Reading List

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

A deep dive into a global money-laundering ecosystem powered by crypto and messaging apps like WeChat and Telegram, used by drug cartels and criminal groups (Jessica Brice/Bloomberg)

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Current and former senior employees say AWS is undergoing a strategic shake-up amid fears it is losing ground to competitors in securing corporate AI contracts (Rafe Rosner-Uddin/Financial Times)

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ByteDance launches Doubao 2.0, an "agent era" upgrade of China's most widely used AI app capable of executing multi-step tasks, ahead of the Lunar New Year (Eduardo Baptista/Reuters)

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Dealroom and NATO Innovation Fund: European defense, security, and resilience startup funding rose 55% YoY to a record $8.7B in 2025, with AI accounting for 44% (Ingrid Lunden/Resilience Media)

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BNP Paribas analysis: Anthropic saw visits to its site jump 6.5% after its Super Bowl ad and DAUs jump 11% post-game, outperforming other AI companies (Samantha Subin/CNBC)

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Sources: TSMC plans to invest another $100B to build four more US fabs to ensure tariff-free chip sales; analysis: its Arizona site has land for four more fabs (Financial Times)

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India partners with Alibaba.com to help Indian startups and small businesses reach overseas buyers, highlighting its selective engagement with Chinese platforms (Jagmeet Singh/TechCrunch)

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Sources: OpenAI is charging $60 per 1,000 impressions for ads in ChatGPT, a high price similar to Netflix's rate when it introduced ads (Financial Times)

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SoftBank-owned Japanese payments app PayPay files for a US IPO, and reports a $675.47M profit on ~$1.82B revenue for the nine months ending December 31, 2025 (Arasu Kannagi Basil/Reuters)

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Sources: the US DHS recently sent hundreds of administrative subpoenas, which do not need a judge's approval, to tech firms to identify people critical of ICE (New York Times)

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A matplotlib maintainer explains how an AI agent that suggests code changes on open source repos wrote a hit piece on him after a rejection, and the aftermath (Scott Shambaugh/The Shamblog)

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Disney sent a cease-and-desist letter to ByteDance, claiming it infringed on Disney's works to train its Seedance 2.0 video generation model without pay (Sara Fischer/Axios)

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Sources: Grafana Labs, which makes cloud and AI monitoring tools, is in talks to raise at a $9B valuation, up from $6.6B in 2024; its ARR hit $400M in Sept. (The Information)

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Blockchain-based lending company Figure confirms a data breach; ShinyHunters hacking group published 2.5GB of data, saying Figure refused to pay a ransom (Lorenzo Franceschi-Bicchierai/TechCrunch)

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Apple says 74% of iPhones launched in the last four years and 66% of all iPhones are running iOS 26; 68% of iPhones were running iOS 18 as of Jan. 21, 2025 (Joe Rossignol/MacRumors)

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Some former employees blame xAI's staff exodus on xAI's focus on NSFW Grok and disregard for safety, constantly playing catch up to OpenAI, infighting, and more (Hayden Field/The Verge)

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Q&A with Dario Amodei on getting close to "a country of geniuses in a data center", how AI will diffuse through the economy, frontier lab profits, China, more (Dwarkesh Patel/Dwarkesh Podcast)

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PitchBook estimates that 25%+ of VC-backed unicorns have become "undercorns," startups once valued at $1B or more by VCs but now valued below that threshold (Dan Primack/Axios)

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The US DoD published and then deleted a document adding Alibaba, Baidu, and BYD to a list of companies with alleged connections to the Chinese military (Demetri Sevastopulo/Financial Times)

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Sources: the US FTC accelerated a probe into whether Microsoft illegally monopolized the enterprise computing market with its cloud software and AI offerings (Bloomberg)

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