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ENTERPRISE IS DEAD

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ELON MUSK-LED GROUP MAKES $97.4 BILLION BID FOR CONTROL OF OPENAI

A group of investors led by Elon Musk offered $97.4 billion to buy the nonprofit that controls OpenAI, but the offer was quickly rejected. OpenAI's structure ensures that no individual can take control of the company. Sam Altman and Musk co-founded OpenAI as a charity in 2015. Musk left the company in 2019 and has since filed a series of legal complaints against OpenAI accusing the company of betraying its original nonprofit mission by creating a for-profit arm and colluding with Microsoft to dominate the development of AI.

T-MOBILE'S STARLINK MESSAGING SERVICE IS NOW FREE TO TRY, EVEN IF YOU AREN'T ON T-MOBILE

T-Mobile's Starlink-powered direct-to-cell satellite messaging service is now open for anyone in the US to try for free. Verizon and AT&T customers can also try the service for free. T-Mobile customers will pay $15 per month after the free testing period ($10 for customers who participated in the beta trial) while other customers will pay $20 a month per line. The service will be included in T-Mobile's Go5G Next plan.

GYROSCOPE-ON-A-CHIP TARGETS GPS' DOMINANCE

Anello Photonics and OSCP showcased their gyroscope-based navigation systems at CES earlier this year. Anello's devices, which can fit in the palm of a person's hand, deliver high precision for multiple applications. OSCP's multi-gyroscope inertial measurement units provide location accuracy to within centimeters. These systems are designed to work alongside GPS as a fallback in case GPS interference is detected.

CHINESE SCIENTISTS CREATED MICE WITH 2 DADS — AND THEY SURVIVED TO ADULTHOOD

Scientists in China have unveiled a new method for breeding mice with two male parents - the resulting babies can survive to adulthood. It is not the first time scientists have bred mice with two dads, but previous attempts did not result in mice that could live to adulthood. The resulting mice had deficits, including shorter lifespans and infertility. The research could result in a better understanding of imprinting disorders, potentially paving the way to treatments that use gene editing to fix them in humans.

YOU ARE USING CURSOR AI INCORRECTLY...

Cursor has a powerful feature called Cursor Rules. It allows developers to build out a standard library of thousands of prompts rules and then compose them together like Unix pipes. Cursor itself can be used to write and update rules. This article goes over how to use Cursor Rules with examples.

PATTERNS FOR BUILDING REALTIME FEATURES

Realtime features share changes triggered by one user to other users as the changes are happening. This typically means servers need to send data to a set of clients that don't know they are missing data. This post contains a collection of patterns for building realtime features that rely on a connection between the client and server, where the server can notify the client of some data. The connection can be anything that allows the server to send data to the client without the client knowing that there is new data.

THE ANTHROPIC ECONOMIC INDEX

The Anthropic Economic Index is an initiative aimed at understanding AI's effects on labor markets and the economy over time. The Index's reports provide data and analysis based on millions of anonymized conversations on Claude.ai. It paints a clear picture of how AI is being incorporated into real-world tasks across the modern economy. Usage is concentrated on software development and technical tasks. AI use leans towards augmentation - its use is more prevalent for tasks associated with mid-to-high wage occupations but lower for both the lowest- and highest-paid roles.

THREE OBSERVATIONS

The intelligence of an AI model increases with the resources used to train and run it - it appears that it is possible to spend arbitrary amounts of money and get continuous and predictable gains. The cost to use a given level of AI falls about 10x every 12 months. The socioeconomic value of linearly increasing intelligence is super-exponential.

OPENAI'S SECRET WEAPON AGAINST NVIDIA DEPENDENCE TAKES SHAPE

OpenAI plans to send its chip designs to TSMC for fabrication within the next few months.

RETHINKING FOUNDING ENGINEER EQUITY

Founding engineers do similar work to founders and take on a similar risk (albeit a bit less), but their compensation is a lot less than other founders.

REASONING MODELS ARE JUST LLMS

Reasoning models show how large language models are not a dead end.

META TO START LAYING OFF 3,000 EMPLOYEES TODAY AS COMPANY SHIFTS FOCUS TO AI HIRING

The layoffs will affect employees across multiple countries - employees will receive their notifications between February 11 and February 18.

