TLDR Index
TLDR

TLDR 2025-04-25

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01GENERAL

02BIG TECH & STARTUPS

NEW FINANCIALS FROM MUSK'S X DEBT SALE SHOW CHANGING COMPANY

X is evolving from a social media platform powered by advertisers to one betting on revenue generated from AI and subscriptions. This change appears to have had a positive effect as the company recently posted $91 million in revenue tied to data licensing and subscriptions in February, a 30% increase from last year. The company boasted nearly $1.5 billion in annual earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation, and amortization. X now has almost $1.1 billion cash on hand, but it still owes $12.5 billion in expensive debt.

bloomberg.com4 min read

PERPLEXITY CEO SAYS ITS BROWSER WILL TRACK EVERYTHING USERS DO ONLINE TO SELL ‘HYPER PERSONALIZED' ADS

Perplexity is building its own browser to collect data on everything users do outside of its own app and sell premium ads. Its CEO believes that users will be fine with its tracking because the ads should be more relevant to them. The company has said that it would buy the Chrome browser business if Google was forced to sell. It recently signed a partnership with Motorola to have its app pre-installed on the Razr series.

techcrunch.com3 min read

03SCIENCE & FUTURISTIC TECHNOLOGY

REUSABLE ROCKETS ARE HERE, SO WHY IS NASA PAYING MORE TO LAUNCH STUFF TO SPACE?

Despite reusable rockets being available nowadays, NASA is still paying more than it did 30 years ago to launch missions into orbit. Launches are now becoming more routine, with SpaceX sending batches of Starlink Internet satellites and other kinds of missions into space every few days. NASA is only one of SpaceX's customers - the US military is launching more missions than ever before and SpaceX is about to become the Pentagon's top launch provider. There's still a lot of demand, so prices haven't gone down.

arstechnica.com9 min read

DRIVERLESS SEMI-TRUCKS ARE COMING SOON TO A HIGHWAY IN TEXAS

Aurora Innovation plans to unleash driverless trucks on a 200-mile stretch of Interstate 45 between Dallas and Houston by the end of the month. The company has been testing its vehicles in closed and virtual environments. It was denied an exemption request from a federal regulation that stipulates that truck drivers must deploy roadside warning devices whenever they're stopped on the side of the road. This prompted Aurora to sue the Motor Carrier Safety Administration, as the company doesn't have human operators to physically deploy the necessary devices.

gizmodo.com3 min read

04PROGRAMMING, DESIGN & DATA SCIENCE

ASK HN: SHARE YOUR AI PROMPT THAT STUMPS EVERY MODEL (HACKER NEWS THREAD)

Any prompt that has been fed into a public large language model has already probably been used for training, even if they haven't been disclosed publicly. This makes it difficult to create personal benchmarks for models - mainstream benchmarks already have a high risk of being gamed. This thread contains prompts that AI still can't answer, along with discussions about the inner workings of large language models. Examples include taking a common riddle and then changing one little detail, asking something about an obscure movie, and asking about things that don't exist.

news.ycombinator.com

ZEV

Zev helps developers remember or discover terminal commands using natural language. Users describe what they want to do and Zev presents a list of commands which users can copy and paste to use. Zev can be used with Ollama and the OpenAI API.

github.comGitHub repository

05MISCELLANEOUS

IF A.I. SYSTEMS BECOME CONSCIOUS, SHOULD THEY HAVE RIGHTS?

While the smartest AI systems are surpassing humans in some domains, it's hard to argue that today's AI systems are conscious. Consciousness is a taboo subject within the world of serious AI research as people are wary of anthropomorphizing AI systems. However, that is starting to change, as there is a growing body of academic research on AI model welfare taking the prospect of AI consciousness more seriously as systems grow more intelligent. While AI models may not be conscious yet, it may be worth exploring for signs of consciousness as long as it's not diverting resources from AI safety and alignment work aimed at keeping humans safe.

nytimes.com6 min read

ASK HN: MY CEO WANTS TO GO HARD ON AI. WHAT DO I DO? (HACKER NEWS THREAD)

CEOs looking to blindly implement AI may be doing so to find more funding rather than build a better product. Employees stuck working in these environments are best off deciding whether they want to go on a VC-driven startup ride or work somewhere else in a product-driven role. These types of AI implementations are often not a real strategy and are more for PR. Doing things for more funding and doing things that get the work done are not always the same. If funding is a real concern, the CEO's approach might be valid.

news.ycombinator.com