Reading List

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

Sources: SoftBank halts talks about a ~$50B acquisition of US data center operator Switch, a setback to Masayoshi Son's goal to roll out Stargate infrastructure (Bloomberg)

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London-based enterprise AI video startup Synthesia raised a $200M Series E led by GV at a $4B valuation, up from $2.1B after raising $180M in January 2025 (Nat Rubio-Licht/The Deep View)

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Manufacturers say that AI is fundamentally changing how some new products are created, finding unexpected solutions and reducing R&D time from weeks to days (John Keilman/Wall Street Journal)

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Entropy, a decentralized crypto custodian that raised a $25M seed led by a16z in June 2022, is shutting down after "several pivots, and two rounds of layoffs" (Zack Abrams/The Block)

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Sources: Samsung enters the final qualification phase to supply its HBM4 chips to Nvidia, and targets mass production in February; Samsung's shares jumped 3.2% (Yoolim Lee/Bloomberg)

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Gallup: 12% of employed US adults reported using AI daily in their job in Q4 2025, compared to 10% in Q3 and 8% in Q2; 49% say they never use AI in their role (Andy Kemp/Gallup)

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Many AI founders now find it necessary to raise at valuations requiring absolute domination of the field; Brex, once valued at $12B, shows the downsides of this (Jason Lemkin/SaaStr)

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A profile of Mercor, which pays ~$2M per day to ~30K experts training AI models at $95 per hour on average, with roles like radiologists earning up to $375/hour (Bethan Staton/Financial Times)

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Power prices surge in Virginia, home to the world's largest data center hub; record demand is expected during the winter storm, partly due to data center needs (Tim McLaughlin/Reuters)

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Meta's decision to deprioritize VR in favor of AI and internet-connected glasses has chilled the VR industry, leading to concerns about its future (Jonathan Vanian/CNBC)

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A deep dive into Apple's AI strategy reset, as it prepares to announce a Gemini-powered personalized Siri next month and a reimagined chatbot-like Siri at WWDC (Mark Gurman/Bloomberg)

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Q&A with David Liu, CEO of PlusAI, which is slated to go public next month, on the ongoing commercial trial of its autonomous truck driving software, and more (Rani Molla/Sherwood News)

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Domain Name Stat: the number of .ai domains passes 1M; data suggests Anguilla, the UK territory managing the domain, made ~$70M in fees in the past year (Sherwood News)

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HSBC: JioHotstar had 300M paying subscribers in India in 2025, compared with 65M for Amazon Prime Video and 20M for Netflix; ~24% of OTT users pay for content (Manish Singh/India Dispatch)

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Analysis: scientists who appeared to use LLMs posted 33% more papers on arXiv than those who didn't, as concerns grow over AI slop in scientific publishing (Ross Andersen/The Atlantic)

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A look at Clawdbot, an open-source personal AI agent that runs locally on the user's computer and integrates with multiple LLMs and messaging services (Federico Viticci/MacStories)

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EquipmentShare, which runs a jobsite tech and equipment rental platform for the construction industry, raised $747.3M in its IPO, valuing the company at $7.16B (Reuters)

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Tests show GPT-5.2 on ChatGPT is citing Grokipedia as a source on some obscure topics, including Iranian political structures (Aisha Down/The Guardian)

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Source: OpenAI mulls new tools to help business users understand the financial benefits of using its products and has made changes to its sales force strategy (The Information)

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SanDisk's stock has surged ~1,000% since August, driven by AI demand for its data storage products; SanDisk has a cost advantage due to its JV with Kioxia (Matt Phillips/Sherwood News)

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