Reading List

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

Code Metal, which uses AI to let engineers translate legacy code into modern languages, raised a $125M Series B led by Salesforce Ventures at a $1.25B valuation (Lauren Goode/Wired)

Techmeme

A US judge rejects Tesla's bid to overturn a $243M jury verdict over a fatal 2019 Autopilot crash, a blow for Tesla as it faces a growing wave of lawsuits (Fred Lambert/Electrek)

Techmeme

Sources: Google may invest $100M in Fluidstack at a $7.5B valuation and has backstopped crypto miners that are building datacenters, seeking to expand TPU use (Wall Street Journal)

Techmeme

Tech stocks rise slightly from their morning lows after the Supreme Court ruled that President Trump lacked the authority to impose sweeping global tariffs (Adam Levine/Barron's Online)

Techmeme

Peak XV, which split from Sequoia in 2023, raised $1.3B across new India- and Asia-focused funds, bringing its total assets under management to over $10B (Jagmeet Singh/TechCrunch)

Techmeme

Claude's C Compiler shows AI elevates the role of human judgment and vision; it's a milestone, but closely mirrors LLVM/GCC, and hard codes things to pass tests (Chris Lattner/Modular Blog)

Techmeme

Sources: OpenAI has 200+ people working on AI devices, including a smart speaker with a camera costing $200 to $300, possibly smart glasses and a smart lamp (The Information)

Techmeme

Avantos, which makes an AI-native client management system for financial institutions, raised a $25M Series A led by Bessemer, taking its total funding to $35M (Minh Le/Tech in Asia)

Techmeme

OpenAI says users aged 18 to 24 account for nearly 50% and under-30s represent 80% of ChatGPT messages in India; 35% of chats are related to professional tasks (Ivan Mehta/TechCrunch)

Techmeme

Pepper, which offers a digital storefront for independent food distributors, raised a $50M Series C led by Lead Edge Capital, taking its total funding to $100M (Chris Metinko/Axios)

Techmeme

Scott Myers, the head of Snap's AR glasses subsidiary Specs, leaves after six years; sources say Myers left after a "blow-up" with Evan Spiegel over strategy (Alex Heath/Sources)

Techmeme

Sources: SoftBank plans to form a consortium to build a $33B power plant in Ohio, set to produce 9.2 GW for AI data centers, as part of the US-Japan trade deal (Nikkei Asia)

Techmeme

General Catalyst plans to invest $5B in India over five years, an increase from the $500M to $1B it previously announced, after merging with a local VC in 2024 (Jagmeet Singh/TechCrunch)

Techmeme

Google rejected 1.75M policy-violating Android apps and blocked 80K+ developer accounts from Google Play in 2025, down from 2.36M apps and 158K accounts in 2024 (Sarah Perez/TechCrunch)

Techmeme

Sources: Amazon's AI tools have caused at least two AWS outages, including a 13-hour disruption in December; Amazon says it was "user error, not AI error" (Rafe Rosner-Uddin/Financial Times)

Techmeme

Microsoft's AI safety team proposed technical standards for detecting AI-generated content, but its CSO declined to commit to using them across its platforms (James O'Donnell/MIT Technology Review)

Techmeme

How some political candidates and activists across ideologies and professions are pushing back on the spread of data centers and AI in the US (Andrew R. Chow/Time)

Techmeme

Uber's market cap fell to ~$150B, down ~25% in six months, as investors weigh robotaxi disruption and see the market as a two-horse race between Waymo and Tesla (Dan Gallagher/Wall Street Journal)

Techmeme

A US grand jury indicted two former Google engineers and one of their husbands for allegedly stealing trade secrets relating to the Tensor chip for Pixel phones (Robert Burnson/Bloomberg)

Techmeme

Tech companies are increasingly building private power plants to fuel off-grid data centers, a move some warn has reliability challenges and hurts climate goals (Evan Halper/Washington Post)

Techmeme