Sunday, January 11, 2026

Google is introducing new personalized ads in AI mode, powered by Gemini, which allow advertisers to offer exclusives for users preparing to buy a product (Cristina Criddle/Financial Times)

Cristina Criddle / Financial Times:
Google is introducing new personalized ads in AI mode, powered by Gemini, which allow advertisers to offer exclusives for users preparing to buy a product  —  Tech giant moves to gain an edge in race to monetise popular AI tools  —  Google is introducing new personalised advertising …



A detailed look at the Apple-TSMC relationship: Apple's annual spend at TSMC rose 12x, from $2B in 2014 to $24B in 2025, and once made up 25% of TSMC's revenue (SemiAnalysis)

SemiAnalysis:
A detailed look at the Apple-TSMC relationship: Apple's annual spend at TSMC rose 12x, from $2B in 2014 to $24B in 2025, and once made up 25% of TSMC's revenue  —  Wafer Demand Model, Node Economics, and the shifting power dynamics as AI reshapes the foundry landscape



Analysis: the AI investment boom represents ~1% of US GDP, roughly half the GDP share during the '90s dot-com boom and comparable to the mid-2010s US shale boom (Toby Nangle/Financial Times)

Toby Nangle / Financial Times:
Analysis: the AI investment boom represents ~1% of US GDP, roughly half the GDP share during the '90s dot-com boom and comparable to the mid-2010s US shale boom  —  US economist Jason Furman caused a bit of a kerfuffle in 2025 when he estimated that investment in information processing equipment & software …



Saturday, January 10, 2026

A profile of Grubhub parent Wonder, which has raised about $2B and is rolling out robotic meal-assembly tech acquired from Sweetgreen for $186M in November 2025 (Joshua Brustein/Bloomberg)

Joshua Brustein / Bloomberg:
A profile of Grubhub parent Wonder, which has raised about $2B and is rolling out robotic meal-assembly tech acquired from Sweetgreen for $186M in November 2025  —  E-commerce mogul Marc Lore's Wonder is leaning into automation in a $2 billion effort to do to restaurants what Amazon did to shopping.



Morgan Stanley survey of audio habits in the US: 50% to 60% of listeners aged 18-44 reported listening to AI-generated music for 2.5 to 3 hours per week (Luke Kawa/Sherwood News)

Luke Kawa / Sherwood News:
Morgan Stanley survey of audio habits in the US: 50% to 60% of listeners aged 18-44 reported listening to AI-generated music for 2.5 to 3 hours per week  —  That's enough AI music to last the run time of “Avatar.”  —  Video may have killed the radio star, but AI is starting to dance on its grave.



Indonesia temporarily blocks Grok due to the risk of AI-generated pornographic content, becoming the first country to deny access to the AI tool (Fransiska Nangoy/Reuters)

Fransiska Nangoy / Reuters:
Indonesia temporarily blocks Grok due to the risk of AI-generated pornographic content, becoming the first country to deny access to the AI tool  —  Indonesia temporarily blocked Elon Musk's Grok chatbot on Saturday due to the risk of AI-generated pornographic content, becoming the first country to deny access to the AI tool.



Stack Overflow recorded just 6,866 questions in Dec. 2025, about the same as in 2008; Stack Overflow now primarily makes money from enterprises and licensing (Claire Yubin Oh/Sherwood News)

Claire Yubin Oh / Sherwood News:
Stack Overflow recorded just 6,866 questions in Dec. 2025, about the same as in 2008; Stack Overflow now primarily makes money from enterprises and licensing  —  The platform is raking in millions of dollars in revenue, with AI an ironic new source of revenue.



Sources: after five Thinking Machines staff left, investors are rattled, potentially impacting fundraising; two researchers quit via Slack during an all-hands (The Information)

The Information : Sources: after five Thinking Machines staff left, investors are rattled, potentially impacting fundraising; two researc...