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MARK ZUCKERBERG’S NEW GOAL IS CREATING ARTIFICIAL GENERAL INTELLIGENCE

Mark Zuckerberg has announced plans to achieve artificial general intelligence (AGI). While he doesn't have a timeline for when AGI will be reached or an exact definition for it, he has moved Meta's AI research group FAIR to the same part of the company building generative AI products across its apps. The move aims to allow Meta's AI breakthroughs to more directly reach its users. Meta plans to own more than 340,000 Nvidia H100 GPUs by the end of the year.

THE NEXT IOS UPDATE WILL MAKE IT HARDER TO BREAK INTO YOUR IPHONE

Apple's newest security feature, Stolen Device Protection, makes it far harder for thieves to hijack Apple IDs and any financial information stored on the device. It will require users to use Face ID or Touch ID and certain changes may take up to an hour to take effect. The feature addresses a key vulnerability where thieves can lock victims out of their Apple IDs by resetting the password using their passcodes. Stolen Device Protection will be included in the iOS 17.3 release expected next week.

FIGURE'S HUMANOID ROBOTS ARE ABOUT TO ENTER THE WORKFORCE AT BMW

Figure is sending its general-purpose humanoid robots to start real-world work at BMW's manufacturing plant in South Carolina. The deal may be one of the first-ever commercial deals involving humanoid robots. While the two companies have yet to announce exactly what Figure's robots will be doing on the factory floor, training has already begun in the company's labs for the first tasks. The partnership is milestone-based, so Figure will have to prove its robots can do useful work before it scales its operations.

FLYING KITES DELIVER CONTAINER-SIZE POWER GENERATION

Airborne wind energy is a new field that uses kites instead of turbines to generate energy from wind. Kites are nimbler than turbines and can deliver a more constant energy supply. Netherlands-based company Kitepower has developed a system called Hawk that flies out in 'pumping' cycles - it flies out while pulling at a tether, generating electricity on the ground, and when the tether reaches its maximum length, the ground station winches the kite back in, using only a fraction of the energy it produced. The system fits into a standard shipping container and assembly at a new site takes less than 24 hours.

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WHISPERSPEECH

WhisperSpeech is a text-to-speech system built by inverting Whisper. The models are currently only trained on the English LibreLight dataset, but future releases will target multiple languages. Samples of synthesized voices are available in the repository.

WHAT'S NEW WITH ML IN PRODUCTION

Most machine learning in production is still not related to large language models or generative AI, which make up less than 10% of the market at most. At their core, machine learning models are algorithms that perform compression on a corpus of data. A lot has changed in leading-edge machine learning applications over the past year as the industry has moved from smaller, business-specific models that perform specific tasks to very large generalist models that complete text. The pendulum is again shifting to smaller models that people are starting to fine-tune and run on their own. The industry still focuses on compression, but it is changing where and how much it is controlled.

COMING TO GRIPS WITH APPLE’S SEEMINGLY UNSHAKABLE SENSE OF ENTITLEMENT TO ITS COMMISSIONS FROM THIRD-PARTY IOS APPS

Apple has introduced a new tax on web purchases that prevents developers from offering digital items more cheaply on the web. Epic will contest this plan in District Court. Apple is demanding commission from web sales that occur within 7 days of a user tapping through to the web from its new External Purchase Links entitlement in an app - services that already sell over the web can continue to do so in exactly the same way. Some critics say Apple shouldn't and legally can't comply with its anti-steering injunction this way, but it looks like the company isn't doing anything contrary to the law.

SAM ALTMAN SAYS AI USING TOO MUCH ENERGY, WILL REQUIRE BREAKTHROUGH ENERGY SOURCE

It's no secret that AI models require astronomical amounts of electricity to run. Experts estimate that the industry could soon use as much electricity as an entire country. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman is looking for cheaper energy alternatives. Future models will require even more power to the degree that they'll need a whole new power source. Altman has already invested around $375 million in a nuclear fusion company.

RESEARCHERS CONFIRM WHAT WE ALREADY KNEW: GOOGLE RESULTS REALLY ARE GETTING WORSE

Search engine results are getting worse as the internet is flooded with low-effort garbage.

WHAT IS SCALABILITY ANYWAY?

A system is scalable when the cost of adding incremental work is approximately constant.

AMAZON’S LATEST LAYOFFS HIT ITS BUY WITH PRIME UNIT

Amazon is laying off about 30 employees in its Buy with Prime unit, less than 5% of the staff in the division.

HOW TO DESIGN AN ISA

An instruction set is a lingua franca between compilers and microarchitecture - the rise of RISC-V as an open base for custom instruction sets has lowered the barrier to entry for people trying to design some or all of an instruction set.

A MASSIVE AMOUNT OF WATER ICE HAS BEEN FOUND ON MARS, LURKING BENEATH THE EQUATOR

A new radar survey of the Medusae Fossae Formation region on the Martian equator has revealed several kilometers-thick slabs of buried water ice.

WORKERS ARE FILMING THEIR LAYOFFS, THEN POSTING THEM TO TIKTOK. WHAT COULD GO WRONG?

