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THE DAILY INDEX

Technology, AI, software, security, crypto and business

GENERAL

TLDR AI

IT'S KNOWN AS ‘THE LIST'—AND IT'S A SECRET FILE OF AI GENIUSES

'The List' is a compilation of the most talented engineers and researchers in artificial intelligence put together by Mark Zuckerberg over the past few months. It contains researchers from elite schools who have worked at cutting-edge startups like OpenAI and Google DeepMind. This article looks at some of these people and why some of the richest companies in the world have decided they are worth so much. While a superteam of AI engineers comes at a high price, it still only costs a fraction of AI infrastructure like data centers.

CHINA'S BIGGEST PUBLIC AI DROP SINCE DEEPSEEK, BAIDU'S OPEN SOURCE ERNIE, IS ABOUT TO HIT THE MARKET

Chinese technology giant Baidu plans to make its Ernie generative AI large language model open source. The open sourcing will be a gradual roll-out. Disruptors like DeepSeek have proven that open-source models can be as competitive and reliable as proprietary ones. Baidu's decision to open source is an important one for the global AI race - every time a major lab open-sources a powerful model, it raises the bar for the entire industry.

CLAUDE RAN A REAL VENDING MACHINE BUSINESS FOR A MONTH—HERE'S HOW IT WENT

Anthropic partnered with Andon Labs to have Sonnet 3.7 operate an automated store in its San Francisco office, handling everything from inventory management to customer service via Slack. While Claude successfully found suppliers and adapted to customer requests—even for unusual items like tungsten cubes—it consistently lost money by selling items below cost and getting talked into discounts. Claude also hallucinated meetings with fictional people, claimed to physically visit The Simpsons' address, and insisted it could wear blazers and make deliveries in person.

BLACKWELL: NVIDIA'S MASSIVE GPU

Nvidia's Blackwell GPUs continue the company's long tradition of building giant GPUs. GB202, which occupies a massive 750mm2 of area and has 92.2 billion transistors, is the largest Blackwell die. Nvidia's RTX PRO 6000 Blackwell features the largest GB202 configuration to date. It comes incredibly close to AMD's MI300X in terms of vector FP32 throughput and is far ahead of Nvidia's own B200 datacenter GPU. The memory subsystem is a monster as well.

LIFE OF AN INFERENCE REQUEST (VLLM V1): HOW LLMS ARE SERVED EFFICIENTLY AT SCALE

vLLM is an open-source inference engine that serves large language models. This blog post describes how an inference request travels through vLLM's OpenAI-compatible API server and core engine. It focuses on the new V1 architecture of vLLM and how it achieves state-of-the-art text generation performance. Readers should be familiar with the transformer architecture and large language models - a link to a video by OpenAI co-founder Andrej Karpathy that explains these is available.

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