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OPENAI DEBUTS MINI VERSION OF ITS MOST POWERFUL MODEL YET

OpenAI has launched a new AI model called GPT-4o mini. It is available to free users. The 'o' in the name stands for 'omni', hinting at the model's audio, video, and text capabilities. The model will be made available to ChatGPT Enterprise users next week.

AMAZON PRIME DAY DRIVES U.S. ONLINE SALES TO RECORD $14.2 BILLION

Online spending during this year's 48-hour Amazon Prime Day event was up 11% year-over-year, with customers spending $14.2 billion. The strong showing was driven by back-to-school shopping and an apparent product refresh cycle. Consumer behaviors during the sale indicate a shift to more conscious shopping and a preference for saving over splurging.

WHAM! NUCLEAR FUSION EXPERIMENT HITS NEW RECORD FOR MAGNET STRENGTH

A new fusion experiment has set a record for the strongest steady magnetic field confining a plasma. Strong magnets are essential for certain types of fusion power - for every doubling of the strength of a magnetic field, the power output of one reactor design increases 16-fold. The team was able to produce a 17 tesla magnetic field, more than twice as powerful as the high-resolution MRI scanners used to image human brains. They are now working on more advanced magnet designs.

A SCIENTIST TOOK A PSYCHEDELIC DRUG — AND WATCHED HIS OWN BRAIN 'FALL APART'

A study on psilocybin suggests that psychedelic drugs work by disrupting certain brain networks, especially one that helps people form a sense of space, time, and self. The study, which involved scanning participants' brains with an MRI while under the influence of the drug, showed that the drug caused populations of neurons usually in synchrony to fall out of synchrony. The brain appears to respond to this by entering a state of enhanced plasticity that can last for weeks. The study hints at how psychedelic drugs could be used to treat people with addiction, depression, or post-traumatic stress.

GOTCHAS WITH SQLITE IN PRODUCTION

SQLite provides lower operational complexity. It is the best choice for getting applications running on a single machine. However, SQLite becomes less appealing if a project requires multiple machines, has a write-heavy workload, or has long-running transactions. In these cases, developers are better off using a more traditional database like MySQL or Postgres.

PYTHON GRAPPLES WITH APPLE APP STORE REJECTIONS

Apple's macOS App Store is automatically rejecting apps that contain the string 'itms-services' - the URL scheme for apps to ask Apple's iTunes Store to install another app. The string exists in the urllib parser in Python's standard library. The discovery of this issue led to a discussion among Python developers about whether 'acceptable to app stores' should be a design goal for CPython. The developers decided to implement a `--with-app-store-compliance` configuration option to remove the problematic code.

META REPORTEDLY UNHAPPY WITH HOW MUCH MONEY ITS VR DIVISION BURNS

Meta has told its AR/VR teams to cut spending by around 20%. The division has lost $55 billion since 2019. The company is still aiming to release a new Meta Quest 4 headset, a Quest Pro sequel, and new AR glasses in the next three years. Meta has been shifting its focus over to AI. It is gearing up to release its Llama 400B AI model by the end of the month.

APPLE TV+ WILL SOON GET A LOT MORE MOVIES MADE BY STUDIOS OTHER THAN APPLE

Apple is in talks with major studios to bring more movies to Apple TV+, expanding and extending the service's appeal. The company's previous experiments with licensing movies and making them available for limited runs seem to have gone well. While Apple has found some success in terms of series, it has struggled to make as much of an impact with its movies. Apple TV+ accounted for $23.9 billion, more than half the revenue generated by iPhone hardware sales, in the second quarter of this year.

BROADCOM GAINS ON REPORT THAT IT'S DISCUSSING CHIP WITH OPENAI

Broadcom is reportedly in discussions with OpenAI about creating an artificial intelligence chip, an effort that will involve OpenAI hiring former Google employees who worked on the Tensor processor.

GOOGLE'S GOO․GL LINKS WILL STOP WORKING IN AUGUST 2025

Google stopped generating new goo.gl URLs in March 2019.

NETFLIX IS KICKING US SUBSCRIBERS OFF ITS CHEAPEST AD-FREE PLAN SOON

Netflix is starting to phase out its ad-free Basic plan in the US and France, making the cheapest commercial-free Netflix plan $15.49 per month in the US.

MODERN LUDDITES: ON BEING A DIGITAL MINIMALIST FAMILY IN A TECH-SATURATED WORLD

Childhood is a precious, fleeting stage of life - screens obstruct imagination and play opportunities, so some parents choose to not rely on them at all.

HOW TO BE (REASONABLY) HARD ON YOURSELF

Being uncritical of your work can lead to mediocrity, but being obsessively self-critical can lead to disastrous consequences.

HOW A SINGLE LINE OF CODE BROUGHT DOWN A BILLION DOLLAR ROCKET

A software flaw in Ariane 5's guidance system caused the rocket to deviate off track, causing one of history's most expensive software failures.

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MISTRAL AND NVIDIA'S NEW MODEL

Mistral Nemo 12B is a multilingual model trained with a new tokenizer that shows powerful multilingual and English performance. It supports 128k contexts too.

GPT-4O MINI

GPT-4o Mini is a new, smaller, model from OpenAI aimed to replace GPT-3.5. It scores 82 on MMLU, which is reasonable for cheap models.

COHERE AND FUJITSU STRATEGIC PARTNERSHIP

Cohere and Fujitsu announced a strategic partnership to develop and provide enterprise AI services with industry-leading Japanese language capabilities. These services will be created with security and data privacy at the core, offering private cloud deployments to serve organizations in highly-regulated industries including financial institutions, the public sector, and R&D units.