While filming your layoff and posting it to social media might feel empowering, critics warn that creators might be acting naive and shortsighted as any company that now googles them will see the video.

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GOOGLE CEO SAYS MORE JOB CUTS ARE NEEDED IN 2024 IN ORDER TO REACH ‘AMBITIOUS GOALS’

Google CEO Sundar Pichai has warned employees that more job cuts are coming this year. The company leadership is preparing its AI goals for the year and will publish its 2024 objectives and key results this week. Pichai says that the layoffs won't be at the scale of last year's reductions and will not touch every team. Alphabet shares jumped 55% last year and its revenue in the third quarter returned to double-digit growth alongside a rebound in the digital ad market.

EVERYTHING SAMSUNG ANNOUNCED AT ITS GALAXY S24 EVENT TODAY

Samsung just held its Galaxy Unpacked event, announcing three new smartphones to start the new year. It also introduced an artificial intelligence platform. The Galaxy S24 Ultra has a 6.8-inch QHD+ Dynamic AMOLED 2X display with a 1-120Hz refresh rate. The Samsung Galaxy S24 boasts a 6.2-inch FHD+ Dynamic AMOLED 2X display that supports a 1-120Hz refresh rate, and the Galaxy S24 Plus features a 6.7-inch QHD+ display. All phones come with Samsung's new Vision booster, which enhances outdoor visibility with its 2,600-nit peak brightness. Galaxy AI includes five key features: Live Translate, Interpreter, Chat Assist, Note Assist, and Transcript Assist.

MEET HELIOS, A NEW CLASS OF SPACE TUG WITH SOME REAL MUSCLE

Space tugs are miniature spacecraft that ferry small satellites to designated orbits. They are particularly useful for satellites that launch as part of a rideshare mission that seek to reach a different altitude or inclination than that of the primary payload. Impulse Space has built an in-space tug that can haul bigger satellites to more distant orbits. Helios is sized to fit within a Falcon 9 fairing and designed to fly on any medium- or heavy-lift vehicle to boost its capability. It will allow satellites to reach geostationary orbit within a day at a much lower cost than current alternatives.

ALPHAGEOMETRY: AN OLYMPIAD-LEVEL AI SYSTEM FOR GEOMETRY

AlphaGeometry is an AI system that solves complex geometry problems at a level approaching a human Olympiad gold medalist. It can solve 25 out of 30 Olympiad geometry problems within the standard Olympiad time limit - the average human gold medalist solves 25.9 problems in the same time. AlphaGeometry uses a neural language model with a rule-bound deduction engine to find solutions. Its output is both verifiable and clean and it uses classical geometry rules with angles and similar triangles just as students do.

BEWARE OF MISLEADING GPU VS CPU BENCHMARKS

Nvidia's RAPIDS project claims that cuDF, a GPU-based Pandas replacement, is up to 80 times faster than Pandas. While these speed-ups are impressive, they're also misleading. The benchmarks compare against Pandas running on a single CPU core - while the Pandas library is single-threaded, fixing this doesn't require using a GPU. It also ignores costs - switching to a GPU may make things faster, but they are significantly more expensive. GPUs may still be an appropriate solution for some tasks, but it will require careful experimentation to determine if they are right for the use case and budget.

BRACE YOURSELF, IPV6 IS COMING

AWS will start charging around $4 per month for IPv4 addresses on February 1. While IPv6 is clearly a good thing, there are still challenges to switching to it. The biggest challenge to global adoption is ISP support. A lot of developer tools aren't set up for IPv6 yet. If you want to ensure your company continues to run smoothly after February 1, start making as many changes as possible now.

I SPENT THE MORNING WITH THE APPLE VISION PRO

Apple is giving select members of the media Vision Pro demos this week. This article describes to readers what the experience is like. The demo aims to walk through as many elements as possible in roughly 60 minutes, from face scans to the spatial desktop to movie watching, while unfortunately skipping over gaming. The author wasn't fully convinced the device was a compelling buy at $3,500 as the price is prohibitively expensive for the majority of people interested in the system and there is still a lack of Vision Pro-specific apps on the system.

AMAZON REPORTEDLY UNSATISFIED WITH A PAID VERSION OF ALEXA, FACES INTERNAL CONFLICT

Amazon has been working on a paid subscription for Alexa, but there have been company conflicts revolving around the new technology. Alexa Plus will supposedly feature all the functionalities that the current Alexa offers, but with a more personalized and conversational AI. It is expected to launch on June 30. Amazon has been struggling to improve the AI, which still provides inaccurate information, and reduce costs.

NOTION’S NEW CALENDAR APP IS DESIGNED TO KEEP YOUR MEETINGS ORGANIZED

Notion Calendar is a standalone app that integrates with databases and notes in Notion.

DOJ ANTITRUST LAWSUIT AGAINST APPLE EXPECTED AS SOON AS MARCH

Apple is alleged to have imposed software and hardware limitations on its iPhones and iPads to stop rivals from effectively competing.

KINDLLM

Kindllm is a large language model chat web app optimized for the Kindle.

