Reading List

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

Austin-based Neurophos, which develops a photon-based "Optical Processing Unit" to replace GPUs in AI training, raised $110M led by Bill Gates' Gates Frontier (Edward Ludlow/Bloomberg)

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Sources: the US and China approve a deal to sell TikTok's US business to a group of mostly US investors led by Oracle and Silverlake, set to close this week (Semafor)

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Snap updates its Family Center tool to let parents view daily screen time averages and a breakdown of time spent by specific app segment like Snap Map (Aisha Malik/TechCrunch)

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Source: Google DeepMind signs a licensing deal with Hume AI, which builds emotionally intelligent voice interfaces, to hire CEO Alan Cowen and ~7 top engineers (Will Knight/Wired)

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Vinted CEO Thomas Plantenga says the Lithuania-based secondhand retailer plans to spend tens of millions of dollars to expand in the US in the coming months (Aimee Look/Wall Street Journal)

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NYT and CCDH analysis: Grok created and shared 1.8M+ sexualized images of women between December 31 and January 8, after Elon Musk promoted the feature on X (New York Times)

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How Google, Huawei, Microsoft, and Nvidia, as well as startups and university research teams, spent millions of dollars to develop AI weather forecasting tools (Tim Fernholz/Bloomberg)

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Cate Blanchett, Cyndi Lauper, and 800+ creatives launch "Stealing Isn't Innovation" to protest unauthorized AI training, backed by RIAA, SAG-AFTRA, and others (Mia Sato/The Verge)

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An analysis of 5,290 AI research papers at NeurIPS: 141, or ~3%, had US-China AI lab collaboration, vs. 134/4,497 in 2024; Llama featured in 106 Chinese papers (Will Knight/Wired)

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Israeli startup Claroty, which makes security tech for hospitals, manufacturing, and industrial systems, raised a $150M Series F, sources say at a $3B valuation (Meir Orbach/CTech)

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South Korea enacts the AI Basic Act, which it says includes the world's first comprehensive set of laws regulating AI, as startups warn of compliance burdens (Kyu-Seok Shim/Reuters)

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Filing: PhonePe reports H1 FY 2026 revenue up 22% YoY to ~$427.5M, a ~$157M loss, and 657.6M users; the payments company plans to sell 50.7M shares in its IPO (Rajesh Mascarenhas/Bloomberg)

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South Korea's Kospi stock index breaks through the record 5,000 level, driven by chip stocks, led by Samsung, up ~3X, and SK Hynix, up ~4x, in the past year (Daniel Tudor/Financial Times)

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Q&A with recently departed OpenAI VP of Research Jerry Tworek, who claims OpenAI's shift toward more conservative ways made high-risk, pioneering work harder (Core Memory)

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A look at the entry-level hiring squeeze in marketing, communications, and customer service as executives increasingly argue AI can absorb much of the workload (Anjli Raval/Financial Times)

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Survey: over 40% of executives said AI saved them more than eight hours per week, while two-thirds of non-management staff said they saved less than two hours (Lindsay Ellis/Wall Street Journal)

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Sources: the US Senate's crypto market structure bill is likely to be delayed by several weeks as key lawmakers shift focus to potential housing legislation (Bloomberg)

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A year after the DeepSeek shock following R1's release, US tech companies still lead in AI chips, model quality, and sales, with no change in investment trends (Chris Miller/Barron's Online)

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German exchange operator Deutsche Boerse agrees to acquire European fund distribution platform Allfunds for about $6.2B in cash and stock (Bloomberg)

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Japanese NAND flash maker Kioxia's stock is up ~800% over the past 12 months, as AI demand and constrained NAND flash supply boost the chipmaker's pricing power (Financial Times)

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