Reading List

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

Analysis: in H1 2025, 500+ orgs lobbied the White House and Congress on AI, on par with H1 2024 but up ~2x since 2023; OpenAI spent $1.8M, up from $380K in 2023 (Financial Times)

Techmeme

Why traditional VC is failing deep tech — and what can fix it

The Next Web

Xelix, which uses AI to automate businesses' accounts payable workflows by connecting with ERP systems, raised a $160M Series B led by Insight Partners (Ryan Lawler/Axios)

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In an interview at the Federal Reserve, Sam Altman warns of an impending "fraud crisis" because of how AI could enable bad actors to impersonate other people (Clare Duffy/CNN)

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Sources: McKinsey has stopped its China business from undertaking consultancy work related to generative AI, a move prompted by Washington's growing scrutiny (Financial Times)

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BetterComp, which provides compensation management services for HR teams, raised a $33M Series A led by Ten Coves Capital (Duncan Riley/SiliconANGLE)

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xLight, which is developing a new class of laser for EUV machines in partnership with ASML, raised a $40M Series B led by Playground Global (Stephen Nellis/Reuters)

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Sources: the Trump admin is pressuring South Korea, Brazil, the EU, and others to drop plans for new taxes on US tech firms as a part of broader trade talks (Wall Street Journal)

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Wuchang: Fallen Feathers makes me feel as powerful as its bosses

Polygon - All

PitchBook: in H1, AI startups raised $104.3B in the US, or ~66% of all US VC funding, up from 49% last year, and there were 281 VC-backed exits totaling $36B (MacKenzie Sigalos/CNBC)

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‘Finally, Relief Is on Its Way’: NY to End Prison Phone Fees

THE CITY - All

Source: the US National Nuclear Security Administration was among those breached by a hack of SharePoint; no sensitive information is known to be compromised (Ari Natter/Bloomberg)

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Anthropic and other researchers detail "subliminal learning", where LLMs learn traits from model-generated data that is semantically unrelated to those traits (Anthropic)

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Businesses and households served by PJM, the US' largest power grid operator, will pay a record $16.1B for electricity supplies amid an AI-driven demand surge (Naureen S Malik/Bloomberg)

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Microsoft launches the 13.8-inch Surface Laptop 5G for business customers, featuring Intel Core Ultra series 2 processors, shipping on August 26 for $1,799+ (Zac Bowden/Windows Central)

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Alibaba debuts the Qwen3-Coder model for agentic coding, including a 480B-parameter MoE variant, and open sources Qwen Code, a CLI tool adapted from Gemini CLI (Qwen)

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The Escobar Phone scam saga has finally come to an end

The Verge - All Posts

Mistral releases a study on the environmental impact of its LLMs, conducting what it claims is the first comprehensive lifecycle analysis of an AI model (Mistral AI)

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Epstein breaks Congress

Vox - All

UMG has partnered with IP asset management company Liquidax Capital to "accelerate the development of UMG's music-related AI patents", already filing 15 (Ethan Millman/The Hollywood Reporter)

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