Reading List

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

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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Adobe will pay a $75M fine and provide $75M in free services to users to resolve a US government lawsuit accusing it of concealing termination fees, and more (Jonathan Stempel/Reuters)

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Peacock adds a new feature to its app that uses AI to curate personalized vertical video playlists, narrated by a generative AI avatar of host Andy Cohen (Lauren Forristal/TechCrunch)

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Banking, manufacturing, and other EU businesses warn "tech sovereignty" could hit profits and competitiveness as Brussels aims to cut reliance on US tech giants (Financial Times)

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Uber is relaunching a robotaxi service with Hyundai-backed Motional in Las Vegas; the service will have a safety driver behind the wheel until the end of 2026 (Natalie Lung/Bloomberg)

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STMicro says it will retrain workers and deploy humanoid robots in its older chip plants for repetitive and physically demanding tasks, aiming to avoid closures (Nathan Vifflin/Reuters)

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Sources: HSBC and Standard Chartered are set to be among the first licensed stablecoin issuers in Hong Kong, as the city pushes to become a crypto hub (Bloomberg)

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China approves the market launch of an invasive BCI system that helps restore hand movement, the world's first approval of such a device for commercial use (Reuters)

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Alex Karp says AI disrupts the economic power of "humanities-trained, largely Democratic voters" and strengthens that of "working-class, often male voters" (Kelby Vera/HuffPost)

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Docs: Binance investigators found accounts, including of a VIP Chinese trader and a suspected Iranian gold smuggler, that helped move $1B to Iran-linked groups (Fortune)

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Source: the perpetrators of the wiper attack on Stryker appear to have used Microsoft Intune to issue a "remote wipe" command against all connected devices (Brian Krebs/Krebs on Security)

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Sources: ByteDance is working with Aolani Cloud to deploy ~500 Nvidia Blackwell systems in Malaysia, totaling ~36,000 B200 chips; the hardware could cost $2.5B+ (Wall Street Journal)

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The European Commission says "X has submitted remedies in relation to its blue check mark" in the EU and the commission will now "assess the proposed remedies" (Gian Volpicelli/Bloomberg)

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A survey of US adults: 75% say they have heard a lot or a little about data centers; 39% say they are bad for the environment, and 38% bad for home energy costs (Pew Research Center)

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Developers on AI coding: many are enthusiastic and now feel more like architects than construction workers, some say software jobs openings may grow, and more (Clive Thompson/New York Times)

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Apple is lowering its commission for its App Store in mainland China from 30% to 25%, starting on March 15, "following discussions with the Chinese regulator" (Mark Gurman/Bloomberg)

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