Reading List

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

Sensor Tower: Shein's ad spend rose 35% MoM in France and the UK in April, while Temu's jumped 40% MoM and 20% MoM respectively, amid Trump's de minimis ban (Arriana McLymore/Reuters)

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Sources: Microsoft remains the biggest holdout among investors in OpenAI's restructuring, and is seeking assurance that changes will protect its $13.75B stake (Bloomberg)

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Sources: OpenAI reaches an agreement to buy Windsurf, an AI coding tool formerly known as Codeium, for about $3B; the deal has not yet closed (Bloomberg)

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Uber and WeRide plan to expand their robotaxi service to 15 more cities over the next five years, including in Europe, after a December 2024 launch in Abu Dhabi (Kirsten Korosec/TechCrunch)

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Recraft, whose image model Recraft V3 beat OpenAI's DALL-E and Midjourney on the Artificial Analysis benchmark last year, raised a $30M Series B led by Accel (Charles Rollet/TechCrunch)

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Sources: Databricks is in advanced talks to acquire startup Neon, a maker of a serverless open-source alternative to AWS Aurora Postgres, for about $1B (Alex Konrad/Upstarts Media)

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Palantir reports Q1 revenue up 39% YoY to $884M, vs. $863M est., and raises 2025 sales guidance to $3.9B; PLTR falls 8%+ after hours (Lizette Chapman/Bloomberg)

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Nvidia launches open-source transcription model Parakeet-TDT-0.6B-V2, topping the Hugging Face Open ASR Leaderboard with a word error rate of 6.05% (Carl Franzen/VentureBeat)

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TeleMessage's parent company says it is "investigating a potential security incident" and has suspended all of its services "out of an abundance of caution" (Kevin Breuninger/CNBC)

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Sources: General Atlantic is in advanced talks to buy a minority stake in Blackstone-backed Liftoff; the deal would value the mobile app marketing firm at $4B+ (Bloomberg)

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Solana Foundation: enough validators were able to quietly patch a 0-day bug last month that could have allowed unlimited "Token-22" minting and account draining (Logan Hitchcock/Decrypt)

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Hasan Sukkar, the founder of AI startup 11x, which has raised $70m+ to date, steps down as CEO; CTO Prabhav Jain has been named the new CEO (TechCrunch)

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App used by Trump adviser says it is temporarily suspending services following reported hack (Raphael Satter/Reuters)

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OpenAI backtracks, says its nonprofit will remain in control of its business operations, after a "constructive dialogue" with civic leaders and AGs of DE and CA (Kyle Wiggers/TechCrunch)

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Apple files an appeal with the US Ninth Circuit, challenging last week's ruling that prevents it from charging devs fees on purchases made outside the App Store (Sarah Jeong/The Verge)

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Trump has two crypto-focused dinners this month, for political donors and for $TRUMP holders; Chainalysis: trading fees alone have made $TRUMP insiders $324M+ (MacKenzie Sigalos/CNBC)

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Sources: Google has quietly launched 100 Zeros, a film and TV production initiative aiming to promote a positive view of tech and drive adoption of its products (Lucia Moses/Business Insider)

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Tel Aviv-based eToro Group says it's targeting a $4B valuation in a Nasdaq IPO, aiming to raise $500M, after pausing plans last month amid market volatility (Reuters)

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A look at Waymo's Mesa, AZ plant, producing several retrofitted Jaguars per day and where plans to scale up with Chinese Zeekr vans may be derailed by tariffs (Alan Ohnsman/Forbes)

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Meta AI brings more privacy risks than ChatGPT and Gemini, building a Memory file including the user's sensitive personal info, like fertility and payday loans (Geoffrey A. Fowler/Washington Post)

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