Reading List

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

Anthropic details how it had to redesign its take-home test for hiring performance engineers as Claude kept defeating it, and releases the original test (Anthropic)

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Sources: Revolut scrapped plans to buy a US lender and will instead apply for a US banking license, betting Trump's lighter touch on approvals will be faster (Financial Times)

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How Anthropic, OpenAI, and Google are testing AI models by having them play Pokémon Blue on Twitch to track a model's ability to reason and make decisions (Isabelle Bousquette/Wall Street Journal)

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Bengaluru-based digital payments startup Juspay raised $50M, in a mix of primary and secondary investments, from WestBridge Capital at a $1.2B valuation (The Economic Times)

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Sam Altman says OpenAI added more than $1B in annual recurring revenue in the past month "just from our API business" (Lee Chong Ming/Business Insider)

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The US' TikTok deal is a win for ByteDance: it will keep and license the algorithm instead of selling it, and continue to run TikTok's commercial activities (Jim Secreto/Financial Times)

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Intel says it struggled to satisfy demand for its server chips used in AI data centers, and forecasts Q1 2026 revenue and profit below market estimates (Reuters)

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Sources: China's review of Meta's Manus deal was spurred by what officials called "selling young crops", a concern over cross-border transfer of emerging tech (Financial Times)

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Netflix co-CEO Greg Peters expects Netflix to win WBD, says Paramount's bid "doesn't pass the sniff test" and a "very small" number of WBD holders backed it (Financial Times)

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Sources: Fei-Fei Li's World Labs is in discussions with investors to raise hundreds of millions at a valuation of $5B; World Labs was last valued at $1B in 2024 (Bloomberg)

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BitGo closed up ~2.7% at $18.49 per share in its NYSE debut on Thursday which saw shares jump as much as 36% intraday, after raising $212.8M in its IPO (Kyle Baird/The Block)

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TikTok's new majority US-owned JV includes investors Oracle, Silver Lake, and Abu Dhabi's MGX, each holding 15%, and Dell Family Office; ByteDance retains 19.9% (Financial Times)

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Adam Presser, previously TikTok's head of operations and trust and safety, will be the CEO of TikTok USDS Joint Venture; TikTok CEO Shou Chew will be a director (Jonathan Vanian/CNBC)

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Source: the TikTok US deal values it at just around $14B; TikTok's US entity makes roughly $14B annually in advertising revenues alone, per analyst estimates (Sara Fischer/Axios)

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ByteDance strikes a deal with a group of non-Chinese investors to create a new TikTok US entity and avoid a federal ban, concluding a six-year legal saga (New York Times)

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Apple accuses the European Commission of "political delay tactics", as the EC seems to be preparing to blame Apple for the shutdown of the Setapp app store (Mark Gurman/Bloomberg)

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Sources: Amazon is planning a second round of job cuts next week as part of its goal of trimming 30,000 corporate workers, after cutting 14,000 jobs in October (Greg Bensinger/Reuters)

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Epic v. Google: Epic and Google have a secret deal involving Unreal Engine, Fortnite, and Android, with Epic spending $800M over six years on Google services (The Verge)

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Capital One agrees to acquire Brex, which specializes in tech to administer corporate credit cards, expenses, and rewards, for $5.15B in cash and stock (Wall Street Journal)

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Intel reports Q4 revenue down 4% YoY to $13.7B, vs. $13.4B est., Data Center and AI revenue up 9% to $4.7B, Q1 guidance below est.; INTC drops 12%+ after hours (Kif Leswing/CNBC)

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