Reading List

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

Some former employees blame xAI's staff exodus on xAI's focus on NSFW Grok and disregard for safety, constantly playing catch up to OpenAI, infighting, and more (Hayden Field/The Verge)

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Q&A with Dario Amodei on getting close to "a country of geniuses in a data center", how AI will diffuse through the economy, frontier lab profits, China, more (Dwarkesh Patel/Dwarkesh Podcast)

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PitchBook estimates that 25%+ of VC-backed unicorns have become "undercorns," startups once valued at $1B or more by VCs but now valued below that threshold (Dan Primack/Axios)

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The US DoD published and then deleted a document adding Alibaba, Baidu, and BYD to a list of companies with alleged connections to the Chinese military (Demetri Sevastopulo/Financial Times)

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Sources: the US FTC accelerated a probe into whether Microsoft illegally monopolized the enterprise computing market with its cloud software and AI offerings (Bloomberg)

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Sources: Binance in late 2025 fired employees who claimed to have uncovered evidence that Iran received $1B+ through Binance between March 2024 and August 2025 (Fortune)

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As OpenAI retires GPT-4o, some users say they are angry and grieving to lose the flirty, quirky companion (Alaina Demopoulos/The Guardian)

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Anthropic adds Chris Liddell, a former Microsoft and GM exec who helped GM IPO and worked in Trump's first administration, to its board ahead of a potential IPO (Kate Clark/Wall Street Journal)

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February investor memo: Cohere hit ~$240M in ARR in 2025, above its $200M target, with QoQ growth of 50%+ and gross margins averaging around 70% throughout 2025 (Ashley Capoot/CNBC)

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Sources: ByteDance is in advanced talks to sell game studio Moonton, the developer of Mobile Legends: Bang Bang, to Saudi Arabia's Savvy Games for $6B to $7B (Reuters)

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Google warns that the EU risks undermining its own competitiveness drive with the "tech sovereignty package" the bloc is set to present in the spring (Barbara Moens/Financial Times)

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A US court sentences Praetorian Group CEO Ramil Ventura Palafox to 20 years in prison for operating a $200M bitcoin Ponzi scheme that defrauded 90K+ investors (Danny Park/The Block)

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Baidu plans to let its search app's 700M MAUs opt-in to message OpenClaw and integrate OpenClaw's capabilities into its e-commerce business and other services (Evelyn Cheng/CNBC)

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Memo: Meta considered adding facial recognition to its smart glasses during a "dynamic political environment" in the US when civil society groups are distracted (New York Times)

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Companies like Stripe, OpenAI, Anthropic, and SpaceX are letting workers cash out before their IPOs, a move once seen as taboo and lacking long-term commitment (Kate Clark/Wall Street Journal)

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A look at Higgsfield, an AI video startup that grew to $300M ARR within 11 months, as it faces a creator backlash over aggressive and shocking marketing tactics (Rashi Shrivastava/Forbes)

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The MPA urges ByteDance to curb its AI video model Seedance 2.0, saying the model "has engaged in unauthorized use of US copyrighted works on a massive scale" (Gene Maddaus/Variety)

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The suspect believed to be behind the mass shooting in Tumbler Ridge, Canada made a Roblox game simulating a mall shooting; Roblox says it removed the account (Emanuel Maiberg/404 Media)

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Anna's Archive quietly starts releasing millions of tracks from its Spotify scrape, despite a preliminary injunction against distributing the copyrighted works (Ernesto Van der Sar/TorrentFreak)

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Sources: the Trump administration has shelved tech security measures against China, including data center equipment curbs, ahead of a Trump-Xi meeting in April (Alexandra Alper/Reuters)

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