Reading List

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

Thoma Bravo co-founder Orlando Bravo says the slump in software company valuations over threat of AI-driven disruption is creating a "huge buying opportunity" (Financial Times)

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Payments using facial recognition are growing in South Korea as the tech improves; South Korean fintech app Toss has scaled its "Facepay" service to 1M+ users (Nami Matsuura/Nikkei Asia)

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The Gates Foundation and OpenAI plan to invest $50M to use AI to ease the impact of chronic staff shortages in 1,000 primary health clinics in Africa by 2028 (Financial Times)

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Apple wins dismissal of parts of a class action alleging it violated CA privacy law by collecting user data from its apps despite users believing they opted out (Isaiah Poritz/Bloomberg Law)

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Signal's Meredith Whittaker says deeper integration of AI agents into devices is "perilous" for encryption, since agents need access to lots of data across apps (Shona Ghosh/Bloomberg)

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China's Cyberspace Administration requires firms to file their AI tools in a public algorithm registry, creating a detailed map of the country's AI ecosystem (Yi-Ling Liu/Wired)

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OpenAI says it will cover the costs of developing energy-related infrastructure at its Stargate data centers to ensure they don't raise consumers' utility bills (Bloomberg)

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Barret Zoph says Thinking Machines Lab fired him only after learning he was leaving, and at no time did the company cite his performance or unethical conduct (Wall Street Journal)

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Apple outages affecting multiple services, including Apple TV, the App Store, and iCloud, are now fixed following a nearly four-hour disruption on January 20 (Juli Clover/MacRumors)

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Analysis: the Trump family has generated ~$1.4B from crypto projects since President Trump's inauguration in January 2025, making up ~20% of their fortune (Bloomberg)

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G42 CEO Peng Xiao says AI chip shipments from Nvidia, AMD, and Cerebras are set to arrive in the UAE within the next few months, as the UAE builds a 200MW hub (Bloomberg)

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Sources: Applied Compute, which lets companies customize models with their own data, is in talks to raise funding at a $1.3B valuation, up from $500M in October (The Information)

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The EC introduces draft revisions to the EU's Cybersecurity Act to phase out equipment from high-risk suppliers in critical sectors, a move criticized by Huawei (Foo Yun Chee/Reuters)

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X says it has open sourced its "core recommendation system" on GitHub and that the system "ranks everything using a Grok-based transformer model" (Lucas Ropek/TechCrunch)

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Drone delivery startup Zipline raised $600M+, boosting its valuation to $7.6B, and says it has now completed 2M+ commercial deliveries of 20M different items (Edward Ludlow/Bloomberg)

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Greg Peters says Netflix plans to bring new content types like video podcasts to its vertical video feed, and plans to roll out a new mobile UI later in 2026 (Caitlin Huston/The Hollywood Reporter)

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Demis Hassabis says there aren't "any plans" to put ads in Gemini and, in response to OpenAI testing ads, says "maybe they feel they need to make more revenue" (Alex Heath/Sources)

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A Massachusetts judge grants a preliminary injunction blocking Kalshi from letting state residents bet on sports through its online platform (Nate Raymond/Reuters)

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Snap reaches an agreement to settle a social media addiction lawsuit in California, a week before the start of a trial in the first of several such lawsuits (Cecilia Kang/New York Times)

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Elon Musk and Sam Altman clashed on X after Musk shared a post about a man who committed a murder-suicide following delusional conversations with ChatGPT (Theo Wayt/The Information)

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