Reading List

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

A new Artificial Analysis benchmark, focusing on OpenAI's gpt-oss-120b, shows how open-weight LLMs exhibit inconsistent performance across hosting providers (Simon Willison/Simon Willison's Weblog)

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GPT-5's underwhelming performance on benchmarks suggests that the current approach of scaling LLMs is starting to reach the limits of available resources (Financial Times)

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How an editor uncovered the "largest self-promotion operation in Wikipedia's history" that promoted obscure composer David Woodard with entries in 335 languages (Nate Anderson/Ars Technica)

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Global smart glasses shipments grew 110% YoY in H1; Meta's share of the market rose to 73%; AI smart glasses accounted for 78% of shipments, up from 46% YoY (Counterpoint Research)

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Anthropic enables Claude Opus 4 and 4.1 to end conversations in "cases of persistently harmful or abusive user interactions"; users can still start new chats (Anthropic)

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A look at AI-powered stuffed animals like Grem, Grok, and Gabbo, which are being promoted as an alternative to screen time for children as young as 3 (New York Times)

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A profile of UCB CS professor Ion Stoica, a billionaire who has helped launch four startups out of his privately-funded research lab, including Databricks (Martina Di Licosa/Forbes)

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TikTok is updating its Community Guidelines, adding new rules for Live creators, including a requirement that commercial content must be disclosed (Sarah Perez/TechCrunch)

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Sources say Meta's chaotic culture and lack of vision have led to AI brain drain; Meta strongly denies it has had issues with talent and retention (Forbes)

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The World Humanoid Robot Games kicked off in Beijing on August 15, with robots across 280 teams from 16 countries competing in track and field and other sports (Reuters)

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Applied Materials Q3: revenue up 8% YoY to $7.3B, vs. $7.22B est., profit up 4% YoY to $1.78B, and projects Q4 revenue and profit below est. on China challenges (Kelly Cloonan/Wall Street Journal)

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Jump, a SaaS startup founded by Alex Rodriguez and Marc Lore for managing sports ticketing and fan experiences, raised a $23M Series A at a $100M+ valuation (Justin Birnbaum/Forbes)

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Lyft co-founders Logan Green and John Zimmer step down as board chair and vice chair, convert their Class B stock to Class A, completing the succession plan (Katherine Hamilton/Wall Street Journal)

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Hands-on with Tiramisu, Meta's "hyperrealistic" VR research prototype with beyond-retinal resolution, high brightness and contrast, and a narrow field of view (David Heaney/UploadVR)

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Filing: Shein reports 2024 UK sales up 32.3% YoY to £2.05B, making the UK its third largest market after the US and Germany, as it works toward a Hong Kong IPO (Helen Reid/Reuters)

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Hands-on with Boba 3, Meta's prototype PC VR headset with a form factor similar to the Quest 3, featuring an ultrawide field of view of 180° by 120° (David Heaney/UploadVR)

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A proposed class action lawsuit accuses Otter.ai of "deceptively and surreptitiously" recording private conversations to train its AI without user consent (Bobby Allyn/NPR)

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Roblox plans to restrict unrated experiences to devs, automatically remove servers with violative content, and limit some social hangouts to verified 17+ users (Matt Kaufman/Roblox Corporate)

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Sources: current and former OpenAI employees plan to sell ~$6B in stock to Thrive Capital, SoftBank, and others in a secondary sale that values OpenAI at ~$500B (Kate Clark/Bloomberg)

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A US district court judge temporarily blocks an FTC probe into Media Matters, part of an antitrust investigation into ad boycotts, calling the probe retaliatory (Bloomberg)

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