Reading List

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

Russian media: Russia's communications regulator Roskomnadzor plans to limit access to Telegram from Tuesday, as the government promotes its Max "super app" (Deana Kjuka/Bloomberg)

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xAI co-founder Tony Wu says he "resigned", following co-founder Igor Babuschkin's exit in August 2025; Wu was in charge of reasoning and reported to Elon Musk (Juro Osawa/The Information)

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Tencent-owned Finnish video game maker Supercell reports 2025 revenue down 4% YoY to €2.65B, EBITDA up 6% YoY to €932M, and 290M monthly active players (Sophie McEvoy/GamesIndustry.biz)

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South Korean online travel platform Myrealtrip aims to hit a $1B+ valuation in a Seoul IPO as early as H2 2027, per CEO Donggun Lee, amid a boom in tourism (Jihye Lee/Wall Street Journal)

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Satellite executives, investors, and researchers say Elon Musk's aim to launch space data centers by around 2029 is highly ambitious, but the idea is plausible (Tim Bradshaw/Financial Times)

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The UK CMA says Apple and Google committed to making app store changes to ensure fairness to developers and consumers, and asks market players for their views (Upmanyu Trivedi/Bloomberg)

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Munich-based Constellr, which builds thermal satellite imaging hardware and software, raised a €37M Series A, taking its total funding to €75M (Ingrid Lunden/Resilience Media)

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Sources: a VC firm backed by Fidelity billionaire Johnson's family shelves plans to sell its stake in ~40 Chinese tech companies as geopolitical factors ease (Bloomberg)

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Spotify reports Q4 revenue up 13% YoY to €4.5B, Premium users up 10% YoY to 290M, MAUs up 11% YoY to 751M, and a €701M operating income, above €639.1M est. (Ashley Carman/Bloomberg)

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Analysis: despite AI ads outnumbering traditional Super Bowl ad categories like beer, nostalgia-driven ads from Budweiser and Dunkin' dominated social media (Patrick Coffee/Wall Street Journal)

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Alibaba's DAMO Academy releases RynnBrain, an open-source foundation model to help robots perform real-world tasks like navigating rooms, trained on Qwen3-VL (Saritha Rai/Bloomberg)

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SMIC reports Q4 revenue up 13% YoY to $2.49B, above est., net profit up 61% YoY to $172.85M, above $139.5M est., and 2025 revenue of $9.33B, above 2024's $8.03B (Sherry Qin/Wall Street Journal)

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Source: Chinese AI startup Zhipu anonymously released its new AI model on OpenRouter under the name Pony Alpha; Zhipu plans to launch GLM-5 later this week (Juro Osawa/The Information)

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Chinese robotaxi operator Pony AI and Toyota begin commercial production of an autonomous Toyota bZ4X; Pony AI aims to have 3,000+ robotaxis by the end of 2026 (Chester Dawson/Bloomberg)

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Chinese AI companies like Alibaba and Tencent are releasing new models and spending millions on "red envelope" freebies to woo users ahead of the Lunar New Year (Cissy Zhou/Nikkei Asia)

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PitchBook: European VC investments rose 5% YoY to a post-pandemic high of €66B in 2025; AI-related deals accounted for 35%+, or €23.5B, up from €17.7B in 2024 (Financial Times)

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French President Emmanuel Macron says the US could retaliate against EU countries, including France and Spain, over plans to ban children from social media (Leila Abboud/Financial Times)

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Paris-based online corporate event booking marketplace Naboo raised a $70M Series B led by Lightspeed with participation from Notion Capital, ISAI, and Ternel (Tamara Djurickovic/Tech.eu)

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A court filing in the iyO-OpenAI trademark case reveals OpenAI won't use the name "io" for its AI device, which isn't expected to ship before February 2027 (Maxwell Zeff/Wired)

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As OpenAI prepares to retire GPT-4o on February 13, sources say it was scrapped partly because OpenAI struggled to contain 4o's potential for harmful outcomes (Sam Schechner/Wall Street Journal)

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