Alex Konrad / Upstarts Media:
Sources: Applied Compute, a pre-launch reinforcement learning startup founded by three former OpenAI staffers, raised $20M at a $100M valuation led by Benchmark  —  The pre-launch reinforcement learning startup founded by Rhythm Garg, Linden Li and Yash Patil, is now valued at $100 million …

Yi Wei Wong / Bloomberg:
Canada orders Chinese video surveillance tech provider Hikvision to cease all operations and close its business in the country over national security concerns  —  Canadian Industry Minister Melanie Joly says that the government has ordered Hikvision Canada to cease all operations in the country …

Simon Willison / Simon Willison's Weblog:
The term “context engineering” is gaining traction over “prompt engineering” as it better describes the skill of providing LLMs with the necessary information  —  I've spoken favorably of prompt engineering in the past - I hoped that term could capture the inherent complexity of constructing reliable prompts.

Vivek Kumar M / Reuters:
Indian digital payments company Pine Labs files for an IPO in India to raise up to ~$304M; source: Pine Labs is seeking a valuation of between $5B and $6B  —  Indian fintech firm Pine Labs' PINL.NS initial public offering could be worth about $1 billion and the company is seeking a valuation …

Joe Rossignol:

The company has promoted its Brad Pitt racing film with advertisements across at least six iPhone apps leading up to today’s wide release, including the App Store, Apple Wallet, Apple Sports, Apple Podcasts, iTunes Store, and of course the Apple TV app.

Most of those apps have ads in them all the time. It’s certainly fine for Apple to use those ad spots to promote their own movie. Even with Apple Sports, which most of the time has no ads at all, I think it’s fine for Apple to occasionally drop a promotion in there for something of their own. And F1 The Movie is a sports movie. The Apple Wallet push notification isn’t just a little different, it’s a lot different.

I will also note one other sort-of promotion. I play the mini crossword every morning in Apple News. Today’s 1-down clue was “F1 The Movie star Brad ____”. I think that’s a clever on-brand tie-in. Fun, not obnoxious. But with the smell of that Wallet push-notification fart still hanging in the air, not as much fun as it otherwise would have been.