Reading List

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

Roblox is testing Roblox Moments, a TikTok-like video app allowing users to share 30-second clips of gameplay, and makes the source code available to developers (Cecilia D'Anastasio/Bloomberg)

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Isotopes, co-founded by Scale AI's former CTO Arun Murthy to build an AI agent for enterprise business analytics, raised a $20M seed (Julie Bort/TechCrunch)

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At the White House dinner on Thursday night, Big Tech executives put on an uncanny display of fealty to Donald Trump by taking turns praising his leadership (Brian Barrett/Wired)

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OpenAI acqui-hires the team behind Alex Codes, a Y-Combinator-backed startup whose tool lets developers use AI models within Apple's development suite Xcode (Ivan Mehta/TechCrunch)

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The EU fines Google €2.95B for abusing its dominance in digital ads, and says its preliminary stance is that Google must divest parts of its ad-tech business (Wall Street Journal)

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World Liberty Financial blacklisted Justin Sun's wallet after it transferred ~$9M worth of WLFI tokens to exchange HTX; Sun called out the freezing of assets (Bloomberg)

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Baseten, which helps companies launch open-source or custom AI models, raised a $150M Series D led by Bond at a $2.15B valuation, up from $825M in February (Allie Garfinkle/Fortune)

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Boston Dynamics and Toyota Research Institute develop a large behavior model that enables more natural-seeming movement and "emergent skills" in humanoid robots (Will Knight/Wired)

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ProRata.ai, which lets publishers embed custom AI search on their websites with a 50/50 revenue split, raised a $40M Series B, taking its total raised to $75M+ (Kerry Flynn/Axios)

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Lenovo unveils Legion Go 2, with an 8.8" OLED screen and an AMD Ryzen Z2 or Z2 Extreme chip, arriving in October for $1,099+, or $400 more than the Legion Go (Sean Hollister/The Verge)

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What to expect from Apple's September 9 event: major design upgrades for the iPhone, an ultrathin iPhone 17 Air, three Apple Watch models, and the AirPods Pro 3 (Mark Gurman/Bloomberg)

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Sources: ByteDance chip design workers, many in Beijing or Shanghai, found out last week they report into a Singapore unit, likely to navigate US-China tensions (Reuters)

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How Synthesia is combining AI voice and video models to improve avatar realism with natural gestures and accent, intonation, and expressiveness preservation (Rhiannon Williams/MIT Technology Review)

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Researchers from UCL, Google DeepMind, and Intrinsic unveil RoboBallet, an AI system designed to help teams of industrial robots work together without colliding (Michael Peel/Financial Times)

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Meta revamps Facebook's classic Poke feature to make it easier to use and adds gamification elements like Snapchat and TikTok have, as it courts younger users (Sarah Perez/TechCrunch)

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Nepal says it is blocking most major social media platforms, including Facebook, X, and YouTube, after the companies failed to register with the government (Binaj Gurubacharya/Associated Press)

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Conversational AI company Cerence sues Apple in Texas over virtual keyboards and "Hey Siri" infringing its patents, saying it first contacted Apple in 2021 (Marcus Mendes/9to5Mac)

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Source: AI contractor marketplace Mercor has received investment offers valuing it as high as $10B, just six months after raising $100M at a $2B valuation (Katie Roof/The Information)

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At a White House dinner, tech CEOs thanked Trump for promoting chip and AI investments, while Trump promised an easy energy permitting process for data centers (Wall Street Journal)

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Sources: OpenAI is set to produce an AI chip co-designed with Broadcom, to ship in 2026, and has committed $10B in orders; the chip will only be used internally (Financial Times)

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