Reading List

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

Demis Hassabis says Chinese AI companies are about six months behind leading western labs and the response to DeepSeek's R1 in 2025 was a "massive overreaction" (Bloomberg)

Techmeme

The World Economic Forum in Davos is now dominated by tech giants, whose interests shunt aside topics like climate change, as Trump and AI take center stage (Peter S. Goodman/New York Times)

Techmeme

Setapp Mobile, one of the first alt iOS app stores launched in 2024 after the EU's DMA, plans to shut down, blaming "still-evolving and complex business terms" (Tim Hardwick/MacRumors)

Techmeme

Ethernovia, which builds automotive ethernet chips and software, raised a $90M+ Series B led by Maverick Silicon (Duncan Riley/SiliconANGLE)

Techmeme

Substack challenger Beehiiv expects to nearly double its annual revenue to $50M in 2026; it now has over 40,000 MAUs, including nearly 15,000 paying subscribers (Jaspreet Singh/Reuters)

Techmeme

Ukraine says it plans to share nearly four years of combat data, including millions of hours of drone footage, with allies to help train AI models (Max Hunder/Reuters)

Techmeme

Filings: Michael Saylor's Strategy has bought more than $3B in Bitcoin since January 5, marking its biggest two-week purchase since December 2024 (Melos Ambaye/Bloomberg)

Techmeme

Legal AI startup Ivo, which aims to reduce hallucinations by breaking legal reviews into 400+ tasks, raised a $55M Series B, a source says at a $355M valuation (Aditya Soni/Reuters)

Techmeme

Nielsen: Christmas Day 2025 set a record for US streaming usage with 55.1B minutes, or 54% of all TV viewing for the day, up by 3.9B minutes on Christmas 2024 (Rick Porter/The Hollywood Reporter)

Techmeme

Portugal orders Polymarket to stop operations and blocks it in the country after heavy activity tied to its recent presidential election, with €110M+ in volume (Naga Avan-Nomayo/The Block)

Techmeme

Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei says selling AI chips to China is like "selling nuclear weapons to North Korea" and has "incredible national security implications" (Christina Kyriasoglou/Bloomberg)

Techmeme

Humans&, founded by ex-Anthropic, xAI, and Google staff to build collaborative AI, raised a $480M seed from Nvidia, Jeff Bezos, and others at a $4.48B valuation (Cade Metz/New York Times)

Techmeme

Sensor Tower: Reels accounted for 50%+ of all Instagram ads in 2025, up from 35% in 2024; Reels accounted for 46% of time spent on Instagram in the US in 2025 (Zach Vallese/CNBC)

Techmeme

How Zynga uses a secretive VIP program with personal account managers and exclusive sweepstake entries to keep top players spending on games like FarmVille (Michael Thomsen/New York Times)

Techmeme

Netflix and WBD say Netflix revised its WBD offer to an all-cash deal for $27.75/share, with the same $82.7B value; its original bid had $59B in debt financing (Brian Stelter/CNN)

Techmeme

Vibe coding startup Emergent raised a $70M Series B led by Khosla and SoftBank Vision Fund 2, after a $23M Series A in September 2025, and claims 5M+ users (Ben Bergman/Business Insider)

Techmeme

Meta VP of Public Policy Simon Milner, the company's most senior Asia-Pacific policy executive, plans to leave after 14 years to retire from full-time work (Newley Purnell/Bloomberg)

Techmeme

Sources: Baidu's Ernie Assistant passes 200M MAUs, as competition intensifies among Chinese tech giants in AI; Ernie is linked to apps like JD.com and Meituan (Jiahui Huang/Wall Street Journal)

Techmeme

Sources: UK and Chinese security officials set up a forum to discuss cyberattacks after hacking accusations, the first of its kind, to help prevent escalation (Alex Wickham/Bloomberg)

Techmeme

Sony and TCL sign a non-binding agreement to spin off Sony's TV and home audio hardware business into a new joint venture, aiming to finalize the deal by March (Jess Weatherbed/The Verge)

Techmeme