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 Tokyo-based neocloud provider Datasection, which sources say has a $1.2B+ contract giving Tencent access to a large share of its 15K Blackwell chips (Financial Times)
- METR: Claude Opus 4.5 has a 50% task completion time horizon of about 4 hours and 49 minutes, more than double that of Claude Opus 4 released earlier this year (@metr_evals)
- Chinese AI chipmaker Moore Threads announces a new generation of chips slated for mass production from 2026, just weeks after its blockbuster IPO in China (Bloomberg)
- Surveillance tools exported by China, based on US tech and obtained by Chinese companies, to countries like Nepal are being used to stifle Tibetan refugees (Associated Press)
- A profile of Josh Woodward, the head of Google Labs who is credited with turning around the Gemini app, growing its MAUs from 350M in March to 650M by October (Jennifer Elias/CNBC)
- S&P Global: data center deals hit $61B globally in 2025; debt issuance nearly doubled YoY to $182B, with Meta raising $62B debt since 2022, ~50% of that in 2025 (April Roach/CNBC)
- Google advises some employees on visas, including H-1B visas, not to travel outside the US due to processing delays, following new social media screening rules (Business Insider)
- The RAISE Act requires AI companies with $500M+ in revenue to publish safety protocols and disclose safety incidents within 72 hours, with fines up to $3M (Isabelle Bousquette/Wall Street Journal)
- Morgan Stanley: ad tiers account for 30% of Netflix subscribers and 50% of Disney+ subscribers; ad tiers accounted for all US net subscriber additions in 2025 (Max Knoblauch/Sherwood News)
- Google says it needs more time to upgrade Assistant to Gemini on most Android devices; Google previously planned to complete the transition by the end of 2025 (Mariella Moon/Engadget)
- Inside NeurIPS 2025, and how it has transformed from a small academic conference into a massive industry event with 24,000+ attendees, yacht parties, and more (Wall Street Journal)
- Security company Koi finds browser extensions with 8M+ total installs that collected users' conversations with AI chatbots and sold them for marketing use (Dan Goodin/Ars Technica)
- Micron projects FY Q2 sales to grow over 2x YoY to $18.7B and adjusted operating income to rise over 5x to $11.3B, signaling higher memory chip prices in 2026 (Dan Gallagher/Wall Street Journal)
- A look at Meta's 2GW Hyperion data center in Louisiana, with the first phase opening in 2028; an analysis shows sales tax breaks on GPUs could total $3.3B+ (Jon Keegan/Sherwood News)
- OpenAI introduces a framework to evaluate chain-of-thought monitorability and a suite of 13 evaluations designed to measure the monitorability of an AI system (OpenAI)
- YouTube's head of products for podcasts Steve McLendon says viewers streamed 700M+ hours of podcasts on TV in October, up from 400M hours in October 2024 (Ashley Carman/Bloomberg)
- Filings: Tether-owned Northern Data sold its bitcoin mining unit, Peak Mining, for up to $200M to a group including companies controlled by Tether executives (Nikou Asgari/Financial Times)
- Sources: TSMC plans to move chipmaking tools into its second Arizona fab in summer 2026, in line with its push to accelerate US production by "several quarters" (Cheng Ting-Fang/Nikkei Asia)
- China issues new rules letting online merchants set their own prices across platforms for goods and services they sell, effective April 10, 2026, for five years (Bloomberg)
- Sources: Resolve AI, which is developing an autonomous site reliability engineering tool, raised a Series A at multiple valuation tiers, including at $1B (Marina Temkin/TechCrunch)