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OPENAI ROLLS OUT ADVANCED VOICE MODE WITH MORE VOICES AND A NEW LOOK

OpenAI is rolling out Advanced Voice Mode (AVM) to ChatGPT Plus and Team users. Enterprise and Edu customers will start receiving access next week. The upgrade makes ChatGPT more natural to speak with and gives the feature a revamped design. It also adds five new voices and adds some of ChatGPT's customization features, including Custom Instructions and Memory. Users will receive a notification in the ChatGPT app when AVM has been made available to them.

STAR FTX WITNESS CAROLINE ELLISON SENTENCED TO TWO YEARS IN PRISON

Caroline Ellison, the former head of FTX's sister investment firm, Alameda Research, has been sentenced to two years in prison for her role in one of the largest financial frauds in history. She pleaded guilty to seven fraud and money-laundering offices related to FTX's collapse but helped testify against her former boyfriend and boss, Sam Bankman-Fried, putting him in prison for 25 years. Ellison has been ordered to forfeit $11 billion and must give the government any income she receives from selling the rights to her story. The judge has requested that she be sent to a low-security prison near where her family lives. Her surrender date will be after November 7.

FOR THE FIRST TIME, BLUE ORIGIN HAS IGNITED AN ORBITAL ROCKET STAGE

The second stage of Blue Origin's New Glenn rocket underwent a successful hot-fire test on Monday. This was the first time Blue Origin integrated and fired an orbital rocket stage. Blue Origin is tracking toward a November launch of its New Glenn rocket. Standing at 320 feet tall, New Glenn still has many potential issues that could delay its schedule, for example, a hurricane is likely to graze Florida's space coast later this week.

OCTOPUSES AND FISH CAUGHT ON CAMERA HUNTING AS A TEAM

Footage captured by divers shows how octopuses can collaborate with fish to hunt for meals. The different species adopt specific roles to maximize the success of the joint hunting expeditions. The octopus works as the decision maker, adapting and responding to different situations, while the fish provide options. In some cases, octopuses have been observed 'punching' fish to punish them or get them to leave a group.

Take the interactive tour

BUILDING A BETTER FIRST DRAFT FOR DESIGNERS

Figma's Make Designs feature has been renamed to First Draft. First Draft allows users to input design goals, then uses AI to select, arrange, and customize design system components, creating a starting point for designs. It aims to give designers more ways to explore their options and help bring ideas to life. First Draft is now available in a limited beta and will be rolled out to users gradually over the coming months.

HOW TO IMPROVE YOUR PRODUCT AND DESIGN TASTE

Taste, a crucial asset that designers, developers, founders, and creators rely on in their work, is one of the few qualities that manages to elude commodification. Certain types of media can be consumed to develop taste. To develop taste, read a wide variety of books, critique and digest products, and understand that there's always something to learn from experts in your field. Diversity often helps refine taste.

OPENFREEMAP

OpenFreeMap allows websites and apps to display custom maps for free. Maps can be self-hosted or hosted on OpenFreeMap's public instance. Use of OpenFreeMap's public instance is completely free, with no limits on the number of map views or requests, no registration, no user database, no API keys, and no cookies. Its data comes from OpenStreetMap. OpenFreeMap also provides weekly full planet downloads in both Btrfs and MBTiles formats.

IN THE ROOM WHERE IT HAPPENED: WHEN NASA NEARLY GAVE BOEING ALL THE CREW FUNDING

This excerpt from the book 'REENTRY: SpaceX, Elon Musk and the Reusable Rockets that Launched a Second Space Age' describes a meeting at NASA headquarters 10 years ago where agency leaders met to decide which companies should be awarded billions of dollars to launch astronauts into orbit. The decision boiled down to three players: Boeing, SpaceX, and Sierra Nevada Corporation. It came down to three factors, price, mission suitability, and past performance, with price being equally weighted to the latter two factors. The decision was close, with NASA officials nearly choosing only Boeing for the contract, but in the end, SpaceX was included.

case study

THE STORY OF MIKE LYNCH CONTINUES TO GET WEIRDER AND WEIRDER

This thread provides a timeline of the story of Mike Lynch, who died on a yacht due to a 'mini tornado' after being found not guilty of fraud after 12 years of criminal investigation - the yacht may have contained encrypted hard drives holding highly classified information tied to intelligence services.

