Reading List

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

Khaby Lame, the world's biggest TikToker, partners with Nasdaq-listed Rich Sparkle in a $975M, 36-month deal to monetize his fan base, including an AI version (Katarina Hoije/Bloomberg)

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Documents: a whistleblower details the Boshang scam compound in Laos that defrauded victims of ~$2.2M over 11 weeks and utilized a system of worker debt bondage (Wired)

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US court filings detail Anthropic's Project Panama, an effort to "destructively scan" up to 2M books with a hydraulic "cutting machine" led by an ex-Google exec (Washington Post)

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The EU gives Google a six-month deadline to lift technical barriers to rival AI search assistants on Android and give key data to other search engine providers (Samuel Stolton/Bloomberg)

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Moonshot says Kimi K2.5 builds on K2 with "pretraining over ~15T mixed visual and text tokens" and "can self-direct an agent swarm with up to 100 sub-agents" (Kimi)

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Chinese startup Moonshot releases Kimi K2.5, saying the model can process text, images, and videos simultaneously and beats its open-source peers in some tests (Bloomberg)

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An interview with OpenAI for Science head Kevin Weil on the team's mission, why LLMs can't come up with game-changing discoveries yet, and more (Will Douglas Heaven/MIT Technology Review)

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TikTok US says it doesn't "have rules against sharing the name Epstein in direct messages" and is "investigating why some users are experiencing issues" (Bobby Allyn/NPR)

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Micron plans to invest $24B over the next decade to build a 700,000-square-foot memory chip facility in Singapore, with wafer output set to start in H2 2028 (Reuters)

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California Governor Gavin Newsom says he will launch a review into whether TikTok is violating state laws by censoring content critical of President Trump (Tyler Katzenberger/Politico)

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The US Army signs a $5.6B, 10-year contract with Salesforce to speed up outdated practices; as part of the deal, military recruiters will get access to Slack (Wall Street Journal)

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YC updated its website to remove Canada from its list of approved jurisdictions for incorporation, leaving the US, Cayman Islands, and Singapore as options (Murad Hemmadi/The Logic)

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Khosla Ventures' Vinod Khosla and Ethan Choi disavow Keith Rabois' comments on an ICE shooting; Rabois said the man killed by agents was committing a "felony" (Julie Bort/TechCrunch)

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A test of ChatGPT Health and Claude for Healthcare with data from Apple Health finds the chatbots provided questionable and inconsistent responses (Geoffrey A. Fowler/Washington Post)

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Meta says it will test new paid subscriptions that give people access to exclusive features on its apps and plans to scale Manus as part of those offerings (Aisha Malik/TechCrunch)

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StepFun, a Chinese AI startup that develops LLMs and has partnered with automaker Geely and smartphone brands like Oppo and Honor, raised a ~$717M Series B+ (Eudora Wang/DealStreetAsia)

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Tim Cook attending a private White House screening of the documentary Melania hours after US agents killed a man suggests horrible judgment, or worse, cowardice (M.G. Siegler/Spyglass)

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Billionaire Tom Steyer, who is running for California governor, says he plans to vote for the one-time 5% tax on billionaires if it reaches the November ballot (Eliyahu Kamisher/Bloomberg)

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A group of YouTubers with a combined 6.2M subscribers adds Snap to a class action lawsuit, alleging the company trained its AI systems on their video content (Sarah Perez/TechCrunch)

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Google agrees to pay $68M to settle a class action lawsuit claiming that Google Assistant inappropriately recorded private conversations on users' devices (Jonathan Stempel/Reuters)

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