Reading List

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

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)

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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)

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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)

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Perplexity's retreat from ads signals a strategic shift as it recognizes its product is not for a mass audience and expects growth to come from enterprise sales (Maxwell Zeff/Wired)

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Sources: Nvidia is close to finalizing an up to $30B investment into OpenAI, replacing 2025's long-term $100B commitment; the deal could be closed this weekend (Financial Times)

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Los Angeles County sues Roblox, alleging it engaged in deceptive business practices that exposed children to sexual content, exploitation, and online predators (Jonathan Lloyd/NBC Los Angeles)

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Sources: Meta cuts its annual distribution of stock options by ~5% for most of its staff, equating to tens of thousands of employees, after a ~10% cut in 2025 (Hannah Murphy/Financial Times)

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Sources: Emerald AI, which develops software to curb data center energy demand, is raising a $25M seed extension at a ~$250M post-money valuation (Alan Neuhauser/Axios)

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Sony shuts down Bluepoint Games, the PlayStation subsidiary behind remakes of older games like Demon's Souls and Uncharted; ~70 employees will lose their jobs (Jason Schreier/Bloomberg)

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Meta says it is "explicitly separating" Quest VR from its Worlds platform, making Worlds "almost exclusively mobile" and setting it up to compete with Roblox (Jay Peters/The Verge)

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Docs: DHS has signed a five-year, $1B blanket purchase agreement with Palantir, allowing agencies like ICE to skip the competitive bidding process (Makena Kelly/Wired)

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CZ returned to the US for the first time since his 2024 prison release to attend a World Liberty Financial event at Mar-a-Lago with Brian Armstrong and others (Wall Street Journal)

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Workers describe a deteriorating culture at Jack Dorsey's Block as morale plunges amid rolling layoffs and a push to use AI tools to improve productivity (Reece Rogers/Wired)

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Toronto-based chip startup Taalas, which hardwires AI models into custom silicon to achieve faster inference, raised $169M, bringing its total funding to $219M (Max A. Cherney/Reuters)

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Sources: AMD agrees to backstop a $300M loan from Goldman Sachs for Crusoe to buy AMD AI chips, the first known case of AMD chips used as debt collateral (The Information)

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Reddit is testing an AI search feature that takes community recommendations and shows matching products from its advertisers in the results (Aisha Malik/TechCrunch)

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Cleveland-based Eagle Wireless, which makes cellular modules used in IoT devices, raised a $30M Series B as the US seeks to reduce its reliance on China (Chris Metinko/Axios)

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New York pulls a proposal that would have allowed for robotaxi services outside NYC, a setback for Waymo, which wants to hit 1M paid weekly US rides by 2026 end (Natalie Lung/Bloomberg)

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Inside the "gay tech mafia" that mixes social and professional lives, as investors, entrepreneurs, and executives detail gay influence in Silicon Valley (Zoë Bernard/Wired)

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Google rolls out Gemini 3.1 Pro, which it says is "a step forward in core reasoning", for all users in the Gemini app; the .1 increment is a first for Google (Abner Li/9to5Google)

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