WHAT HAPPENS TO SAAS IN A WORLD WITH COMPUTER USING AGENTS?

Many of the elements that once differentiated SaaS products will lose their importance in an agent-driven future.

REVENGE OF THE GPT WRAPPERS: DEFENSIBILITY IN A WORLD OF COMMODITIZED AI MODELS

The war between 'GPT wrappers' will cause traditional defensibility strategies, particularly sustained advantages in distribution and network effects, to return to the forefront.

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APPLE IS REPORTEDLY DEVELOPING AIRPODS WITH CAMERAS: HERE'S WHAT THAT MEANS

Apple is reportedly prototyping AirPods with integrated cameras. The integration may be aimed at bringing Visual Intelligence to the AirPods, allowing them to understand the outside world and provide information to the user. They could be used together with Vision Pro headsets to enhance the user experience and strengthen the spatial computing ecosystem. The AirPods' cameras could enable in-air gesture controls. The tech is unlikely to debut anytime soon - it won't be released until 2027 at the earliest.

HOW SAM ALTMAN SIDESTEPPED ELON MUSK TO WIN OVER DONALD TRUMP

Sam Altman was on the phone with Donald Trump just days before Trump's inauguration preparing the announcement to build data centers across the country. Altman was relegated to the overflow room during the inauguration, but he stood behind Trump in the Roosevelt Room of the White House the day after as Trump announced Stargate, describing it as the largest AI infrastructure project by far in history. Stargate had been in the works for months, but the announcement was timed for Trump to take credit for it in his first days in office. This article takes a behind-the-scenes look at how the deal came about.

THE DRUG INDUSTRY IS HAVING ITS OWN DEEPSEEK MOMENT

Summit Therapeutics, a drug company backed by billionaire Bob Duggan, recently announced that its drug had outperformed Merck's Keytruda in a lung cancer trial. Keytruda is the best-selling drug in the pharma industry. Summit had licensed the drug from a little-known Chinese biotech called Akeso. While Summit's drug still needs regulatory approval, the news added billions of dollars to the company's market capitalization and created a watershed moment for the industry.

HUMAN-LIKE TEETH SUCCESSFULLY GROWN IN A PIG'S MOUTH

Scientists have been manipulating genes to grow human cells in animals for decades. They have now shown it is possible to cultivate human teeth cells inside of a pig's mouth. The teeth that grew inside the pigs didn't reach full human tooth size and likely wouldn't stand up to regular use, but these findings could lead to the development of biological tooth substitutes. Research shows that more than half of US adults may be receptive to the technology.

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THE LLM CURVE OF IMPACT ON SOFTWARE ENGINEERS

AI's impact on someone's day-to-day job largely depends on their level. It impacts junior engineers the most, with the impact level dropping through to the senior level, before becoming useful again for Staff+ engineers. This may be why developers' experiences vary so much. The reason some people are skeptical or overly excited may be because the tasks they are working on are quite different.

AI-BY-HAND-EXCEL

This repository contains a collection of Excel exercises that teach concepts in AI. It covers topics like Softmax, Temperature, Backpropagation, Long Short Term Memory, Multihead attention, AlphaFold, and much more. The repository is still being expanded with more sheets.

DEFINANCIALIZATION / HYPERFINANCIALIZATION

The world has become increasingly financialized as a consequence of bad money. The US dollar serves as a poor monetary instrument because it doesn't effectively preserve purchasing power over long time frames. Instead of saving, people are forced to invest. While Bitcoin simplifies savings and definancializes the world of money and savings, crypto is producing a world of hyper-financialization. New products are constantly emerging that attempt to turn anything and everything into a financial market. The phenomenon will probably continue as fiat unwinds, but after a long enough time, Bitcoin's core value proposition will become more apparent.

HOW AI TAKEOVER MIGHT HAPPEN IN 2 YEARS

This post contains a short story on what an AI researcher thinks could be the worst-case scenario for an AI takeover. It is not a likely scenario, but it is not pure fantasy either - AI progress might not become as fast or untamable as the story portrays, but it could happen in the right circumstances. The future is still not set, but some of the worst outcomes are already plausible.

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A BRIEF HISTORY OF CODE SIGNING AT MOZILLA

An overview of the what, when, why, and how of code signing at Mozilla.

