Reading List

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

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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Foxconn reports Q4 revenue of ~$64.6B, up 15% YoY vs. est. of a 13% rise, boosted by data center spending, with December 2024 bringing in ~$19.8B, up 42% YoY (Jane Lanhee Lee/Bloomberg)

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PitchBook: AI startups building medical note-taking apps raised $800M in 2024, up from $390M in 2023, as Microsoft, Amazon, and others compete for market share (Madhumita Murgia/Financial Times)

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The UK CMA is testing an AI tool to help catch companies that collude when bidding for public contracts, amid a "significant risk of bid-rigging" in procurement (Suzi Ring/Financial Times)

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How Huawei is flourishing despite harsh US sanctions, demonstrating the resilience of a company at the center of a worsening cold war between the US and China (Eva Dou/Washington Post)

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CrowdStrike, whose botched software update caused a global IT outage in July 2024, has more than recovered the $30B in market value it shed after the crisis (Stephanie Stacey/Financial Times)

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Douyin, Pinduoduo, and Xiaohongshu vow to improve their algorithms after China's three-month campaign from November 2024 to fix "typical issues with algorithms" (Coco Feng/South China Morning Post)

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Sources: Reliance writes off its $200M investment in Bengaluru-based hyperlocal delivery startup Dunzo, as CEO Kabeer Biswas looks to sell Dunzo for $25M-$30M (Bismah Malik/Inc42)

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Joe Biden awards the Presidential Medal of Freedom to Tim Gill, who founded the publishing software startup Quark before becoming an influential LGBTQ+ activist (Max Levy/Denver Post)

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