Reading List

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

Sources: NY-based Tandem, which uses AI to automate the paperwork for writing and receiving medical prescriptions, raised a $100M Series B at a $1B valuation (Rebecca Torrence/Bloomberg)

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Interviews with 100+ therapists and psychiatrists on clients' AI chatbot usage show, while there are some upsides, conversations also deepened negative feelings (New York Times)

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OpenAI says nearly 1.3M weekly users are discussing "advanced topics in hard science" in January, with an average of 8.4M ChatGPT messages on those topics (Ashley Gold/Axios)

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Ricursive, founded by ex-Google researchers to automate advanced chip design, raised $335M from Sequoia, Radical, Lightspeed, and others at a $4B valuation (Cade Metz/New York Times)

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Morgan Stanley: UK companies reported that AI led to 8% net job losses over the past 12 months, above Japan's 7%, Germany's 4%, Australia's 2%; the US added 2% (Irina Anghel/Bloomberg)

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Documents: China's military is focused on harnessing AI to deploy swarms of drones, robot dogs, and other autonomous systems, learning from hawks and coyotes (Josh Chin/Wall Street Journal)

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Claude Code can feel daunting, and most people's problems are not software-shaped, but it is clearly autonomous and the home-cooked app renaissance is great (Jasmine Sun/@jasmine's substack)

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The EU opens a formal DSA investigation into xAI over Grok generating sexualized images of women and children; xAI faces fines of up to 6% of global revenue (Barbara Moens/Financial Times)

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Digital Realty, QTS, and NTT Data warn the data center industry is doing a poor job of combating local opposition; 24+ US projects were blocked in January alone (Rafe Rosner-Uddin/Financial Times)

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Chinese autonomous trucking company DeepWay raised ~$173M ahead of its planned Hong Kong IPO, filed in November 2025; DeepWay reported ~$215M in H1 2025 revenue (Dong Cao/Bloomberg)

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Quantum computing company IonQ acquires US chipmaker SkyWater for ~$1.8B, paying $35/share, in IonQ's biggest deal yet; SkyWater will operate as a subsidiary (Lauren Thomas/Wall Street Journal)

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Sources: SoftBank halts talks about a ~$50B acquisition of US data center operator Switch, a setback to Masayoshi Son's goal to roll out Stargate infrastructure (Bloomberg)

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London-based enterprise AI video startup Synthesia raised a $200M Series E led by GV at a $4B valuation, up from $2.1B after raising $180M in January 2025 (Nat Rubio-Licht/The Deep View)

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Manufacturers say that AI is fundamentally changing how some new products are created, finding unexpected solutions and reducing R&D time from weeks to days (John Keilman/Wall Street Journal)

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Entropy, a decentralized crypto custodian that raised a $25M seed led by a16z in June 2022, is shutting down after "several pivots, and two rounds of layoffs" (Zack Abrams/The Block)

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Sources: Samsung enters the final qualification phase to supply its HBM4 chips to Nvidia, and targets mass production in February; Samsung's shares jumped 3.2% (Yoolim Lee/Bloomberg)

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Gallup: 12% of employed US adults reported using AI daily in their job in Q4 2025, compared to 10% in Q3 and 8% in Q2; 49% say they never use AI in their role (Andy Kemp/Gallup)

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Many AI founders now find it necessary to raise at valuations requiring absolute domination of the field; Brex, once valued at $12B, shows the downsides of this (Jason Lemkin/SaaStr)

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A profile of Mercor, which pays ~$2M per day to ~30K experts training AI models at $95 per hour on average, with roles like radiologists earning up to $375/hour (Bethan Staton/Financial Times)

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Power prices surge in Virginia, home to the world's largest data center hub; record demand is expected during the winter storm, partly due to data center needs (Tim McLaughlin/Reuters)

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