Elon Musk, the world’s richest man, has controlling stakes in Tesla, SpaceX, and Starlink. These three companies have moved their respective industries so far forward that governments depend on them. For example, Tesla’s charging infrastructure plays a role in the US government’s push toward clean energy. NASA almost solely uses SpaceX rockets now. Starlink has played a role in the Russia-Ukraine war. This article delves into how Elon Musk is not just a key player in technology anymore, but inadvertently a geopolitical player by himself due to the level of influence he has through his companies. This has been further shown by Musk’s purchase of Twitter, through which he has a social media platform where a lot of online discourse and political information disseminates.
Google Gemini, a new family of large language models that aims to rival OpenAI's ChatGPT, is rumored to be released soon. In the meantime, Google is integrating AI into many of its products including Search with the Search Generative Experience. On the application layer, Google is working on Duet AI, which is the name for the intelligent assistant that is being deployed throughout a number of enterprise and developer-focused tools, with corresponding capabilities for each set of use cases.
People have used large language models to mold text in different ways, ranging from writing emails to summarizing articles. Developers are now looking to help people generate bits of music by just typing some words.
Walk is a terminal navigator that is simple and minimalistic that allows for quick navigation with fuzzy searching. It is a replacement for cd and ls. Users can open vim right from the walk. GIF examples are available.
Architect new features, lead projects, and make product decisions for radical new CRM in an open culture (our financials/customer conversations are open to all team members). Learn more
VisionScript is an abstract programming language built in Python for doing common computer vision tasks that offers a simple syntax for running object detection, classification, and segmentation models.
Web developers have no control over what conditions their websites will be visited on, so it's best to create flexible rules and allow browsers to calculate the best outcomes based on the conditions they find themselves in.
While diffusion methods are great for creating images and videos, they have a hard time editing videos without changing how objects look over time. StableVideo uses a special technique to make sure edited objects look consistent throughout a video.
Another cool games paper from Deepmind. The researchers try to improve their AlphaZero chess playing agent to reduce hallucination and improve broad creativity. They find that the types of moves it plays are more diverse and can solve really challenging positional puzzles. Interesting to see how it works out long term.
Chatbots that act like fictional characters are gaining popularity, but current methods need refining for better imitation. This study presents a new algorithm using improved prompts and character memories from scripts.
RLIPv1 is a method that helps computers connect what they see in images to descriptive words, but it has some problems, especially with being slow and lacking data. This new paper introduces RLIPv2, a faster version that uses a new tool (ALIF) to better merge images and words. It also has a new way to get more descriptive data from images.
OpenPipe is a flexible playground for comparing and optimizing LLM prompts. It lets you quickly generate, test, and compare candidate prompts, and can automatically translate those prompts between models.
A fun blog about creating game assets using a classic AI technique. There are lots of good tidbits here around dataset curation, hyperparameter optimization, and human based evaluation. Could be cool to expand this with SDXL pixel LoRAs and truly synthesize maps from scratch.
There are parallels between human fetish formation and AI alignment challenges, suggesting that understanding how misinterpretations of evolutionary cues lead to fetishes might offer insights into AI generalization problems. The article explores the potential for this analogy to inform AI training and interpretability, acknowledging the differences between biological evolution and AI programming.
Coinbase has acquired a stake in Circle, dissolving the Centre Consortium which issues the USDC stablecoin. Now, Circle will continue independently as the sole issuer of USDC. Revenue from interest on the dollar reserves backing USDC will now be split equally between the two companies. Circle also plans to launch USDC on six additional blockchains by the end of October. This is yet another example of Coinbase’s shift away from trading commission revenue toward a diversified revenue mix.
Friend.tech has captured the attention of the crypto world and mainstream influencers alike, generating over $3 million in fees over the past week. However, the app, still in beta, originally used the term “shares” to refer to the token you bought to gain access to user chat rooms. The term is almost always used to refer to ownership in companies, so it could potentially mislead users and easily raise red flags for regulators, something many people called attention to. In light of this, the app, still gaining steam, has recoined the term for access to user chat rooms as “keys”.