ANTHROPIC IN TALKS TO RAISE FUNDING AT $60 BILLION VALUATION

Anthropic is in talks to raise $2 billion in a funding round being led by Lightspeed Venture Partners.

EXPLORE FUTURE POSSIBILITIES WITH AI

This website contains experimental demos that feature the latest AI research from Meta.

MICROSOFT EDGE NOW HAS AN AI-POWERED SCAREWARE BLOCKER

Scareware blocker uses a locally-run machine learning model to compare full screen pages to known scams.

WHY THERE ARE NO CRACKED BIOTECHNOLOGISTS?

The field might be too complicated for a human to understand enough to be 'cracked' - but this seems like a task well suited to AGI.

ILYA SUTSKEVER'S STARTUP IN TALKS TO FUNDRAISE AT ROUGHLY $20B VALUATION

Ilya Sutskever's startup, Safe Superintelligence, has yet to generate any revenue and little is known about its work.

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GOOGLE STARTS TESTING NEW SEARCH ‘AI MODE' INTERNALLY – HERE'S AN EARLY LOOK AT IT

Google Search is working on an AI Mode that allows users to ask open-ended/exploratory questions and get generated AI Overview-style responses. The company has started testing the experience with employees. AI Mode is powered by a custom version of Gemini 2.0 that has advanced reasoning and thinking capabilities. A screenshot of the user interface is available in the article.

APPLE JUST BUILT AN ADORABLE ROBOT LAMP, A SNEAK PEEK INTO ROBOTICS WORK

Apple recently published a research paper and video that explains how the company built a non-anthropomorphic robot lamp prototype with an expressive design model rather than a functional one. The lamp resembles Pixar's iconic Luxo and displays human-like gestures. It can perform a variety of tasks with human-like expressions. A link to the full video from Apple is available.

WORLD'S FIRST LAB-GROWN MEAT FOR PETS GOES ON SALE

Meatly's Chick Bites, a dog treat made from lab-grown meat, are getting a limited release at a single pet store in the UK today. The company plans to expand production in hopes of making its lab-grown meat more widely available. The UK gave Meatly the green light to produce pet food made from lab-grown meat in July last year. Chick Bites are made from a combination of plant-based ingredients and Meatly's lab-grown chicken, which the company claims is just as tasty and nutritious as traditional chicken breast.

HOW DOES LIFE HAPPEN WHEN THERE'S BARELY ANY LIGHT?

Life still exists in some of the coldest, darkest places on Earth, where there is barely any light. Some phytoplankton living in the Arctic are able to survive without becoming dormant even during periods of 24-hour darkness. These organisms have their photosynthetic machines up and running as soon as the barest amount of sunlight returns. It is still unclear how the microalgae stay alive out of dormancy. The ability may be shared by algae in other areas of the deep sea, which means that the zone of productive ocean may be deeper than previously thought.

NONTRADITIONAL RED TEAMS

Every development team should have some exposure to red team practices. Developers should check user-generated content for offensive messaging and make sure their sites work correctly with ad blockers. They should also make sure their forms work with password managers. None of these factors are major blockers, but they're easy to prevent. It's important to use your eyes before shipping.

WHERE DID TIKTOK'S SOFTWARE ENGINEERS GO?

The uncertainty over TikTok's future has motivated the company's engineers to interview and quit when they get an offer. Publicly traded companies appear to be the most popular destination for employees who leave. People appear to be quitting for better liquid total compensation packages. A chart showing the flow of employees from TikTok to other companies is available in the article.

THE FUTURE BELONGS TO IDEA GUYS WHO CAN JUST DO THINGS

AI will make execution cheap. This will make brand, distribution, and ideas much more important. There is currently an unbounded opportunity for any proficient software engineer. People are still stuck at the level of thinking about singular AI coworkers - it will be possible to have thousands of agents working on the same problems at the same time.

OPENAI LEAKS SALES AGENT IN TOKYO (3 MINUTE VIDEO)

OpenAI recently demoed an AI sales agent in Tokyo. The demo showed the agent using a Deep Research-like search to fill in customer information, check available time slots, and email leads to schedule meetings. It is unclear whether the demo was a mock-up of a product its API users could build or an actual release for Enterprise customers.

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