Reading List

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

DeepSeek launches DeepSeek-OCR 2, an upgraded optical character recognition model that replaces OpenAI-developed CLIP framework with Alibaba's Qwen2-0.5b (Ben Jiang/South China Morning Post)

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France plans to replace Microsoft Teams and Zoom with French-made and Outscale-hosted Visio by 2027, as part of a push to drop US software vendors in government (Pascale Davies/Euronews)

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Google expands Android's anti-theft suite, including a dedicated toggle for its Failed Authentication Lock feature on devices running Android 16 or later (Sarah Perez/TechCrunch)

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Google adds Gemini 3 to AI Overviews as the default model globally and now lets users ask follow-up questions "seamlessly" via AI Mode (Robert Hart/The Verge)

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TikTok settles a California lawsuit ahead of a landmark social media addiction trial; Snap recently settled the suit, while Meta and YouTube remain defendants (Cecilia Kang/New York Times)

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The UK government says it recruited a team of AI specialists to build AI tools to improve transport, public safety and defense, backed by Meta's funding (Sam Tabahriti/Reuters)

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Clawdbot creator Peter Steinberger says he is changing the name of the viral AI agent to Moltbot after he "was forced to rename the account by Anthropic" (Henry Chandonnet/Business Insider)

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Ai2 launches Open Coding Agents, starting with SERA, an open-source family that includes 32B and 8B parameter models designed to adapt to private codebases (Kyt Dotson/SiliconANGLE)

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Sonos announces the Amp Multi, a large digital amplifier and its first new device in over a year, ending a pause in hardware releases as it focused on software (Chris Welch/Bloomberg)

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Flora, whose node-based design tool uses AI to create media assets for clients like Lionsgate, raised a $42M Series A, bringing its total funding to $52M (Ivan Mehta/TechCrunch)

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Crypto payments network Mesh raised a $75M Series C led by Dragonfly at a $1B valuation, bringing its total funding to $200M (Naga Avan-Nomayo/The Block)

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Summize, which uses AI to let in-house legal teams manage contract workflows within apps like Slack, raised $50M, bringing its total funding to $65M (Chris Metinko/Axios)

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WhatsApp launches Strict Account Settings, a high-security mode to protect high-risk users like journalists and public figures from sophisticated cyberattacks (Raphael Satter/Reuters)

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Yahoo launches Scout, an AI answer engine powered by Claude, in beta for US users on desktop and mobile, and joins Microsoft's Publisher Content Marketplace (Kerry Flynn/Axios)

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Amazon plans to close all 57 Fresh and 15 Go locations in the US, as it pivots its physical retail strategy to focus exclusively on Whole Foods (Todd Bishop/GeekWire)

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Israeli startup Memcyco, which offers real-time phishing and account takeover protection, raised a $37M Series A led by NAventures and others (Meir Orbach/CTech)

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UPS plans to eliminate 30,000 jobs in 2026 as part of winding down its partnership with Amazon, and expects $3B in savings related to the Amazon unwind (Laya Neelakandan/CNBC)

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Pornhub parent Aylo says it will restrict UK users from February 2, after six months of complying with the UK's OSA; users who verified their ages can login (Samantha Cole/404 Media)

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Amazon agrees to pay a $309M settlement and return $600M to users in a US class action lawsuit over allegedly incorrectly denied refunds since September 2017 (Mike Scarcella/Reuters)

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Abu Dhabi's top tech university MBZUAI launches K2 Think, a new model it says is capable of advanced reasoning, as part of the UAE's push into "sovereign" AI (Tim Bradshaw/Financial Times)

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