Bad news for those who get their updates through RSS feeds: Feedly, the largest standalone RSS reader worldwide, has experienced technical issues for over a week, and paying users are upset that the web app has been “unusably slow.” Some users have also reported that the company has ignored their support requests. Uh-oh.

Feedly, the heir to the market ceded by Google when it closed Google Reader in 2013, is today among the most successful RSS newsreaders globally with 15 million users, according to its website. That makes it larger than competitive products like the web-based Inoreader as well as various desktop apps like NetNewsWire, Reeder, and others.

And yet, the app is experiencing a number of ongoing issues that are affecting users and paying subscribers alike. The most critical problem is a significant slowdown on its web app, which has made browsing feeds quickly and efficiently very frustrating. Users on Reddit reported the app running “extremely” slow, making it “unusable.”

Further, users said that the company’s iOS app, including on iOS 27 beta, has not been working, and the classic version of Feedly’s mobile app (preferred by a small subset of customers) was shut down without warning weeks ago.

As most consumers now keep up with news through dedicated apps, like Apple News by browsing the web and sources like Google News, and through posts on social media, the market for RSS readers has always been relatively small. However, Feedly has been working to shift its focus to AI, offering businesses a way to track emerging threats and keep up with tailored intelligence through its app.

With the latest issues, it begs the question as of whether Feedly is still focused on its core RSS customers amid its pivot to AI, which is the product the company now advertises via its homepage.

TechCrunch reached out to Feedly for an update on these issues, given that multiple customers on Reddit said their requests for technical support had been ignored.

In response, Feedly CEO Edwin Khodabakchian reassured TechCrunch that RSS was still a focus.

“Despite the pivot to cyber threat intelligence, fixing the basic RSS functionality is still a priority because our CTI community uses the news-reading capability,” he said. “Our goal has been to maintain the Feedly News Reader as fast and streamlined as possible.”

In addition, the CEO said the company was aware of the issues with its web app, which were attributed to a bug, and said the front-end team had been testing a fix. Currently, the team believes the issue was related to using “Mark as Read” on accounts with a lot of folders, and a fix for that was released Friday. The company is still confirming whether this has resolved the problem for all users.

Khodabakchian also confirmed that the Feedly Classic app was “retired two weeks ago because it “no longer met some iOS and Android requirements,” though it had been removed from the App Store long before that. At the time, the app had only a few hundred active users, he noted. The team did not notify those existing users before its final shutdown.

In addition, Khodabakchian said he was not aware of the iOS app issues, which prevent the app from loading, but said Feedly would investigate. He also promised it would be fixed quickly, noting that the company still actively invests in its main iOS and Android app.

Amazon is buying tons of rare books, cutting off their spines, and scanning them for AI training, according to 404 Media, which placed a tracking device in a rare book that ultimately arrived at an Amazon facility in Las Vegas.

The facility, known as VGT3, identifies itself with a symbol of a dinosaur holding a book in its claws. Amazon told 404 Media in a statement that it “purchases books through commercial channels to improve the products and services customers use.”

Companies like Amazon need unfathomably large amounts of text to train their LLMs, which have already ingested what they can from the internet (and, in Anthropic’s case, illegally pirated books). Rare books, especially ones that are out of print or impossible to find on the internet, offer a new source of coveted training data.

These texts are especially valuable since there’s no chance that anything published before 2022 was written by an LLM. When LLMs train on AI-generated text, they risk “model collapse,” which can occur when the quality of an LLM’s outputs degrade after ingesting too much AI-generated text.

Startup Groq has raised $350 million as it continues to pivot from an AI chipmaker to a neocloud company that provides powerful GPUs and AI infrastructure services. 

The new capital, led by investment firm Disruptive with planned participation from Nvidia, values the company at $3.5 billion. That’s down from the $6.9 billion Groq was valued at last September, just a few months before Nvidia hired the startup’s founder and CEO, Jonathan Ross, and other top talent as part of a licensing deal. 

A spokesperson for the company told TechCrunch that despite the difference in valuation, the company doesn’t see it as a down round, but rather as establishing a new valuation for the “post-Nvidia-lincensing-deal version of Groq.” 

Groq was focused on building its own chips, dubbed LPUs (language processing units), to compete with Nvidia on inference — the type of compute needed to run AI workloads in real time. After it lost its star team, Groq shifted from being a pure AI chipmaker into a cloud and data center provider that operates Nvidia systems, making the remaining Groq company an Nvidia customer. 

In June, Groq raised a $650 million round to kick off its pivot. The company intends to scale from 54 megawatts to more than 200 megawatts by 2027.

Today, Groq operates 13 data centers across North America, Europe, the Middle East, and Asia Pacific, serving more than 6 million developers, enterprises, and AI-native companies. Groq says the fresh funds will support “those seeking usage of medium and larger sized clusters of Nvidia accelerated computing for training and inference.” 

“We are building Groq into the world’s leading AI inference cloud,” Alex Davis, Groq’s chairman and CEO of Disruptive, said in a statement. “Inference will without a doubt become the largest and most critical layer of AI infrastructure.”

While inference is in high demand as enterprises scale AI workloads, it’s an open question whether neoclouds will be a profitable enough business to provide returns on their considerable investment in the long term. CoreWeave reported strong second-quarter revenue growth and recently landed major contracts, including with Meta and Anthropic. However, investors remained concerned about the company’s high capital expenditures, heavy reliance on debt, and exposure to rapidly depreciating hardware, and its ability to turn growth into free cash flow. 

Groq’s financials are still private for now, but its pivot puts the company directly inside Nvidia’s AI infrastructure ecosystem. That’s not exactly a unique relationship among neoclouds today. Nvidia supplies the GPUs powering clouds from CoreWeave, Lambda, and Nebius, while also investing billions into some of those companies as they race to build more capacity.

TechCrunch has reached out to Groq for more information.