Reading List

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

The US BOP releases Caroline Ellison, the former FTX executive and ex-girlfriend of Sam Bankman-Fried, after about 14 months; she had a two-year sentence (Business Insider)

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Inside the turmoil at Thinking Machines; sources say Meta discussed buying TML, and CTO Barret Zoph had been in talks since October 2025 about an OpenAI return (New York Times)

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Railway, a cloud platform for software deployment, raised a $100M Series B led by TQ Ventures, bringing its total funding to $130M+, says it has ARR of $10M+ (Chris Metinko/Axios)

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Inferact, founded by the creators of vLLM to create a commercial AI product for cross-hardware efficiency, raised a $150M seed led by a16z at an $800M valuation (Agnee Ghosh/Bloomberg)

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Mistral CEO Arthur Mensch calls claims that Chinese AI startups lag behind the US a "fairy tale", and China's open-source tech is "probably stressing" US CEOs (Bloomberg)

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Spotify expands its AI-powered Prompted Playlists beta to Premium subscribers in the US and Canada, following initial testing in New Zealand (Sarah Perez/TechCrunch)

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Google rolls out Personal Intelligence in AI Mode to access users' Gmail and Google Photos data for more tailored responses, for US Pro and Ultra subscribers (Aisha Malik/TechCrunch)

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Cambio, creator of AI-powered commercial real estate software for institutional investors, raised an $18M Series A led by Maverick Ventures at a $100M valuation (Mary Ann Azevedo/Crunchbase News)

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Superstate raised an $82.5M Series B to expand from tokenized Treasury offerings into SEC-registered equities on Ethereum and Solana (James Hunt/The Block)

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Adobe rolls out Firefly Foundry, which creates AI-generated "commercially safe" images, video, and more grounded in a brand or franchise's creative universe (Dade Hayes/Deadline)

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Autodesk plans to cut about 1,000 jobs, or ~7% of its workforce, as part of a global restructuring plan seeking to strengthen sales and marketing (Robb M. Stewart/Wall Street Journal)

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Waymo launches its robotaxi service in Miami, its sixth market, initially covering a 60-square-mile area, and partners with Moove for fleet management (Lora Kolodny/CNBC)

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A look at Craig Federighi's approach to AI at Apple; sources say he led a push to use other companies' models to help launch a revamped Siri later in 2026 (The Information)

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Circana: the Switch 2 ended December and 2025 as the US' best-selling video game hardware, offsetting declines among rivals to lift overall hardware spend by 9% (Vlad Savov/Bloomberg)

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Q&A with Yann LeCun on his new Paris-based startup Advanced Machine Intelligence, leaving Meta, real-world applications for world models, robotics, and more (Caiwei Chen/MIT Technology Review)

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Q&A with Netflix co-CEO Greg Peters on Netflix's stock roller coaster, viewer engagement, ads, the WBD acquisition, regulation, competition, Hollywood, and more (Ben Thompson/Stratechery)

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Austin-based Neurophos, which develops a photon-based "Optical Processing Unit" to replace GPUs in AI training, raised $110M led by Bill Gates' Gates Frontier (Edward Ludlow/Bloomberg)

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Sources: the US and China approve a deal to sell TikTok's US business to a group of mostly US investors led by Oracle and Silverlake, set to close this week (Semafor)

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Snap updates its Family Center tool to let parents view daily screen time averages and a breakdown of time spent by specific app segment like Snap Map (Aisha Malik/TechCrunch)

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Source: Google DeepMind signs a licensing deal with Hume AI, which builds emotionally intelligent voice interfaces, to hire CEO Alan Cowen and ~7 top engineers (Will Knight/Wired)

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