Reading List

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

The US Army awards Anduril a 10-year contract worth up to $20B to buy its software, hardware, and services; the deal includes a 5-year optional ordering period (Jen Judson/Bloomberg)

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A US government website shows the Commerce Department withdrew a planned rule tightening AI chip exports; a draft was sent to agencies for feedback in February (Karen Freifeld/Reuters)

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Sources: Meta plans sweeping layoffs that could affect 20% or more of the company, amid mounting AI infrastructure costs; it had ~79,000 employees as of Dec. 31 (Reuters)

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A US judge questions Elon Musk's $134B claim for damages in his lawsuit against OpenAI and Microsoft but rules Musk can still make his case to a jury (Elon Musk/Financial Times)

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$TRUMP memecoin surged as much as 60% after its promoters announced a gala luncheon at Mar-a-Lago with Trump; the White House hasn't confirmed his attendance (Bloomberg)

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Amazon wins its appeal against a €746M GDPR fine imposed by Luxembourg's privacy watchdog after a court finds the watchdog had not properly done its analysis (Foo Yun Chee/Reuters)

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Sources: the Trump administration is set to receive a ~$10B fee from investors in TikTok's US business for the government's role in brokering the TikTok US deal (Wall Street Journal)

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Digg announces a "hard reset" and shuts down operations two months after it was relaunched by Kevin Rose and Alexis Ohanian, citing the scale of AI bot spam (Richard Lawler/The Verge)

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Facebook launches new tools to help creators detect and report impersonation, and updates guidelines to better define what it considers to be "original content" (Sarah Perez/TechCrunch)

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Sources: Mirendil, founded by former Anthropic researchers to develop AI models for scientific research, is in talks to raise $175M at a $1B valuation (The Information)

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Didi reports Q4 revenue up 10.5% YoY to $8.46B, international revenue up 47% YoY to $638M, and a net loss of $43.48M amid an overseas expansion push (Reuters)

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MacBook Neo teardown: most repairable MacBook in ~14 years, with no parts pairing issues, a screwed-down battery, and relatively easy keyboard replacement (Elizabeth Chamberlain/iFixit News)

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Travis Kalanick renames CloudKitchens' parent company as Atoms, focused on creating "gainfully employed robots" for the food, mining, and transport industries (Natalie Lung/Bloomberg)

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Claude Opus 4.6 and Sonnet 4.6 now offer a 1M context window at standard pricing; it is the default for Claude Code Max, Team, and Enterprise users on Opus 4.6 (Anthropic)

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Meta says Instagram will no longer support end-to-end encrypted messages starting May 8, saying "very few people" were using E2EE in their DMs (Karandeep Singh Oberoi/Android Police)

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Sources: Travis Kalanick prepares to launch a self-driving car company with backing from Uber and has been discussing acquiring Anthony Levandowski's Pronto.ai (Jessica E. Lessin/The Information)

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Elon Musk says xAI "was not built right first time around, so is being rebuilt from the foundations up" (Fred Lambert/Electrek)

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AWS plans to deploy Cerebras' Wafer-Scale Engine chip for AI inference functions; AWS will still offer slower, cheaper computing using its Trainium processors (Wall Street Journal)

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Amazon Prime Video plans to raise the price of its ad-free plan, Ultra, to $4.99 per month, and add support for up to five simultaneous streams, from April 10 (Emma Roth/The Verge)

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Sources: Elon Musk pushed out two more xAI co-founders after getting frustrated with xAI's coding product progress and brought in "fixers" from SpaceX and Tesla (Financial Times)

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