Sources: the researcher who declined Zuckerberg's offer of a $1.5B+ package over six years is Thinking Machines co-founder and ex-Meta staffer Andrew Tulloch  —  The loyalties and larger-than-life figures prompting some people to turn down insanely lucrative offers in Silicon Valley right now

How VCs are changing the way people learn about the tech industry, through a sprawling media ecosystem consisting of podcasts, newsletters, and streaming shows  —  Podcasts hosted by venture capitalists set the narrative in tech, changing the way that insiders—and everyone else—learn about the world of startups.

An in-depth look at the rise of relationships between humans and AI companion chatbots on apps like Nomi, coinciding with a loneliness epidemic in the US  —  Nikolai Daskalov lives alone in a small house in rural Virginia.  His preferred spot is a brown suede recliner in the middle …

A profile of Robinhood CEO Vlad Tenev, whose personal fortune has surged 6x over the past year to $6.1B, as the company leans into tokenized stock derivatives  —  First Vlad Tenev blew up the brokerage industry's fee model.  Now, thanks in part to his full-on crypto embrace …

Cinven acquires a majority stake in Smart Communications from Accel-KKR; sources: the deal values the customer conversations platform at ~$1.8B including debt  —  Cinven has acquired a majority stake in UK technology firm Smart Communications from investment firm Accel-KKR.

SentinelOne researchers detail over 10 offensive cybersecurity patents filed by Shanghai Firetech, a company allegedly involved in Beijing's Silk Typhoon hacks  —  Researchers have discovered more than 10 patents for powerful offensive cybersecurity technologies filed by a prominent Chinese …

How Palantir has benefited since President Trump took office, securing new and expanded government contracts and becoming the S&P's top-performing stock of 2025  —  From warfighting and tracking deportations to writing State Department cables with AI, the company is benefiting …

China's World AI Conference struck a stark contrast to Trump's America-first, regulation-light vision, focusing instead on global cooperation for AI safety  —  Behind closed doors, Chinese researchers are laying the groundwork for a new global AI agenda—without input from the US.

Anthropic cited OpenAI's use of Claude Code “ahead of the launch of GPT-5” but says it will provide API access to OpenAI for benchmarking and safety evaluations  —  Anthropic says it has revoked OpenAI's access to the Claude API after ChatGPT's engineers were found using Claude's coding tools.

Manus unveils Wide Research, an experimental feature that lets users on its Pro plan enlist dozens of parallelized AI agents for large-scale, high-volume tasks  —  Chinese AI startup Manus, which made headlines earlier this year for its approach to a multi-agent orchestration platform for consumers and …

Lina Khan cites Figma IPO as vindication of M&A scrutiny, saying letting startups grow independently, rather than be acquired, can generate “enormous value”  —  A surprising figure is celebrating Figma's successful IPO: Lina Khan, former chair of the Federal Trade Commission.

Microsoft's latest 10-K shows that the company's committed datacenter construction is down YoY, with almost no new leases signed in the past 12 months  —  Microsoft datacenter strategy - still in⏸️mode 🧵 @JeremieEO Four months ago we flagged Microsoft's pause on more than 1.5 GW of self-build capacity — on top of the leasing freeze we called out in December. Microsoft's latest 10-K backs us up: committed datacenter construction [image]

Signatories to the EU's voluntary AI Code of Practice include Amazon, Anthropic, Google, Microsoft, and OpenAI, while Chinese AI companies remain absent  —  Nearly all dominant EU and US AI developers have signed up, but - so far - there are none from China.