Reading List

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

California regulators unanimously approved Verizon's nearly $10B Frontier acquisition; deliberations included Verizon committing to the state's DEI requirements (Matthew Keys/TheDesk.net)

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Meta says it will discontinue Workrooms, its VR space for workers, on February 16, and stop selling Quests and Horizon services to businesses from February 20 (Sean Hollister/The Verge)

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Sources: Trump and several state governors agree to direct grid operator PJM to hold an auction for tech companies to fund new power plants due to AI demand (Bloomberg)

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YouTube revises policy to allow full monetization of nongraphic videos on sensitive issues including abortion, self-harm, suicide, and domestic and sexual abuse (Sam Gutelle/Tubefilter)

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Sources: Thinking Machines lacks a clear product or business strategy and has been struggling over the last couple of months to raise a new round of financing (Alex Heath/Sources)

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Total global VC funding to fintech startups totaled $51.8B in 2025, up 27% YoY and above pre-pandemic totals, but much lower than 2021's peak of $141.6B (Mary Ann Azevedo/Crunchbase News)

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Ashley St. Clair, mother of one of Elon Musk's children, sues xAI, alleging Grok refused to stop making sexualized deepfakes of her, amid custody disputes (Peter Senzamici/New York Post)

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As Meta shifts resources away from its Supernatural VR fitness service, users mourn the loss of a community built around the platform and its coaches (Boone Ashworth/Wired)

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Google agrees to pay $8.25M to settle a class-action lawsuit alleging its AdMob SDK illegally collected data from children under age 13 (Suzanne Smalley/The Record)

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Source: at least two more Thinking Machines staffers are expected to join OpenAI soon; some researchers say they are exhausted by the industry's constant drama (Wired)

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Replit launches Mobile Apps on Replit, which enables vibe-coding of iOS apps with integrated Stripe monetization (CNBC)

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Sources: Replit is in advanced discussions to raise about $400M in a new round of funding that would roughly triple its valuation to $9B (Bloomberg)

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Mytra, which is building autonomous robots for warehouses that can move loads up to 3,000 pounds, raised a $120M Series C led by Avenir Growth (Allie Garfinkle/Fortune)

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Andrea Vallone, who left OpenAI in November as the head of its safety research team, joins Anthropic's alignment team (Hayden Field/The Verge)

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The US says Taiwanese companies will invest $250B+ in chip production in the US as part of a trade deal, with Taiwanese government guaranteeing $250B in credit (Kif Leswing/CNBC)

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Symbolic.ai, founded by ex-eBay CEO Devin Wenig and Ars Technica co-founder Jon Stokes, partners with News Corp to offer AI tools to WSJ, Barron's, and others (Ben Sherry/Inc)

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Equal1, which was spun out from University College Dublin, raised $60M to deploy its new quantum server for data centers, bringing its total funding to $85M (Ciara O'Brien/The Irish Times)

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Letter: a top House Republican warns severe DRAM and HBM3E supply shortages will constrain H200 export licenses; Nvidia says it "can serve all approved" orders (Maggie Eastland/Bloomberg)

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Google releases TranslateGemma, a suite of Gemma 3-based open translation models available in 4B-, 12B-, and 27B-parameter sizes, with support for 55 languages (The Keyword)

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X revises its developer API policies to "no longer allow apps that reward users for posting on X (aka 'infofi')", amid a backlash about increasing AI slop on X (André Beganski/Decrypt)

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