Reading List

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

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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Montreal-based Vention raised a $110M Series D to scale its physical AI platform into manufacturing plants worldwide, taking its total raised to ~$216M (Madison McLauchlan/BetaKit)

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Samsung says the Galaxy Z TriFold costs $2,899, or $899 more than the Galaxy Z Fold 7, launching in the US on January 30 exclusively via its website and stores (Chris Welch/Bloomberg)

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Internal Slack message: Sam Altman tells OpenAI staff that "What's happening with ICE is going too far" and he hopes President Trump "will rise to this moment" (New York Times)

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Uber launches Uber AV Labs, a division to collect real-world driving data via sensor-equipped vehicles to train reinforcement learning models for its partners (Sean O'Kane/TechCrunch)

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SEC filing: Pinterest plans to lay off less than 15% of its workforce by Q3 and cut back on office space, saying it is "reallocating resources" to AI teams (Annie Palmer/CNBC)

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Chinese-language crypto laundering networks processed ~$16.1B in 2025, or $44M per day on average across 1,799+ wallets, representing 20% of laundering activity (Chainalysis)

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Corning says Meta committed to paying up to $6B through 2030 for fiber-optic cable in its AI data centers, and it plans to expand its Hickory, NC, factory (Katie Tarasov/CNBC)

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A profile of White House AI adviser Sriram Krishnan, who wrote an EO against "Woke" AI, aims to "fight China", and rallies executives around Trump's policies (Financial Times)

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Khaby Lame, the world's biggest TikToker, partners with Nasdaq-listed Rich Sparkle in a $975M, 36-month deal to monetize his fan base, including an AI version (Katarina Hoije/Bloomberg)

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Documents: a whistleblower details the Boshang scam compound in Laos that defrauded victims of ~$2.2M over 11 weeks and utilized a system of worker debt bondage (Wired)

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US court filings detail Anthropic's Project Panama, an effort to "destructively scan" up to 2M books with a hydraulic "cutting machine" led by an ex-Google exec (Washington Post)

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The EU gives Google a six-month deadline to lift technical barriers to rival AI search assistants on Android and give key data to other search engine providers (Samuel Stolton/Bloomberg)

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Moonshot says Kimi K2.5 builds on K2 with "pretraining over ~15T mixed visual and text tokens" and "can self-direct an agent swarm with up to 100 sub-agents" (Kimi)

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Chinese startup Moonshot releases Kimi K2.5, saying the model can process text, images, and videos simultaneously and beats its open-source peers in some tests (Bloomberg)

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An interview with OpenAI for Science head Kevin Weil on the team's mission, why LLMs can't come up with game-changing discoveries yet, and more (Will Douglas Heaven/MIT Technology Review)

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TikTok US says it doesn't "have rules against sharing the name Epstein in direct messages" and is "investigating why some users are experiencing issues" (Bobby Allyn/NPR)

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Micron plans to invest $24B over the next decade to build a 700,000-square-foot memory chip facility in Singapore, with wafer output set to start in H2 2028 (Reuters)

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California Governor Gavin Newsom says he will launch a review into whether TikTok is violating state laws by censoring content critical of President Trump (Tyler Katzenberger/Politico)

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The US Army signs a $5.6B, 10-year contract with Salesforce to speed up outdated practices; as part of the deal, military recruiters will get access to Slack (Wall Street Journal)

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