Weekly Tech, Marketing & AI News Roundup

It’s Saturday, and here’s your weekly dose of what’s shaking up tech, marketing, and AI. Let’s dive in!

Social Media and Marketing Updates

• Instagram: Testing DM upgrades, a dislike button for comments, and Testimonials in Partnership Ads.

  
  

• Twitter / X: Launched Grok 3, but Elon jacked up Premium+ from $16 to $40/month. X users are upset — 150% hike for AI perks and priority posts? Cancel culture’s hitting the platform hard.

  
  YouTube: Rolling out Veo 2 AI from Google DeepMind for creators. Video generation’s about to get a sci-fi glow-up on YouTube.

  
  

• LinkedIn: Added Email Open Rates and Sends to Newsletter analytics.

  
  

• WhatsApp: Testing social media links in profiles and an AI chat tab. Meta’s turning it into a mini-social hub. WhatsApp Beta feature lets you customize voice message transcriptions.

  
  

• Digital Marketing: Meta’s AI ad push is the talk of the town — automated campaigns are a marketer’s dream.

Tech & AI Highlights

• Meta: Advantage+ AI ad tools got a glow-up—full campaign automation for lead gen and simpler setups. Also, those Feb 9 layoffs (5% of low performers) are still echoing, with AI/ML hiring ramping up. Zuck’s betting big on bots.

  
  

• OpenAI: Expanded its Operator AI agent to more countries. It’s ChatGPT’s smarter cousin — scheduling, research, you name it. Plus, Deep Research (launched earlier) is still flexing against Perplexity.
  

  
  

• Perplexity: Perplexity Deep Research (Feb 15 drop) is killing it — 2–4 minute answers, free for five queries/day.
  

  
  

• Apple-Alibaba: Rumored AI collab to juice up Siri with Alibaba’s cloud tech. No official word, but X is hyped—could this be Apple’s AI comeback?
  

  
  

• China’s DeepSeek: South Korea’s ban last Sunday’s still hot, with U.S. Congress eyeing a TikTok-style crackdown. Data privacy fears are peaking — AI geopolitics :P
  

Leaks, Speculations and New Features

• Grok Voices with different moods, personalities and custom instructions.

  
  

• ChatGPT persistent chat memory (ChatGPT moonshine Alpha).

  
  

• Claude web app changes (retry, summaries, warning for reaching limits faster)

  
  

• Dark mode for ElevenLabs.

  
  

• Pika AI dropped Pikaswaps. You can swap objects in your real-world video with anything.

  
  

• Grok 3 rolls out for everyone even free users.

  
  

• GPT 4.5 probably rolling out next week and GPT 5 in May.

  
  

• 400 million weekly active users on ChatGPT.

  
  

• ElevenLabs and Spotify partner for AI-generated audiobooks creation and publishing.

Random Cool Stuff

• Clone Robotics: Launched a soft-bodied android with Myofiber tech (1,000+ synthetic muscles). Walks naturally, talks English, runs on water + electricity. Sci-fi movies are turning out to be real!

  
  

• ElevenLabs Studio now available for free for everyone.
  

  
  

• Convergence's AI Agent Proxy 1.0 deepseeked OpenAI… again with it's operator launch!
  
  

• R1 1776 is a DeepSeek-R1 reasoning model that has been post-trained by Perplexity AI to remove Chinese Communist Party censorship.
  
  

• NYX an AI-powered performance marketing co-pilot launches an end-to-end campaign management platform helping you create high-converting ads, launch campaigns across major ad channels, receive analytics and insights.

What’s your favorite update this week? Got any tech gossip that I may have missed? Drop it below in the comments!

Give me a Follow on Product Hunt to be notified of my forum threads and hunts. :)