Reading List

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

SoftBank-owned Japanese payments app PayPay files for a US IPO, and reports a $675.47M profit on ~$1.82B revenue for the nine months ending December 31, 2025 (Arasu Kannagi Basil/Reuters)

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Sources: the US DHS recently sent hundreds of administrative subpoenas, which do not need a judge's approval, to tech firms to identify people critical of ICE (New York Times)

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A matplotlib maintainer explains how an AI agent that suggests code changes on open source repos wrote a hit piece on him after a rejection, and the aftermath (Scott Shambaugh/The Shamblog)

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Disney sent a cease-and-desist letter to ByteDance, claiming it infringed on Disney's works to train its Seedance 2.0 video generation model without pay (Sara Fischer/Axios)

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Sources: Grafana Labs, which makes cloud and AI monitoring tools, is in talks to raise at a $9B valuation, up from $6.6B in 2024; its ARR hit $400M in Sept. (The Information)

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Blockchain-based lending company Figure confirms a data breach; ShinyHunters hacking group published 2.5GB of data, saying Figure refused to pay a ransom (Lorenzo Franceschi-Bicchierai/TechCrunch)

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Apple says 74% of iPhones launched in the last four years and 66% of all iPhones are running iOS 26; 68% of iPhones were running iOS 18 as of Jan. 21, 2025 (Joe Rossignol/MacRumors)

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Some former employees blame xAI's staff exodus on xAI's focus on NSFW Grok and disregard for safety, constantly playing catch up to OpenAI, infighting, and more (Hayden Field/The Verge)

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Q&A with Dario Amodei on getting close to "a country of geniuses in a data center", how AI will diffuse through the economy, frontier lab profits, China, more (Dwarkesh Patel/Dwarkesh Podcast)

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PitchBook estimates that 25%+ of VC-backed unicorns have become "undercorns," startups once valued at $1B or more by VCs but now valued below that threshold (Dan Primack/Axios)

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The US DoD published and then deleted a document adding Alibaba, Baidu, and BYD to a list of companies with alleged connections to the Chinese military (Demetri Sevastopulo/Financial Times)

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Sources: the US FTC accelerated a probe into whether Microsoft illegally monopolized the enterprise computing market with its cloud software and AI offerings (Bloomberg)

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Sources: Binance in late 2025 fired employees who claimed to have uncovered evidence that Iran received $1B+ through Binance between March 2024 and August 2025 (Fortune)

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As OpenAI retires GPT-4o, some users say they are angry and grieving to lose the flirty, quirky companion (Alaina Demopoulos/The Guardian)

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Anthropic adds Chris Liddell, a former Microsoft and GM exec who helped GM IPO and worked in Trump's first administration, to its board ahead of a potential IPO (Kate Clark/Wall Street Journal)

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February investor memo: Cohere hit ~$240M in ARR in 2025, above its $200M target, with QoQ growth of 50%+ and gross margins averaging around 70% throughout 2025 (Ashley Capoot/CNBC)

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Sources: ByteDance is in advanced talks to sell game studio Moonton, the developer of Mobile Legends: Bang Bang, to Saudi Arabia's Savvy Games for $6B to $7B (Reuters)

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Google warns that the EU risks undermining its own competitiveness drive with the "tech sovereignty package" the bloc is set to present in the spring (Barbara Moens/Financial Times)

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A US court sentences Praetorian Group CEO Ramil Ventura Palafox to 20 years in prison for operating a $200M bitcoin Ponzi scheme that defrauded 90K+ investors (Danny Park/The Block)

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Baidu plans to let its search app's 700M MAUs opt-in to message OpenClaw and integrate OpenClaw's capabilities into its e-commerce business and other services (Evelyn Cheng/CNBC)

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