Reading List

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

Vibe coding startup Emergent raised a $70M Series B led by Khosla and SoftBank Vision Fund 2, after a $23M Series A in September 2025, and claims 5M+ users (Ben Bergman/Business Insider)

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Meta VP of Public Policy Simon Milner, the company's most senior Asia-Pacific policy executive, plans to leave after 14 years to retire from full-time work (Newley Purnell/Bloomberg)

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Sources: Baidu's Ernie Assistant passes 200M MAUs, as competition intensifies among Chinese tech giants in AI; Ernie is linked to apps like JD.com and Meituan (Jiahui Huang/Wall Street Journal)

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Sources: UK and Chinese security officials set up a forum to discuss cyberattacks after hacking accusations, the first of its kind, to help prevent escalation (Alex Wickham/Bloomberg)

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Sony and TCL sign a non-binding agreement to spin off Sony's TV and home audio hardware business into a new joint venture, aiming to finalize the deal by March (Jess Weatherbed/The Verge)

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Sources: China broadens its probe into Temu owner PDD, dispatching 100+ investigators to its Shanghai HQ, after staff exchanged physical blows with regulators (John Liu/Bloomberg)

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PE firm Everstone combines India's Wingify, which helps A/B test sites, and France's AB Tasty, which improves e-commerce UX; Everstone bought Wingify for $200M (Jagmeet Singh/TechCrunch)

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French accounting software startup Pennylane raised $204M led by TCV, a source says at a ~$4.25B valuation, with participation from Blackstone, DST, and others (Yazhou Sun/Bloomberg)

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A look at South Korea's Independent AI Foundation Model competition, which aims to find the best homegrown AI models, in a bid to compete with the US and China (Yoolim Lee/Bloomberg)

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Sources: ByteDance boosts its cloud via more sales hires and lower prices; IDC: ByteDance had 13% of China's AI cloud market in H1 2025, behind Alibaba's 23% (Eleanor Olcott/Financial Times)

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Pune-based supply chain robotics startup Unbox Robotics raised a $28M Series B in a mix of primary and secondary capital, after raising $15M in earlier rounds (Anjali Jain/Inc42)

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xAI faces a growing outcry from global regulators over Grok's generation of nonconsensual explicit photos, but has faced little regulatory action in the US (Kurt Wagner/Bloomberg)

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Anthropic details the "Assistant Axis", a pattern of neural activity in language models that governs their default identity and helpful behavior (Anthropic)

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The UK Treasury committee says the government and Bank of England's "wait-and-see approach" to AI risks in the financial sector poses "serious harm" to the UK (Kalyeena Makortoff/The Guardian)

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Cursor's recent experiment involved running hundreds of AI agents for nearly a week to build a web browser, writing 1M+ lines of code across 1,000 files (Simon Willison/Simon Willison's Weblog)

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The UK launches a consultation on whether to ban under-16s from using social media, alongside restrictions on addictive app features like infinite scrolling (Kiran Stacey/The Guardian)

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Q&A with Razer CEO Min-Liang Tan on the use of AI in game development, the gaming community's pushback against AI, partnering with Grok, and more (Nilay Patel/The Verge)

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Anthropic's Claude Cowork launch revives investor fears about disruption that weighed on SaaS stocks in 2025; Morgan Stanley's SaaS index is down 15% YTD (Ryan Vlastelica/Bloomberg)

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The UK government plans to take a £25M stake in Octopus Energy's tech spin-off Kraken, last valued at $8.65B, in an effort to encourage Kraken to list in London (Financial Times)

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Sources: Seoul-based AI chip designer FuriosaAI seeks to raise a $300M to $500M Series D to fund mass production of its second-gen RNGD chip and eyes a 2027 IPO (Yoolim Lee/Bloomberg)

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