Oman has unveiled a new, $350 million Bitcoin mining facility in the Salalah Free Zone. The Ministry of Transport, Communications, and Information Technology initiated the project, aiming to establish Oman as a leading global mining hub. Overseen by Exahertz International, the facility is expected to create new jobs and make significant strides in the local economy. Additionally, a similar project has kicked off in Kyrgyzstan, using hydroelectric power for mining operations.
Silo Finance has launched Silo Llama, utilizing $crvUSD as its sole bridge asset. It allows $crvUSD lenders to lend or borrow against any token asset, with increased capital efficiency, yield opportunities, and utility. The protocol uses a risk-isolated design, ensuring depositor security and allowing lenders to control their risk exposure. The interest rate model is adjustable depending on the collateral's risk, ensuring fair compensation. The product is now live with various silos including $CRV, $LINK, $rETH, and $OHM.
The bear market is a great time to research different chains and protocols and form new theses or strategies for a potential bull market. This reading list is a fantastic resource to get started with if you’re doing this and Solana is one of the chains you’re wanting to learn more about. From a broad overview to historical context to technical topics, this list is everything you need to know to get a feel for Solana.
How do zkProofs work and what do they look like on-chain? zkProofs can be an intimidating and confusing topic but seeing how they actually function makes it more intuitive. This thread takes a deep dive on this topic and tracks a Worldcoin zk Verifier transaction, where instead of submitting thousands of ids on chain, the protocol submits a smaller zkProof. It then explains how to check the Verification Key for this transaction.
This article from the Collab + Currency team examines whether brands' ventures into web3 so far have been successful. Brands such as Tiffany & Co, Reddit, and DraftKings have been experimenting with blockchain-based initiatives like NFT collections and avatar collectibles. Some of these brands are missing the mark, while others are capitalizing on web3's potential to foster culture and community, an area where traditional brands have been constrained. The article goes on to explain that beyond the tech, this is one of the most important benefits of crypto for brands.
This thread outlines 10 reasons why crypto has the potential for a 10x in the coming years, pointing to factors like the rise of stablecoins, growing institutional adoption, advancements in financial technology, increasing societal use of crypto, and a consistent influx of intellectual capital into the crypto space.
In a feat that statistically would happen only once in 450 years, a solo miner with 1 petahash of power astoundingly won a 6.25 bitcoin block reward worth $162,000.
NFT platform Recur is shutting down after raising $50 million in Series A less than 2 years ago. Despite previous success, "unforeseen challenges" led to its closure amid a stagnant NFT market.
This thread explains how we’ve entered into a new phase in crypto, transitioning from hardcore DeFi usage to crypto apps. There is now a minimum viable set of infrastructure available that makes it possible to build consumer apps with decent UX.
Elon Musk admitted X may fail after a glitch led to the automatic removal of pictures and links on posts made before December 2014. Without an official explanation of what caused the glitch, experts are speculating it could be the result of data storage cost saving efforts.
BeReal is adding pinned posts on profiles, user mentions in posts, and replacing its Discovery feed with a Friends of Friends feed. Users will be able to see posts from users who have mutual friends on the app, so long as they’re opted in.
AI ethical concerns include misinformation, bias and discrimination, privacy concerns, and lack of accountability. This post tackles 5 steps to mitigate these ethical risks, including setting rules and responsibilities for AI use, maintaining transparency, and ensuring continuous education across teams.
Deep linking is the practice of linking to specific pages on a website or app. This post explains how to deep link and its benefits, increase site navigability and conversion rate, and boost link equity to key pages.
This post presents ChatGPT prompts to make paid media campaign planning and setup both quicker and easier. It includes prompts for grouping keywords by intent, generating ad copy, finding related keywords, and suggesting audience targeting for social media ads.