JUSTICE DEPARTMENT ACCUSES VISA OF DEBIT NETWORK MONOPOLY THAT AFFECTS PRICE OF ‘NEARLY EVERYTHING'

The US Justice Department has sued Visa for creating an illegal monopoly over debit payments by imposing 'exclusionary' agreements on partners and smothering upstart firms, resulting in consumers and merchants paying billions of dollars in additional fees.

THE PYTHON PACKAGE INDEX SHOULD GET RID OF ITS TRAINING WHEELS

It would be hard for PyPI to survive without bandwidth donated by Fastly - this article provides a contingency plan for if corporations decide to stop offering free credits to the Python project.

WP ENGINE SENDS CEASE-AND-DESIST LETTER TO AUTOMATTIC OVER MULLENWEG'S COMMENTS

WP Engine has sent a cease-and-desist letter to Automattic asking the company and its CEO to retract their comments calling WP Engine a 'cancer to WordPress' and to stop making statements against the company.

WILL A.I. BE A BUST? A WALL STREET SKEPTIC RINGS THE ALARM

Building too much of what the world doesn't need typically ends badly.

ARC CREATOR JOSH MILLER ON WHY YOU NEED A BETTER BROWSER THAN CHROME

Arc is a ground-up rethinking of the web browser that makes running complex apps as simple as possible.

JAMES CAMERON JOINS STABILITY'S BOARD

Decorated filmmaker James Cameron has joined the board of generative media company Stability AI to guide its transition into visual storytelling.

UPDATED GEMINI MODELS, REDUCED 1.5 PRO PRICING, INCREASED RATE LIMITS

The Gemini models from Google have had a huge reduction in cost, an increase to 2 million tokens in context, and improvements to overall performance. One interesting tidbit is the step change in cost after 128k tokens.

OPENAI STAFFERS REPORTEDLY 'TAKEN ABACK' BY 'OMINOUS' LOGO REBRANDING

OpenAI plans to rebrand in 2024, introducing a new logo that employees found lacking in creativity. The company is shifting from a non-profit to a for-profit structure. This rebranding aims to solidify its identity as OpenAI becomes more recognized.

MEDICATION MANUFACTURING WITH AI

MIT researchers speed up a novel AI-based estimator for medication manufacturing by 60 times.

CLOTHING IMAGE EDITING WITH MULTIMODAL INPAINTING

ControlEdit is a new method for precise multimodal clothing image editing. It allows for localized edits on clothing images while maintaining consistent style and natural transitions.

ELEMENT ORDER AFFECTS AGENT PERFORMANCE

The order in which UI elements are presented significantly impacts agent performance in virtual environments. Randomizing element order reduces performance as much as removing all visible text.

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VIDEO SALIENCY PREDICTION CHALLENGE

The AIM 2024 Video Saliency Prediction Challenge tasked participants with predicting saliency maps for a set of video sequences using a newly collected AViMoS dataset of 1,500 videos.

DYNAMIC MESH RECONSTRUCTION

Dynamic 2D Gaussians (D-2DGS) is a new technique for reconstructing accurate meshes from sparse image input. Unlike previous methods that struggle with mesh quality, D-2DGS uses 2D Gaussians to represent geometry and captures deformations through controlled points.

TRAIN GNNS ON LARGE GRAPHS WITH FASTGL

FastGL is a GPU-efficient framework designed to speed up the training of Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) on massive graphs. It reduces data traffic and enhances memory efficiency by optimizing the sampling, memory, and computation phases of GNN training.

VISUALIZING PIECEWISE LINEAR NETWORKS

A great post by quant firm Jane Street that explores ways to visualize networks that are piecewise linear.

DREAMHOI: A NOVEL AI APPROACH FOR REALISTIC 3D HUMAN-OBJECT INTERACTION GENERATION USING TEXTUAL DESCRIPTIONS AND DIFFUSION MODELS

DreamHoi has introduced a new AI technique for generating realistic 3D human-object interactions using textual descriptions and advanced diffusion models. This approach aims to bridge the gap between textual input and detailed 3D output, enhancing virtual experiences.

APPLE INTELLIGENCE WILL SUPPORT GERMAN, ITALIAN, KOREAN, PORTUGUESE, AND VIETNAMESE IN 2025

Apple's generative AI will expand to more languages, including German and Korean, by 2025. It will initially launch in American English with iOS 18.1 but will face regulatory hurdles in the EU and China. Apple is in talks with the European Commission and Chinese regulators to address these issues.

SALESFORCE VENTURES UPS ITS AI FUND TO $1B, DOUBLING IT AGAIN

Salesforce Ventures has announced a new $500 million fund, bringing its AI investment total to $1 billion.

