Reading List

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

Chinese VCs are targeting failed founders' personal assets and blacklisting them as debtors when they don't pay, throwing China's funding ecosystem into crisis (Financial Times)

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Intel launches Arrow Lake Core Ultra 200U, 200H, and 200HX laptop CPUs; none of the CPUs meet the AI performance requirements for Microsoft's Copilot+ (Andrew Cunningham/Ars Technica)

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Ring announces a new partnership with fire safety brand Kidde to launch smart smoke and carbon monoxide alarms, launching for $54.97 and $74.97 in April 2025 (Jennifer Pattison Tuohy/The Verge)

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Disney and Fubo announce a deal wherein Disney will combine Hulu + Live TV with Fubo in a joint venture and Fubo will drop its Venu Sports antitrust lawsuit (Todd Spangler/Variety)

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TiVo plans to launch TiVo OS in the US with a new Sharp TV, arriving as soon as February 2025, rivaling the likes of Roku, Google TV, and Amazon's Fire TV (Emma Roth/The Verge)

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Comcast plans to launch Universal Ads in Q1 2025 to simplify ad buying and win over SMB advertisers from Big Tech, and signs deals with NBCUniversal and others (Lillian Rizzo/CNBC)

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Avataar debuts Velocity, an AI tool that generates product videos based on a product link, and says HP, Victoria's Secret, Lowe's, and others are using the tool (Ivan Mehta/TechCrunch)

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Sam Altman says "we are now confident we know how to build AGI as we have traditionally understood it" and that OpenAI is turning its focus to superintelligence (Sam Altman)

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Uber and Lyft are embracing autonomous vehicle operators like Waymo, May Mobility, and others, after abandoning developing their own driverless taxis years ago (Preetika Rana/Wall Street Journal)

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Sources: India plans ~$2.7B in fresh subsidies and import tariff cuts to help boost local manufacturing, especially of smartphones made by companies like Apple (Bloomberg)

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A look at the rise of Watch Duty, a wildfire monitoring app active in 14 US states that has gained up to 7.2M active users in the three years since its launch (Gabrielle Canon/The Guardian)

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A profile of headhunter Peterson Conway, who worked with Palantir and other Silicon Valley defense and hard tech firms and is now the talent head at VC firm A* (Margaux MacColl/TechCrunch)

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Sam Altman says that OpenAI, which isn't profitable, is losing money on its $200-per-month ChatGPT Pro plan because "people use it much more than we expected" (Kyle Wiggers/TechCrunch)

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Singapore-based Digital Edge, which operates 21 data centers in Japan, South Korea, India, and others, raised $1.6B+, including ~$640M in equity and $1B in debt (Yantoultra Ngui/Reuters)

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Samsung unveils a suite of AI experiences for its TVs, including Click to Search, Live Translate, and a way to recognize food on the screen and provide recipes (Dean Takahashi/VentureBeat)

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Advertising company Outfront, whose clients include Mercury, Brex, Klarna, and Venmo, says fintech ad spend is up 45%+ YoY on average over the past three years (Teresa Xie/Bloomberg)

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Q&A with Sam Altman on OpenAI's and ChatGPT's first few years, his removal as CEO, OpenAI's structure, AGI, AI safety, nuclear fusion, Trump, Musk, and more (Josh Tyrangiel/Bloomberg)

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Sources: Italy is in advanced talks for a €1.5B, five-year SpaceX deal to provide the government with secure telecom services, Europe's largest such project (Bloomberg)

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Malaysia's environment minister says global tech companies should expect to pay a premium for access to energy and water to serve data centers in the country (Financial Times)

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A look at Chinese hackers' attacks on US infrastructure and telecoms; sources: Charter, Consolidated Communications, and Windstream networks were also breached (Wall Street Journal)

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