Main by morning: Apple competes with YouTube and Spotify, Alibaba has a new AI model

Medical company Danaher is preparing a $10 billion deal to buy Masimo, strengthening its position in the fast-growing medical monitoring market. Elon Musk's SpaceX and xAI are participating in the Pentagon's competition to create voice-controlled autonomous drone swarms, bringing them into a new, more sensitive field of AI weapons. On these and other topics - in our roundup of key developments for the morning of February 17.

Apple has announced the launch of an integrated video mode in Apple Podcasts this spring amid the growing popularity of video podcasts (watched by 37% of the audience over the age of 12 each month), CNBC reports. Users will be able to switch between audio and video in the same feed, use picture-in-picture mode and download videos for offline viewing. The update includes support for HLS streaming (HLS is a continuous communication protocol for streaming media that provides stable playback of content) and dynamic insertion of video ads; Apple will not charge authors for placement, but will introduce a commission for advertising networks for displaying ads.

The move intensifies the company's competition with YouTube, Spotify and Netflix, which are actively investing in video podcasts, CNBC points out. The hosting partners will be Acast, ART19, Omny Studio and SiriusXM. The service is part of the Services segment, which brought Apple $30 billion in revenue in the last quarter.

Alibaba released a new series of Qwen3.5 AI models in open-weight and cloud versions on the eve of Chinese New Year, CNBC writes. The model gained native multimodality (text, images and video), support for agent and coding functions, and compatibility with open-source agents.

According to the company, the 397 billion parameter version shows improvements in performance and cost and is comparable to OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google DeepMind (estimates provided by Alibaba itself). Qwen3.5 supports 201 languages versus 82 in the last version, and Alibaba has announced new open-weight models (AI models that can be used, modified and deployed locally by other developers) in the coming days. The release comes amid intensifying competition, with ByteDance and Zhipu AI also updating their models with a focus on agent-based capabilities, the channel points out.

Danaher is close to a deal to buy US MedTech company Masimo for about $10bn, the Financial Times reports. The agreement could be announced as early as Tuesday, February 17, and implies a $7 billion premium to Masimo's market capitalization. This would be Danaher's largest acquisition since it bought Cytiva in 2020 for $21 billion.

Masimo is known for patient monitoring systems, including pulse oximeters; in 2024, the company had revenue of about $2 billion with an operating loss of $266 million, the newspaper recalls.

Overall, the patient monitoring device market was estimated at $56.4 billion in 2025 and could exceed $137 billion by 2034 at a growth rate of about 10% per year due to an aging population and the development of remote monitoring, the newspaper said.

Elon Musk's SpaceX and xAI are participating in a $100 million closed Pentagon competition to create autonomous swarms of voice-controlled drones, Bloomberg reports. The project involves developing software capable of translating voice commands into digital instructions and coordinating the actions of multiple drones in the air and at sea.

The competition is being held in several stages - from software to actual testing - and is supervised by the US Department of Defense structures focused on the implementation of AI in military systems. The participation of Musk's companies marks their deeper entry into the field of AI weapons, despite the entrepreneur's previous statements about the risks of autonomous weapons, the agency points out, recalling that xAI already has contracts with the Pentagon for the integration of its chatbot Grok, and after the merger with SpaceX, the companies will work on the project together.

- Japan's broad Topix index was down 0.77 percent, while the Nikkei 225 was down 0.78 percent.

- Hong Kong's Hang Seng index added 0.52%. Shanghai and Shenzhen stock exchanges do not hold trading due to holidays in China.

- The Korea Exchange is not trading due to holidays in South Korea.

- Australia's S&P/ASX 200 rose 0.24%.

- S&P 500 futures were down 0.43%, Nasdaq Composite futures were down 0.75% and Dow Jones Industrial Average exchange-traded contracts were down 0.29%.

This article was AI-translated and verified by a human editor