LINKEDIN SCRAPED USER DATA FOR TRAINING BEFORE UPDATING ITS TERMS OF SERVICE

LinkedIn allegedly trained AI models on user data without initially updating its privacy policy.

T-MOBILE PARTNERS WITH OPENAI FOR CUSTOMER SERVICE REVAMP

T-Mobile and OpenAI will build a new customer service system powered by AI agents as part of a multi-year partnership.

TURKEY TO NOT MOVE FORWARD WITH CRYPTO TAXES

Turkey has decided not to introduce additional taxes on stocks and crypto trading profits, according to VP Cevdet Yilmaz. The decision comes after Turkey considered the economic impact and feedback from various stakeholders, shifting the focus to changing tax exemptions instead.

CAROLINE ELLISON SENTENCED TO 24 MONTHS IN PRISON FOR FTX FRAUD

Caroline Ellison, the former CEO of Alameda Research, has been sentenced to two years in a minimum-security prison for her involvement in the collapse of FTX.

CIRCLE ANNOUNCES NEW PRODUCT

Circle has announced a new product suite called the Circle Compliance Engine, which offers tools like Transaction Screening, Monitoring, and a Travel Rule service to help companies build financial applications onchain while maintaining more strict compliance standards. The service also leverages Circle Programmable Wallets, with the goal of streamlining compliance for developers working across multiple blockchain networks.

WARPCAST LAUNCHES MINI-APPS FROM FRAMES

Warpcast is experimenting with mini-apps, allowing users to launch them directly from frames and deep links. The first prototypes, including Paragraph and Flappycaster, are now available to try, with more to come soon.

APTOS REPORT

Aptos, a high-performance blockchain platform utilizing the Move programming language, saw significant growth in 2024 driven by technological advancements and partnerships. Key highlights include Tether's USDT integration, Chainlink's data services, and NBCUniversal collaborations, alongside a surge in DeFi and gaming activity, most notably with the popular Tapos Cat game, resulting in record-breaking transaction volumes and increased daily active users.

WHAT ARE BASED ROLLUPS?

"Based Rollups" are a new type of rollup that leverages Ethereum's existing block-building infrastructure, allowing Ethereum to serve as the sequencer instead of relying on independent L2 sequencers. This integration lets Ethereum capture not only its own transaction fees but also a portion of L2 tips, ensuring continuous operation and composability with Ethereum's state but at the cost of reduced profitability for the L2 team and slower block times due to Ethereum's pace.

FROM BINARY TO ANALOG PREDICTION MARKETS

This article discusses the evolution of prediction markets from simple binary options to more complex, open-ended "analog" markets that allow for nuanced predictions. It highlights how emerging tech like Layer 2 solutions, zkTLS, AI, and semantic prediction markets are enabling more expressive and community-driven prediction markets, moving beyond traditional yes/no questions to deeper, more engaging market structures. While the concept shows promise, challenges remain around insider gaming and user-friendly interfaces.

PLUME NETWORK TOKENIZING OVER $1 BILLION IN RWAS

TRUSTTOKEN, TRUECOIN SETTLE WITH SEC OVER FRAUD ACCUSATIONS IN STABLECOIN INVESTING

TrustToken and TrueCoin (one team) settled with the SEC over accusations of misrepresenting how their stablecoin (TrueUSD - TUSD) is backed and selling related securities without registration.

CANDIDATE HARRIS UNLIKELY TO MAKE FULL-THROATED CRYPTO POLICY BEFORE ELECTION

Vice President Kamala Harris' presidential campaign has taken a cautious approach to crypto policy, engaging in high-level discussions with industry leaders but avoiding public policy commitments.

GOVERNMENT OF BHUTAN HOLDS $828M IN BITCOIN, ARKHAM DATA SHOWS

The Kingdom of Bhutan holds almost a third of its GDP in Bitcoin.

CRYPTO IN SOUTH ASIA: KEY THINGS TO KNOW

South Asia has emerged as a major player in the global crypto market, with countries like Vietnam, Indonesia, and Singapore showing high adoption rates despite uncertain regulatory landscapes.

THE NEW OPENAI LOGO IS ALREADY CAUSING CONTROVERSY (AND WE HAVEN'T EVEN SEEN IT YET)

OpenAI has proposed a new logo, a simple circle, which received negative feedback at a company meeting. It has been described as "uninspiring" and "ominous." Employees seem attached to the current design, which symbolizes precision, potential, and optimism. Whether OpenAI will revise the logo before a public debut remains uncertain.