Reading List

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

OpenAI hopes the Disney deal boosts Sora, which has high costs and limited traction; Sensor Tower: users average 13 minutes per day on Sora vs. 90 on TikTok (Financial Times)

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Broadcom's shares fell 11% on December 12, their biggest single-day drop since January, after the company's AI sales outlook fell short of investor expectations (Dina Bass/Bloomberg)

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Indian IT giant TCS agrees to acquire Coastal Cloud, a Florida-based Salesforce consulting partner, for $700M, in a bid to boost its AI and US customer business (Mark Haranas/CRN)

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Cisco's stock touched a new record high of $80.25 on December 10, surpassing its previous split-adjusted high of $80.06 on March 27, 2000; CSCO is up 31.64% YTD (Robin Wigglesworth/Financial Times)

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Seagate and Western Digital, with stocks each up 200%+ in 2025, will join Nasdaq 100 before the December 22 market open; GlobalFoundries will leave the index (Isabelle Lee/Bloomberg)

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In a letter to the Trump administration, the GOP Senatorial Committee Chair Sen. Tim Scott said the Netflix-WBD deal raises "significant antitrust problems" (Semafor)

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Google has removed dozens of AI videos from YouTube that depicted Disney characters, after Disney sent a cease-and-desist letter flagging the links (Gene Maddaus/Variety)

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Microsoft expands its bug bounty program so that any critical vulnerability, including in third-party code, impacting its online services is eligible for awards (Duncan Riley/SiliconANGLE)

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OpenAI quietly adopted Anthropic's "skills" mechanism in ChatGPT and Codex; ChatGPT's skills include creating and modifying spreadsheets, docx files, and PDFs (Simon Willison/Simon Willison's Weblog)

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Internal message: SpaceX has authorized an insider share sale at $421/share, valuing the company at ~$800B, and said it's preparing for a possible IPO in 2026 (Loren Grush/Bloomberg)

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Singapore-based ChemLex raised a $45M funding round led by Granite Asia to build an AI-powered, automated chemistry lab to accelerate drug discovery (Rachyl Jones/Semafor)

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Sources: Intel is in advanced talks to acquire AI chip startup SambaNova for about $1.6B including debt; the deal could come together as soon as next month (Bloomberg)

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Automated digital wealth management company Wealthfront's stock closed up 1.36% in its Nasdaq debut, valuing it at ~$2.7B, after raising $486M in its IPO (Andrew Welsch/Barron's Online)

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Shares of data center real estate company Fermi closed down 34% after a tenant terminated a $150M agreement to help fund an AI campus in West Texas (Financial Times)

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Tether submits an all-cash offer to acquire a 65.4% stake in Italian soccer club Juventus, says it will invest €1B in the club if the acquisition is completed (Reuters)

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Source: OpenEvidence, which offers an AI chatbot for doctors, is raising $250M at a $12B valuation, up from $6B in Oct., and has $150M in annualized ad revenue (Stephanie Palazzolo/The Information)

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Zoom says its "federated AI" model, combining its SLM with open- and closed-source models, got 48.1% on Humanity's Last Exam vs. 45.8% for Gemini 3 Pro w/ tools (Xuedong Huang/Zoom)

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David Sacks says China is rejecting Nvidia's H200 AI chips, because the country wants "semiconductor independence" and to "prop up and subsidize Huawei" (Maggie Eastland/Bloomberg)

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Amazon Prime Video pulls its AI recaps, which it began testing in November, for Fallout, Bosch, and other shows after users noticed errors in the Fallout recaps (Emma Roth/The Verge)

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Mira Murati's Thinking Machines Lab makes Tinker, its API for fine-tuning language models, generally available, adds support for Kimi K2 Thinking, and more (Thinking Machines Lab)

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