Reading List

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

Philadelphia-based Asylon, which modifies Boston Dynamics' robot dog Spot into DroneDog, raised a $26M Series B led by Insight, taking its total funding to $45M (Julie Bort/TechCrunch)

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Lumotive, whose optical chip tech can "steer" laser light and is an alternative to lidar, extends its Series B from $45M to $59M, including from Amazon's IIF (Rebecca Szkutak/TechCrunch)

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Miaan Group: a number of Iranians received spyware threat alerts from Apple in H1 2025 in the months prior to the Iran-Israel war, the first such cases in Iran (Patrick Howell O'Neill/Bloomberg)

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UK startup Inforcer, which helps SMBs automate and manage Microsoft 365, security, and more, raised a $35M Series B, a source says at a $200M+ valuation (Alex Konrad/Upstarts Media)

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Sources: Google is seeking to recruit news organizations for a new licensing project related to AI, and plans to launch a pilot initially with ~20 US outlets (Bloomberg)

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Ashby, which offers an AI-powered talent platform combining applications, CRM, search, and more, raised a $50M Series D, following a $30M Series C in 2024 (Judy Rider/Crunchbase News)

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Reka AI, which aims to make more efficient LLMs, raised $110M from Nvidia, Snowflake, and others at a $1B+ valuation, up from ~$300M in 2023, per PitchBook (Brunella Tipismana Urbano/Bloomberg)

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AMD and Stability AI launch the industry's first Stable Diffusion 3.0 Medium AI model optimized for AMD's XDNA 2 NPUs, designed to run locally on Ryzen laptops (Anton Shilov/Tom's Hardware)

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OpenAI and Oracle unveil plans to develop 4.5GW of additional US data center capacity in an expanded partnership, hitting 5GW in total and running 2M AI chips (Bloomberg)

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A London judge rules that HPE lost ~£730M after acquiring Mike Lynch's Autonomy, after a 2022 fraud finding against Lynch, who died in 2024; HPE was seeking $4B (Jonathan Browning/Bloomberg)

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US investment firm Carlyle agrees to acquire a majority stake in IT consultancy and services provider Adastra, sources say valuing it at $400M including debt (Swetha Gopinath/Bloomberg)

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Google, Amazon, Cohere, and Mistral are intensifying efforts to reduce AI hallucinations via technical fixes, data quality improvements, and fact-checking (Melissa Heikkilä/Financial Times)

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Seoul-based chip designer FuriosaAI signs a deal with LG to use its AI chip RNGD, its first major contract, after rejecting Meta's $800M buyout offer in March (Yoolim Lee/Bloomberg)

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While AI hasn't yet led to new physics discoveries, the tech is proving powerful in the field, aiding in experiment design and spotting patterns in complex data (Anil Ananthaswamy/Quanta Magazine)

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Multinational firms like McDonald's and UK insurer Bupa, struggling to hire AI talent at home, are turning to back offices in India to meet their core AI needs (Financial Times)

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A roundup of the 2025 VLSI conference: using digital twins for design exploration, DRAM beyond 1x nm nodes, Intel's 18A process compared to TSMC, and more (Dylan Patel/SemiAnalysis)

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OpenAI and the UK government announce a partnership to explore AI use in justice, defense, security, and edtech, and possibly expand OpenAI's London office (Reuters)

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Researchers say hackers linked to the Chinese government were behind at least some of the recent widespread attacks using the SharePoint RCE vulnerability (Washington Post)

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Leaked memo: Dario Amodei told staff Anthropic plans to seek UAE and Qatar funding, likely enriching "dictators", and says a "no bad person" rule is impractical (Kylie Robison/Wired)

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Samsung Galaxy Watch8 review: thinner and sturdier, but its design with a square casing and a round screen is polarizing, and Gemini is useful but hit-or-miss (Samantha Kelly/Bloomberg)

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