Reading List

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

Sources: Google expands the scope of its months-old AI coding strike team to "midtraining" to try to catch up with Anthropic, after major executive departures (Erin Woo/The Information)

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Sail, whose software optimizes how AI models run on existing chips, emerges from stealth with $80M in seed and Series A led by Kleiner at a $450M valuation (Lily Mae Lazarus/Fortune)

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Apple says "the rapid expansion of AI data centers has created an extraordinary surge in demand for memory and storage"; the MacBook Neo rises from $599 to $699 (Mark Gurman/Bloomberg)

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Apple raises Mac, iPad, and other product prices by 15%-25%, saying it has "never seen a component price increase this much, this quickly"; iPhone is unchanged (Rolfe Winkler/Wall Street Journal)

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Australian payments startup Airwallex raised $320M led by Lee Fixel's Addition at an $11B valuation, and is incubating blockchain payments startup Metal (Jeff Kauflin/Forbes)

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Scaled Cognition, a reliability-focused lab that develops the Agentic Pretrained Transformer model, raised a $100M Series A led by Khosla at a $750M valuation (Steven Rosenbush/Wall Street Journal)

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Exponential View: global AI sales, excluding China, hit $25B in Q1, exceeding an estimated $21B in data center and chip depreciation costs; margins remain thin (Jacob Reid/Bloomberg)

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OpenAI, Anthropic, Amazon, Microsoft, and others launch Raise Us, a new non-profit led by ex-Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo to help US workers adapt to AI (Lydia DePillis/New York Times)

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Preliminary findings: the EU says Azure and AWS are "the largest and second largest" cloud services in the EU, as the bloc weighs up tougher DMA oversight (Samuel Stolton/Bloomberg)

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How risk modelers like Fathom and Verisk are using AI and diffusion models to bypass the limits of physics-based "cat" models to predict natural disasters (Financial Times)

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IBM details a 0.7nm chip manufacturing process that utilizes a "nanostack" 3D transistor architecture, which it says could continue chip innovation for 10 years (Don Clark/New York Times)

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A profile of incoming WhatsApp CEO Kunal Shah, who studied philosophy, advised Sequoia India, and joins a growing pool of Indian-born executives at US companies (Financial Times)

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Alibaba's Hong Kong stock closed down 4.43% after Anthropic accused Alibaba of "illicitly" accessing its AI models, down 36.24% YTD; Xiaomi and Baidu fell ~2% (Jeanny Yu/Bloomberg)

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Arm EVP Mohamed Awad says its chip architecture now accounts for 50%+ of the hyperscale cloud computing market, as AI demand transforms the data center industry (Cheng Ting-Fang/Nikkei Asia)

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Qualcomm CEO Cristiano Amon says the company is designing data center chips specifically for Chinese customers that are in compliance with US export controls (Yifan Yu/Nikkei Asia)

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Mirendil, founded by former Anthropic researchers and seeking to build self-improving AI for open-source developers, raised a $200M seed at a $1B valuation (Tina Li/Wall Street Journal)

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Coval, which develops simulation and evaluation tech for testing, launching, and monitoring AI voice and chat agents, raised a $28M Series A led by Norwest (Duncan Riley/SiliconANGLE)

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As China's working-age population shrinks, a consensus is emerging that it must deploy embodied AI robots into as many tasks as possible, as soon as possible (Financial Times)

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How Larry Ellison's $45M donation to a group supporting President Trump brought Ellison deeper into Trump's circle, helping Oracle and his son's WBD acquisition (Wall Street Journal)

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Assort Health, which develops AI voice agents for health care to handle scheduling and more, raised a $120M Series C led by Menlo Ventures at a $1.2B valuation (Heather Landi/Fierce Healthcare)

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