HOW APPLE BUILT ICLOUD TO STORE BILLIONS OF DATABASES

Apple uses FoundationDB and Cassandra for iCloud and CloudKit, using billions of databases in its extreme multi-tenant architecture.

MICROSOFT TAUGHT APPLE NOTHING

Apple is protecting its App Store racket with the same kind of indignant entitlement that characterized Microsoft in the late 90s, during its darkest monopoly days.

EVALUATIONS ARE ALL WE NEED

While large language models seem intelligent and highly capable, we still don't know how to evaluate them and spot talent within them.

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APPLE HITS “ALL-TIME HIGH” SMARTPHONE MARKET SHARE, TAKES #1 SPOT FOR 2023

Apple was the number one smartphone OEM in 2023. It had a 20.1% market share for the year, a 3.7% growth over 2022. Apple's best-selling phone, and the best-selling model in the world, was the iPhone 14 Pro Max. The company's cheapest phone, the iPhone SE at $429, didn't sell well. Apple's market share is fueled by aggressive trade-in offers and interest-free financing plans.

OPENAI CHANGES ITS STANCE, ANNOUNCES THAT IT IS WORKING WITH THE PENTAGON

OpenAI has announced a partnership with the Pentagon. The company's usage policy previously banned activities like weapons development and military use and warfare, but it recently updated its policies to remove the part about military use and warfare. OpenAI and the Pentagon are working on cybersecurity software and are in discussions about how OpenAI's technology could assist with preventing veteran suicide.

EXPERIMENTAL ULTRASOUND TREATMENT TARGETING BRAINS IN TRIALS TO HELP THOSE WITH ALZHEIMER'S, DRUG ADDICTION

A new experimental treatment uses ultrasound to open the blood-brain barrier using a specialized helmet to temporarily allow therapeutic drugs to quickly get inside the brain. Patients are awake during the procedure but they say the procedure is painless. In human trials, the treatment resulted in a clear reduction in the beta-amyloid proteins targeted. The treatment has also shown efficacy in treating patients with severe drug addictions.

A CLONED RHESUS MONKEY IS STILL ALIVE AFTER 2 YEARS

A team of researchers at the Chinese Academy of Sciences claims one of its cloned monkeys has lived more than two years, the longest any cloned rhesus macaque has survived yet. It was developed using a new method called the trophoblast replacement method. The new technique could have implications for conventional IVF. There is still a lot of trial and error involved - the researchers achieved just one live fetus for every 113 activated embryos, and of all 11 embryos transferred to a womb, only one produced a live fetus.

HOW TO USE CHATGPT TO BUILD SOFTWARE PRODUCTS

This X post provides a small guide on how to use ChatGPT to build software products. The process involves asking the model to go through planning stages first to lay down a structure before getting it to write code. It will take a few attempts with different ideas before users get the hang of how to feed the model information to get good results.

WHY LOWERCASE LETTERS SAVE DATA

Both lowercase and uppercase letters use 1 byte each, but swapping uppercase letters for lowercase letters saves data. This is due to how text compression works. This article explains how text compression works using interactive examples. It also provides examples where this knowledge can be used to systematically save data.

CEOS SAY GENERATIVE AI WILL RESULT IN JOB CUTS IN 2024

A quarter of global CEOs expect that generative AI will lead to a headcount reduction of at least 5% this year. Media and entertainment, banking, insurance, and logistics are the industries most likely to be affected by job losses due to cutting-edge AI tools. Engineering, construction, and technology firms are least likely to anticipate cuts because of automation. With AI, executives are most worried about the cybersecurity risks and the spread of disinformation.

U.S. DEVELOPERS CAN NOW OFFER NON-APP STORE PURCHASING OPTION, BUT APPLE WILL STILL COLLECT COMMISSIONS

Developers in the US iOS App Store are now able to direct customers to a non-App Store purchasing option for digital goods. Apple plans to continue collecting a 12% to 27% commission on content bought this way. Developers who want to offer alternative payment options need to apply for a StoreKit External Purchase Link Entitlement. Details about the specific rules for Entitlement Links are available in the article.

SCHED_EXT SCHEDULERS AND TOOLS

This repository contains various scheduler implementations and support utilities for sched_ext, a Linux kernel feature that enables implementing kernel thread schedulers in BPF and dynamically loading them.

OPENAI ANNOUNCES TEAM TO BUILD ‘CROWDSOURCED’ GOVERNANCE IDEAS INTO ITS MODELS

OpenAI's new Collective Alignment team's goal is to create a system for collecting and encoding public input on its models' behaviors into OpenAI products and services.

PASSWORDLESS: A DIFFERENT KIND OF HELL?

A look at the history of passwords and how they have evolved.

DATADRIFT

Datadrift is a monitoring and incident management platform that helps teams deliver trusted and reliable metrics.

GOOGLE SAID TO USE SPECIAL POOL OF STOCK COMP TO KEEP TOP AI RESEARCHERS

Certain researchers at Google's DeepMind have received grants of restricted stock worth up to millions of dollars.