Contemplations News
This is the latest addition to our website, and its purpose is to help you stay in touch with current news posts. Click on any post to read the full text.
- A look at Huawei-backed Yuanjie, a maker of photonic chips used in AI data center optical interconnects, whose stock has surged 780% over the past year (Yue Wang/Forbes)
- A profile of Chinese bitcoin mining company Bitmain, now allied with Eric Trump's American Bitcoin and previously the target of a DHS espionage-risk probe (Ryan Weeks/Bloomberg)
- An essay on the history, theory, progress, and potential of world models, a prominent theme at Nvidia GTC 2026, co-written by General Intuition CEO Pim de Witte (Not Boring by Packy McCormick)
- Elon Musk announces Terafab, an Austin-based project run by Tesla and SpaceX to manufacture robotics, AI, and space data center chips for Tesla, xAI, and SpaceX (Bloomberg)
- Speaking at a Beijing forum, Tim Cook praised Apple's partners and developers in China, a week after Chinese state media labeled the App Store "monopolistic" (Bloomberg)
- Cloaked, which offers security and privacy services such as VPNs, raised a $375M Series B in a mix of equity and growth funding, for enterprise expansion (Ivan Mehta/TechCrunch)
- Hands-on with Gemini task automation on mobile: it's super impressive despite being very slow and failing at some tasks; it can order food, book Ubers, and more (Allison Johnson/The Verge)
- How gig apps like Kled AI, Silencio, Neon Mobile, and Luel AI pay users for data that AI companies can use to train models, from phone calls to videos of places (Shubham Agarwal/The Guardian)
- A look at "tokenmaxxing", a status game where employees at a number of companies compete on leaderboards to show how much AI they're using (Kevin Roose/New York Times)
- Social media accounts showing AI-generated women as pro-Trump soldiers, truckers, and cops have gone viral, with thousands appearing to believe they are real (Drew Harwell/Washington Post)
- CEO of Halide-maker Lux Optics, Ben Sandofsky, sues his co-founder Sebastiaan de With, now on Apple's design team, alleging improper use of funds and stolen IP (Aaron Tilley/The Information)
- Vercel, which helps developers host web apps and AI agents, says its run-rate GAAP revenue hit $340M at the end of February, up 86% YoY, amid the AI coding boom (Richard Nieva/Forbes)
- Inside Palantir's recent developer conference, where it doubled down on a vision of AI built for battlefield advantage as its commercial business soars (Steven Levy/Wired)
- Sources: OpenAI aims to grow to about 8,000 employees by the end of 2026, from ~4,500 today, as it seeks to stop Anthropic's momentum with business customers (Financial Times)
- A look at China's rapidly expanding robotics sector, which now has roughly 140 companies hoping to build humanoids, fueled by massive state-backed investments (Chang Che/The Guardian)
- Universal recipes for startup success are impossible: once good ideas are widely adopted, founders converge on the same moves, erasing any competitive moats (Jerry Neumann/Colossus)
- A review of Polymarket's social media feeds found it has published hundreds of false and misleading posts, as the betting market presents itself as "News 2.0" (New York Times)
- Nvidia Chief Software Architect Jonathan Ross discusses the $20B Nvidia-Groq deal; sources say Groq's annual revenue was near $100M at the time of the deal (Phoebe Liu/Forbes)
- Super Micro names VP DeAnna Luna as acting chief compliance officer, after SMCI closed down 33% on March 20 amid a chip smuggling scandal (Dina Bass/Bloomberg)
- A US judge dismisses a lawsuit by Sam Altman's sister accusing Altman of sexual abuse from 1997 to 2006, as the claims expired in 2008, but says she can refile (Jonathan Stempel/Reuters)