Reading List

The most recent articles from a list of feeds I subscribe to.

Sources: Disney's Sora deal is entirely in OpenAI stock rather than a cash licensing fee; Disney has the option to buy additional stock beyond the $1B stake (Bloomberg)

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Sources: Notion told staff it is doing a $300M tender offer at an $11B valuation, ahead of a potential IPO; it passed $600M in ARR, half of it from AI products (Anna Tong/Forbes)

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How crypto entrepreneur Bill Zanker helped Trump and Melania launch memecoins; as of December 10, $TRUMP was down 92% since its peak and $MELANIA was down 99% (Bloomberg)

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The US FTC, along with 21 states and DC, files an amended complaint against Uber, alleging deceptive billing and cancellation practices related to Uber One (Reuters)

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Cloudflare 2025 report: global internet traffic grew 19% in 2025, ChatGPT was the most popular AI service, global traffic from Starlink grew 2.3x, and more (Cloudflare)

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GM is adding native Apple Music to select vehicles, and rolls out support for digital keys, after it started phasing out CarPlay in 2023 (Andrew J. Hawkins/The Verge)

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Sources: xAI has created an enterprise AI sales group, but xAI's lack of experience in selling to big businesses is holding potential customers back (Theo Wayt/The Information)

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Lidar manufacturer Luminar files for Chapter 11 bankruptcy and says it reached a deal to sell its semiconductor subsidiary to Quantum Computing Inc. for $110M (Reshmi Basu/Bloomberg)

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Mexico-based fintech Plata raised up to $500M in a financing deal arranged by Nomura Securities International, as it moves toward becoming a full-fledged bank (Prakhar Srivastava/Reuters)

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Google is shutting down its dark web monitoring tool, launched in 2024 to alert users when their personal info is detected on the dark web, on February 16, 2026 (Ben Schoon/9to5Google)

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NY-based Octane, which offers "instant" financing for large recreational and lifestyle purchases, raised a $100M Series F at a post-money valuation of $1.3B (Mary Ann Azevedo/Crunchbase News)

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Nvidia acquires SchedMD, the developer of Slurm, an open-source AI workload management system, and says it will keep distributing Slurm on an open-source basis (Arsheeya Bajwa/Reuters)

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The Trump administration launches US Tech Force to recruit ~1,000 staffers from Apple, Meta, xAI, and others for two-year stints to modernize the government (Natalie Alms/Nextgov/FCW)

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Source: Dragoneer raised $4.3B for its seventh VC fund and now has over $30B in AUM; it raised $3.8B for its sixth private fund in 2022 (Dan Primack/Axios)

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Thrive Holdings announces it has hired Palantir CIO Jim Siders to serve as CEO of Shield Technology Partners, a newly created business focused on IT services (Ashley Capoot/CNBC)

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LG smart TV owners say a webOS update pinned Microsoft Copilot to the home screen, with no apparent way to remove the app; LG unveiled an AI TV strategy at CES (Luke James/Tom's Hardware)

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Internal docs: Meta earned $18B+ in annual ad sales from China in 2024, making up 10%+ of its global revenue, with $3B+ linked to fraudulent ads, like for scams (Reuters)

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Lightspeed raised $9B+ across six AI funds, including $3.3B to back breakout hits like Anthropic, xAI, and Mistral; Lightspeed has backed 165 AI startups (Erin Griffith/New York Times)

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Nvidia launches Nemotron 3, a family of AI models using a hybrid mixture-of-experts architecture and the Mamba-Transformer design, in 30B, 100B, and ~500B sizes (Emilia David/VentureBeat)

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Memo: Greg Peters and Ted Sarandos lay out Netflix's WBD offer, moving to quell concerns about job losses and the end of theater releases, after Paramount's bid (Rose Henderson/Bloomberg)

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