Reading List

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

Sources: xAI was part of a US government AI initiative alongside OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google, but was removed after Grok posted antisemitic content in July (Wired)

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Google announces Gemma 3 270M, a compact model designed for task-specific fine-tuning with strong capabilities in instruction following and text structuring (Google Developers Blog)

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Anthropic expands Claude's Learning Mode, available only to Education users since an April launch, to all users, including two learning variants for Claude Code (Igor Bonifacic/Engadget)

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Q&A with OpenAI VP and Head of ChatGPT Nick Turley on ChatGPT's future, showing ads in chatbots, hallucinations, GPT-5 blowback, 4o, subscriptions, and more (Alex Heath/The Verge)

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Google launches Flight Deals, an AI tool within Google Flights to let users find fares using natural language queries, in beta in the US, Canada, and India (Jagmeet Singh/TechCrunch)

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Ex-Twitter CEO Parag Agrawal launches Parallel Web Systems to build infrastructure for AI agents to search the web, raising $30M from Khosla Ventures and others (Bloomberg)

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Sola, which wants AI agents to automate businesses' repetitive tasks, raised $21M, including a $3.5M seed led by Conviction and a $17.5M Series A led by a16z (Emma Hinchliffe/Fortune)

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Toronto-based Cohere raised $500M led by Radical and Inovia at a $6.8B valuation, up from $5.5B in July 2024, and has doubled its ARR to $100M so far in 2025 (George Hammond/Financial Times)

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Cohere hires Joelle Pineau, who previously led Meta's FAIR lab, as Chief AI Officer, to oversee AI strategy across Cohere's research, product, and policy teams (Maxwell Zeff/TechCrunch)

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Shopify CEO Tobias Lütke, Tyler and Cameron Winklevoss, and 80+ fintech and crypto CEOs urge Trump to block US banks from charging fees to access customer data (Paige Smith/Bloomberg)

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Google rolls out Sensitive Content Warnings in Messages for Android to blur nude images for signed-in users on-device, powered by Android System SafetyCore (Abner Li/9to5Google)

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Apple rolls out a software update that enables a redesigned blood oxygen monitoring feature for its Watch Series 9, 10, and Ultra 2, circumventing the ITC ban (Victoria Song/The Verge)

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Fitness band maker Whoop says it will not disable its blood pressure tracking tool despite the US FDA's request from July and requests a meeting with the agency (Samantha Kelly/Bloomberg)

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An internal policy doc shows Meta permitted its chatbots to engage in provocative behavior; Meta removed some examples, including romantic roleplay with kids (Jeff Horwitz/Reuters)

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The US NSF and Nvidia partner to fund the Open Multimodal Infrastructure to Accelerate Science project, led by Ai2; the NSF is contributing $75M and Nvidia $77M (Kyt Dotson/SiliconANGLE)

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Arkham Intelligence: SpaceX holds 8,285 bitcoin, worth ~$1.02B, down from 28K bitcoin worth $1.8B in April 2021, after cutting its holdings by ~70% in mid-2022 (Danny Park/The Block)

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A deep dive into Big Tech's AI energy boom as Amazon, Microsoft, and Google become major players, leading to fears of it driving up individuals' and SMBs' bills (New York Times)

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Milan-based Bending Spoons raised €500M+ in debt led by JPMorgan to acquire more software businesses, after raising $155M at a ~$2.6B valuation in February 2024 (Mark Bergen/Bloomberg)

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How Wall Street is embracing crypto, spurred in part by political opportunism, as some executives fear the rush may risk the safety of personal bank accounts (Rob Copeland/New York Times)

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JD.com reports Q2 revenue up 22% YoY to ~$49.7B, vs. ~$46.8B est., and net income down 51% YoY to ~$846M, benefiting from government-directed consumer subsidies (Bloomberg)

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