TLDR 2025-02-12

MUSK'S $97.4 BILLION OPENAI BID PILES PRESSURE ON SAM ALTMAN

Elon Musk's offer to buy OpenAI for $97.4 billion, backed by a consortium of investors, could force OpenAI's board of directors to reassess how it is valuing the nonprofit. OpenAI is currently negotiating how much equity Microsoft should get in its for-profit company - satisfying all those parties was already complicated. The company must get approval for its conversion from attorneys general in California and Delaware - these officials will oversee the valuation of the nonprofit's assets during a sale to ensure it is properly compensated. Sam Altman has stated that he thinks Musk's offer is just a tactic to slow OpenAI down.

LEAKED PIXEL 9A RENDERS SHOW ALMOST NO CAMERA BUMP

Google appears to be ditching the camera bump this year for the Pixel 9A - it's still there, but just barely. A new set of renders has leaked showing the phone in black, white, pink, and purple. The back cameras will include a 48-megapixel main shooter and a 13-megapixel ultrawide. The phone will have a 13-megapixel selfie camera in the front and a 5,100mAh battery. The base model of the phone, which will have 128GB storage, will cost $499. The Pixel 9A will be released on March 26.

A YEAR OF TELEPATHY

There are now three people with Neuralink implants. Combined, these patients have had their Links implanted for over 670 days and used Telepathy for over 4,900 hours. All three individuals are unable to move their arms and legs. This post looks at how their Links have improved their lives. It tells each of their stories and shows examples of what their Links have enabled them to do.

ARGENTINA'S GENE-EDITED HORSES

Scientists in Argentina have created genetically edited horses with increased explosive speed. The five foals have been tweaked to one day be able to outrun the champion mare they received genes from. Gene editing is banned by the International Federation for Equestrian Sports and the British Horseracing Authority, but the biotech firm that created the foals argues that the new horses' genes could have theoretically occurred naturally through selective breeding or genetic mutations.

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EMERGING PATTERNS IN BUILDING GENAI PRODUCTS

A range of common patterns is emerging as software products that use generative AI are moving from proof-of-concept to production systems. This article looks at some of the regular patterns used to deal with issues in moving to production. It covers direct prompting, embeddings, evals, hybrid receivers, query rewriting, and retrieval augmented generation. The article provides an example and instructions for when to use the pattern for each pattern described.

META'S HYPERSCALE INFRASTRUCTURE: OVERVIEW AND INSIGHTS

This article provides a high-level overview of Meta's hyperscale infrastructure. Meta's engineering culture values moving fast, technology openness, research in production, and shared infrastructure. It has adopted continuous deployment universally and enabled developers to write serverless functions rather than traditional service code. Meta uses hardware-software co-design at the data center scale and autonomously optimizes resource allocations to reduce hardware costs. Its strategy involves co-designing the entire stack.

ANNOUNCING THE 2025 EXCEPTIONAL STARTUPS LIST

This year's Exceptional Startups List contains 240 startups, up from 140 last year. 43% of the startups came from the Bay Area. Over 30 of the top venture firms submitted names this year, including some of the best funds on Earth. AI was the main driver of the size of the list. A link to the list is available in the article.

YOUTUBE SURPRISE: CEO SAYS TV OVERTAKES MOBILE AS “PRIMARY DEVICE” FOR VIEWING

TV screens have overtaken mobile as the primary device for viewing YouTube in the US. Many of the world's biggest events, including elections, the Olympics, Coachella, the Super Bowl, and the Cricket World Cup, play out on the platform. YouTube plans to roll out more tools to support podcasters, improve monetization for creators, and make it easier to discover podcasts. It is making auto-dubbing available for all creators in the YouTube Partner Program later this month. The future will expand to more languages throughout the year.

THERE HASN'T BEEN MUCH IF ANY REDUCTION IN WFH IN OVER TWO YEARS, DESPITE THE HYPE ABOUT RTO

Hopes that return-to-office mandates will bail out the office sector seem premature.

CHINA LAUNCHES NEW ROCKET CRUCIAL TO CHALLENGING MUSK'S STARLINK

China's Long March 8A is designed to deploy large numbers of satellites for China's massive space-based internet networks.

DEEPMIND WORKING ON DISTRIBUTED TRAINING OF LARGE AI MODELS

DeepMind has published research that discusses how to distribute the training of models with billions of parameters among clusters of computers (that could theoretically be widely separated) while producing the same level of quality as before.

WASM WILL REPLACE CONTAINERS

WebAssembly is a true write-once-run-anywhere experience, and you can compile several languages into WebAssembly already.

BUILDING A PERSONAL, PRIVATE AI COMPUTER ON A BUDGET

This post walks through how to build a setup that can run medium-sized models completely under your control.

ENTERPRISE IS DEAD

Enterprise is not one-size-fits-all - do the things that click, whether they're easy or not, and ignore the noise.