Reading List

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

ByteDance's new AI video generation model Seedance 2.0 goes viral in China, with one state-backed newspaper saying it is bigger than DeepSeek's "Sputnik moment" (Eduardo Baptista/Reuters)

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Israeli authorities charge a reservist and a civilian for allegedly using classified information to bet on "the occurrence of military operations" on Polymarket (Financial Times)

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Nvidia launches a native GeForce Now app on select Amazon Fire TV sticks, offering up to 1080p and 60fps gaming; Fire TV users previously had to sideload it (Kris Holt/Engadget)

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Q&A with Stratechery's Ben Thompson on aggregation theory, AI, TikTok, ByteDance, AI agentic commerce, SaaS stocks, running Stratechery, TSMC, Stripe, and more (John Collison/Cheeky Pint)

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Simile, which uses AI to help companies predict human behavior, including guessing items customers might buy, raised $100M led by Index and emerges from stealth (Edward Ludlow/Bloomberg)

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Crypto transaction volume linked to suspected human trafficking, largely based in Southeast Asia, hit hundreds of millions of dollars in 2025, up 85% YoY (Chainalysis)

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A profile of Applied Intuition, which makes self-driving simulation software and booked ~$800M in 2025 revenue at 80%+ gross margins, as it expands beyond cars (Iain Martin/Forbes)

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Anthropic donates $20M to Public First, a super PAC pushing for AI guardrails and transparency in opposition to OpenAI-backed PACs, ahead of the US midterms (Theodore Schleifer/New York Times)

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Google's TIG says Gemini has been inundated by "commercially motivated" actors who are trying to clone it, including one campaign that prompted it 100K+ times (Kevin Collier/NBC News)

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Alibaba says Qwen's e-commerce service, offering a ~$3.60 voucher, generated 120M+ orders from Chinese users over the past six days, ahead of the Lunar New Year (Juro Osawa/The Information)

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Waymo co-CEO Tekedra Mawakana expects the company to hit 1M+ paid weekly robotaxi rides in the US by the end of 2026, up from ~400K per week in six cities now (Edward Ludlow/Bloomberg)

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Internal messages: Amazon steers teams to use its in-house AI coding assistant Kiro for production, prompting criticism as ~1,500 employees push for Claude Code (Eugene Kim/Business Insider)

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xAI all-hands: Nikita Bier says X hit $1B in ARR from selling $3- to $40-per-month subscriptions, but offered no details on ad revenue or other xAI financials (Theo Wayt/The Information)

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AI tools like Opus 4.6 actually do make engineers 10x more productive and are addictive, but the "AI Vampire" effect is causing widespread developer burnout (Steve Yegge)

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Dutch payments company Adyen reports H2 2025 net revenue up 17% YoY to €1.27B and forecasts 2026 net revenue growth at 20%-22%, vs 22.8% est.; ADYEN falls 15%+ (Kai Nicol-Schwarz/CNBC)

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Samsung says it sent the first commercial HBM4 shipments to customers; Samsung seeks to supply Nvidia and compete with memory rivals like SK Hynix and Micron (Yoolim Lee/Bloomberg)

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Meta's auditor Ernst & Young raised a red flag over the financial engineering Meta used to keep its $27B Hyperion data center project off its balance sheet (Jonathan Weil/Wall Street Journal)

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Private equity and private credit groups' big bets on SaaS companies, the biggest area of PE activity in the past decade, risk being derailed by the rise of AI (Financial Times)

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SoftBank reports Q3 net profit of $1.6B, below est., and Vision Fund posted a $2.4B gain, after a $4.2B gain in its OpenAI investment helped offset losses (Arjun Kharpal/CNBC)

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Sources: some OpenAI executives were surprised by a WSJ report that OpenAI was targeting a Q4 2026 IPO; OpenAI hopes to triple its ~$13B 2025 revenue in 2026 (New York Times)

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