Reading List

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

Rhoda AI, which is developing an AI model for industrial robots trained on public internet videos, raised $450M led by Premji Invest at a $1.7B valuation (Dina Bass/Bloomberg)

Techmeme

YouTube expands its likeness detection tool to select government officials, political candidates, and journalists to "manage unauthorized AI-impersonation" (Kerry Flynn/Axios)

Techmeme

Meta acquires AI agent social network Moltbook for an undisclosed sum; its creators, Matt Schlicht and Ben Parr, will join Meta Superintelligence Labs (Ina Fried/Axios)

Techmeme

Meta's Oversight Board calls for an AI content moderation overhaul, saying current methods are not "comprehensive enough" to handle misinformation in a conflict (Jess Weatherbed/The Verge)

Techmeme

Israeli startup Jazz, which uses AI agents to tackle data loss prevention, raised $61M across seed and Series A led by Glilot and Team8, and has 15 paying users (Jake Rudnitsky/Bloomberg)

Techmeme

Sources: Tencent is developing a top-secret AI agent for WeChat, and has tested using models from Zhipu, Alibaba, and DeepSeek, to compete with Qwen and Doubao (The Information)

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Google rolls out Gemini-powered AI capabilities across Docs, Sheets, Slides, and Drive, including a "Help me create" tool in Docs to generate first drafts (Aisha Malik/TechCrunch)

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Swedish legal AI startup Legora raised a $550M Series D led by Accel, tripling its valuation to $5.55B since its October 2025 raise, as it expands in the US (Yazhou Sun/Bloomberg)

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MacBook Neo review: premium chassis, vivid display, mechanical touchpad is clickable anywhere, and affordable, but no backlit keyboard and no USB-C port labels (Andrew E. Freedman/Tom's Hardware)

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Mira Murati's Thinking Machines Lab signs a chip supply deal with Nvidia worth tens of billions of dollars, planning to deploy 1GW+ of next-gen Vera Rubin chips (Financial Times)

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Paris-based Qevlar AI, an agentic AI developer for security operations centers, raised $30M led by Partech and Forgepoint Capital International (Chris Metinko/Axios)

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Sources: Amazon starts its bond sale, targeting ~$37B to ~$42B in an offering in dollars and euros, in potentially one of the biggest-ever corporate bond sales (Bloomberg)

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Memo: Amazon SVP Dave Treadwell says junior and mid-level engineers now require more senior engineers to sign off any AI-assisted code changes, after outages (Rafe Rosner-Uddin/Financial Times)

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AI networking equipment startup Eridu emerges from stealth and raised a $200M Series A led by Socratic, John Doerr, and more, taking its total funding to $230M (Julie Bort/TechCrunch)

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Meta emails advertisers about "location fees" in select European countries to cover digital services taxes, starting July 1; Google and Amazon have similar fees (Gian Volpicelli/Bloomberg)

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Kazuo Ishiguro, Philippa Gregory, Richard Osman, and ~10,000 writers publish Don't Steal This Book, an "empty" book to protest AI companies using their work (Dan Milmo/The Guardian)

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Nexthop AI, which offers specialized switches to reduce power consumption and latency for hyperscalers, raised $500M led by Lightspeed at a $4.2B valuation (Rebecca Torrence/Bloomberg)

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How AI training company Mercor, valued at $10B in 2025, uses AI interviewer Melvin and invasive monitoring software Insightful to manage its 30K+ workforce (Josh Dzieza/The Verge)

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AT&T says it plans to spend $250B+ over the next five years to build out its US infrastructure, including high-speed fiber; AT&T spent $21B on capex in 2025 (Bloomberg)

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AI cybersecurity startup Armadin, started by Mandiant founder Kevin Mandia to build AI agents, raised ~$190M led by Accel; Google bought Mandiant for $5.4B (Samantha Subin/CNBC)

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