LEAPFROGGING TRADITIONAL VECTOR-BASED RAG WITH LANGUAGE MAPS

Retrieval is a huge part of building a chat application over data. However, systems are often sensitive to the format of things being retrieved. Building a language map (e.g., Wikipedia style entry) of the content, and using that for retrieval dramatically improves chat-based performance. Mutable AI does this for code base question answering.

PATCH-LEVEL TRAINING TECHNIQUE ENHANCES EFFICIENCY OF LLMS

Researchers propose patch-level training for large language models to improve training efficiency.

REMOVING INAPPROPRIATE CONTENT FROM DIFFUSION MODELS

Reliable and Efficient Concept Erasure (RECE) is a novel method that erases inappropriate content from diffusion models in just 3 seconds without needing extra fine-tuning.

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TLDR60.

LLM2SH

LLM2sh is a command-line utility that leverages LLMs to translate plain-language requests into shell commands.

SYMBOLIC MUSIC TASKS WITH GRAPH NEURAL NETWORKS

GraphMuse is a new framework designed to enhance the use of Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) in symbolic music tasks.

UNIVERSAL MULTIMODAL EMBEDDINGS WITH LLMS

E5-V is a new framework that adapts Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) to create universal multimodal embeddings. It bridges the gap between different input types using prompts, achieving impressive performance in multimodal tasks without fine-tuning.

STRATEGIZING YOUR PREPARATION FOR MACHINE LEARNING INTERVIEWS

Machine Learning interviews can be challenging. Understanding the spectrum of ML roles and tailoring your preparation to specific job responsibilities and specializations can significantly improve your chances. Focus on mastering fundamentals, researching company-specific technologies, and consistently tracking your progress to confidently tackle interviews.

UNCENSOR ANY LLM WITH ABLITERATION

Llama models are heavily censored for safety, limiting flexibility. The "abliteration" technique uncensors them by identifying and removing the refusal mechanism, allowing models to respond to all prompts without retraining.

QUESTION-ANSWERING FOR SCIENTIFIC PAPERS

SPIQA is a QA dataset designed to help readers quickly find answers in scientific research articles by interpreting complex figures and tables.

OPENAI AND BROADCOM HELD DISCUSSIONS ABOUT PRODUCING AN AI CHIP

Broadcom has had discussions with OpenAI about building a new artificial intelligence server chip.

OVERCOMING THE LIMITS OF CURRENT LLMS

Large language models face challenges such as hallucinations, lack of confidence estimates, and lack of citations.

FLOW STUDIO (PRODUCT LAUNCH)

Flow Studio generates fully-produced, film-quality 3-minute-long videos with engaging plots, consistent characters, and automatically matched background music and sound effects.

WAZIRX SUFFERS $230M HACK

A detailed investigation into the $230M+ WazirX hack, beginning from the original exploiter address, revealed preliminary transactions made on July 10th using Tornado Cash. The tactic involved hints at the potential involvement of the Lazarus Group.

‘HE'S CHANGED HIS TUNE'—TRUMP REVEALS JPMORGAN CEO'S ‘SUDDEN' BITCOIN AND CRYPTO FLIP

In an interview with Bloomberg, Donald Trump said Jamie Dimon, JP Morgan's CEO, has ‘changed his tune a little bit' on Bitcoin. Previously, Dimon has criticized Bitcoin as a fraud and Ponzi scheme, but he has been overseeing the development of JP Morgan's proprietary blockchain and cryptocurrency to improve internal transactions. Trump also hinted that Dimon is being considered for U.S. Treasury Secretary under his administration.

POLYGON ANNOUNCES MATIC TO POL MIGRATION DATE

On September 4th, the MATIC to POL migration will occur within the Polygon network, making POL the primary gas and staking token, marking its first phase as a key element in future Polygon projects like AggLayer. For current MATIC holders on the Polygon PoS, no action will be required for this transition, while those on Ethereum or other platforms may need to engage with a migration process detailed by the community.

THE SINK L2: SOLVING LONG-TERM VALUE ALIGNMENT

Most general-purpose L2s are like retail brokerages, with little differentiation and non-unique applications. Introducing native yield allows L2s to monetize based on assets under management instead of sequencer fees. The Sink has two primitives – a V2 DEX with bribe mechanisms and a CDP with a stake-able stablecoin – to offer high, scalable yields. The idea is similar to Berachain and Blast combined.

RECAP OF CRYPTO AND POLICY IN DC

With the elections becoming more prevalent, crypto's political influence continues to shape policy and rhetoric, evidenced by the Trump-Vance ticket being the first to have a Bitcoin holder on the ballot. Though the GOP has been leading the charge on pro-crypto policy, Democrats are catching up and creating bipartisan momentum. The past few weeks have seen various political wins and losses, like the house voting not to override Biden's SAB 121 veto, a few CFTC and SEC hearings, and the SEC's dropped case against Paxos stablecoins.

DIVING INTO DARK POOLS

Public institutional moves have far-ranging consequences. Dark pools, a concept well-known in traditional finance, allow traders to be confidential when executing transactions. DeFi dark pools currently suffer from a lack of liquidity and must use novel methods like ZK proofs to comply with KYC/AML regulations, but they offer better security, privacy, and cost-efficiency than OTC trading.

MARK CUBAN'S THOUGHTS ON TRUMP, BITCOIN, AND SILICON VALLEY

Billionaire investor Mark Cuban believes Silicon Valley's support for Trump is a “bitcoin play.” Trump's support of crypto is excellent, but it does not significantly impact the price. However, it makes it easier to operate a business. Bitcoin's price could go extremely high because of lower tax rates, tariffs, and geopolitical uncertainty. Ultimately, it could become a global currency and safe haven asset.