some Nvidia chips and is looking for alternatives, sources say:

https://www.reuters.com/business/openai-is-unsatisfied-with-some-nvidia-chips-looking-alternatives-sources-say-2026-02-02/

As AI struggled with power delivery and cooling, foundry services providers like TSMC found their urgent-to-ramp-up AI chips stored on shelves. They're wisely not falling for the hype or the excuses for sloppy coding as "Silicon Valley Thinks TSMC is Braking the AI Boom":

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=2lLFBun1qR0

A post-American, enshittification-resistant internet (a speech at 39C3 in Hamburg on Dec 28, 2025)

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=39jsstmmUUs

AI Slop Will Save The Internet… Seriously.

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=_QlsGkDvVHU

Verge Motorcycles with the Donut Lab battery appear to have slipped delivery from Q1/26 to Q4/26 (use Chrome browser to translate):

https://www.kauppalehti.fi/uutiset/a/5460f06d-27b5-4c8e-bb7f-8fc03f5294f5

Is Porsche really pulling the plug on the all-electric Boxster?

https://www.evo.co.uk/porsche/cayman/208484/is-porsche-really-pulling-the-plug-on-the-all-electric-boxster

NASA’s Perseverance rover has "just made" history by driving across Mars using routes planned by artificial intelligence instead of human operators. A vision-capable AI analyzed the same images and terrain data normally used by rover planners, identified hazards like rocks and sand ripples, and charted a safe path across the Martian surface. [The rover drove 'er almost 2 months ago, so maybe JPL should use that same AI to navigate getting its press releases out faster?] 

https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2026/01/260131084555.htm

Anthropic cements its position as the not-OpenAI with no-ads pledge. As profit-starved AI companies scramble to monetize chat interactions, Claude bets on trust.

https://www.theregister.com/2026/02/04/anthropic_no_advertising_in_claude/

Royal Navy Called His Engine a “Toy” — Then His 100-Foot Boat Outran Every Warship at 34 Knots

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=LfsImHXAZ7o