Reading List

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

The UK CMA says Apple and Google committed to making app store changes to ensure fairness to developers and consumers, and asks market players for their views (Upmanyu Trivedi/Bloomberg)

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Munich-based Constellr, which builds thermal satellite imaging hardware and software, raised a €37M Series A, taking its total funding to €75M (Ingrid Lunden/Resilience Media)

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Sources: a VC firm backed by Fidelity billionaire Johnson's family shelves plans to sell its stake in ~40 Chinese tech companies as geopolitical factors ease (Bloomberg)

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Spotify reports Q4 revenue up 13% YoY to €4.5B, Premium users up 10% YoY to 290M, MAUs up 11% YoY to 751M, and a €701M operating income, above €639.1M est. (Ashley Carman/Bloomberg)

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Analysis: despite AI ads outnumbering traditional Super Bowl ad categories like beer, nostalgia-driven ads from Budweiser and Dunkin' dominated social media (Patrick Coffee/Wall Street Journal)

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Alibaba's DAMO Academy releases RynnBrain, an open-source foundation model to help robots perform real-world tasks like navigating rooms, trained on Qwen3-VL (Saritha Rai/Bloomberg)

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SMIC reports Q4 revenue up 13% YoY to $2.49B, above est., net profit up 61% YoY to $172.85M, above $139.5M est., and 2025 revenue of $9.33B, above 2024's $8.03B (Sherry Qin/Wall Street Journal)

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Source: Chinese AI startup Zhipu anonymously released its new AI model on OpenRouter under the name Pony Alpha; Zhipu plans to launch GLM-5 later this week (Juro Osawa/The Information)

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Chinese robotaxi operator Pony AI and Toyota begin commercial production of an autonomous Toyota bZ4X; Pony AI aims to have 3,000+ robotaxis by the end of 2026 (Chester Dawson/Bloomberg)

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Chinese AI companies like Alibaba and Tencent are releasing new models and spending millions on "red envelope" freebies to woo users ahead of the Lunar New Year (Cissy Zhou/Nikkei Asia)

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PitchBook: European VC investments rose 5% YoY to a post-pandemic high of €66B in 2025; AI-related deals accounted for 35%+, or €23.5B, up from €17.7B in 2024 (Financial Times)

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French President Emmanuel Macron says the US could retaliate against EU countries, including France and Spain, over plans to ban children from social media (Leila Abboud/Financial Times)

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Paris-based online corporate event booking marketplace Naboo raised a $70M Series B led by Lightspeed with participation from Notion Capital, ISAI, and Ternel (Tamara Djurickovic/Tech.eu)

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A court filing in the iyO-OpenAI trademark case reveals OpenAI won't use the name "io" for its AI device, which isn't expected to ship before February 2027 (Maxwell Zeff/Wired)

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As OpenAI prepares to retire GPT-4o on February 13, sources say it was scrapped partly because OpenAI struggled to contain 4o's potential for harmful outcomes (Sam Schechner/Wall Street Journal)

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London-based Tem, which uses AI to optimize energy transactions for businesses, raised a $75M Series B led by Lightspeed, a source says at a $300M+ valuation (Tim De Chant/TechCrunch)

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OpenAI Responds to Critical Super Bowl Commercials by Putting Ads in ChatGPT (Ece Yildirim/Gizmodo)

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In opening statements in New Mexico's suit against Meta, state prosecutors argue Meta misrepresented the safety of its platforms, as Meta's attorney pushes back (Morgan Lee/Associated Press)

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Farcaster co-founders Dan Romero and Varun Srinivasan, along with the team at Merkle, join stablecoin startup Tempo after Merkle's sale of Farcaster to Neynar (Kyle Baird/The Block)

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Sources: the White House is drafting a voluntary pact seeking commitments from tech companies to ensure data centers don't raise electricity prices and more (Politico)

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