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APPLE ANNOUNCES WINNERS OF THE 2024 APPLE DESIGN AWARDS

The Apple Design Awards honors 14 of the best-in-class apps and games chosen from 42 finalists.

HOW TO BUILD A DOA PRODUCT: HUMANE AI PIN FOUNDERS BANNED INTERNAL CRITICISM

Humane's founders preferred positivity over criticism, leading them to disregard warnings from employees about the AI Pin.

STUDY FINDS 268% HIGHER FAILURE RATES FOR AGILE SOFTWARE PROJECTS

Agile's problems may stem more from its implementation rather than from the principles themselves.

INTEL ABANDONS HYPERTHREADING FOR LUNAR LAKE CPUS

Intel is disabling hyperthreading, which lets more than one thread run on a single CPU core, on all Lunar Lake CPU cores as it wants to maximize power efficiency in portable laptops.

LET A THOUSAND SKYSCRAPERS BLOOM

Scaling effects are everywhere, from biology to business to civilization.

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QWEN 2 LAUNCH

Qwen 2 is a new flagship language model from Alibaba Cloud. It slightly surpasses Llama 3 70B on benchmark performance in English while being a better multilingual model.

NVIDIA EMAILS: ELON MUSK DIVERTING TESLA GPUS TO HIS OTHER COMPANIES

Elon Musk redirected 12,000 H100 GPUs ordered by Tesla to X. He had told investors in April that Tesla had spent $1 billion on GPUs in the three months of the year. Tesla has been developing its own in-house supercomputer for AI, but Musk has previously said that it would be redundant if the company could source more H100s. X's order of 12,000 H100s will be redirected to Tesla.

SECURING RESEARCH INFRASTRUCTURE FOR ADVANCED AI

OpenAI has outlined the security architecture of its AI training supercomputers, emphasizing the protection of sensitive model weights and other assets using Azure-based infrastructure and Kubernetes for orchestration.

EXTRACTING CONCEPTS FROM GPT-4

The team at OpenAI has discovered 16 million interpretable features in GPT-4 including price increases, algebraic rings, and who/what correspondence. This is a great step forward for SAE interpretability at scale. They shared the code in a companion GitHub repository.

DRAGONFLY VISION MODEL

The Together AI team has a novel VLM that excels at extremely high resolution images due to its efficient architecture.

SELF-ATTENTION WITH CONVOLUTIONS

Researchers have developed a novel approach called FFNification that transforms self-attention mechanisms into more efficient token mixers using only convolutions while keeping the query-key-value framework.

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MESOP: GRADIO COMPETITION

Google has released a competitor to Gradio, a popular AI prototyping framework. Mesop is pure Python and has slightly more composability but is less mature than Gradio.

ENHANCING LONG-RANGE DEPENDENCIES IN STATE SPACE MODELS

GrootVL is a network that improves state space models by dynamically generating a tree topology based on spatial relationships and input features.

VISUAL GEO-LOCALIZATION WITH MULTI-MODAL LEARNING

Researchers have developed a new two-stage training method to improve Visual Geo-localization (VG), enhancing its performance in applications like autonomous driving, augmented reality, and SLAM.

A GRAND UNIFIED THEORY OF THE AI HYPE CYCLE

The AI industry has seen several hype cycles throughout the decades, each producing genuinely useful technology and lasting longer than the last. Every cycle follows the process of a sigmoid curve rather than an exponential one. All strategies for developing the technology inevitably have a limit that doesn't take too long to find. While the current AI hype cycle is unlike any that have come before it, it will likely follow a similar trajectory as previous cycles.

AI VOICE AGENTS

Andreessen Horowitz put together a blog post and deck outlining the state of play for AI voice agents and where it sees opportunities for innovation and investment. It covers the currently leading infrastructure stack and maps out the current B2B and B2C application layer landscape.

ADVANCING IMPLICIT NEURAL REPRESENTATIONS WITH RELU

Researchers have revisited the use of ReLU activation functions in learning implicit neural representations (INRs). Inspired by second-order B-spline wavelets, they introduced simple constraints to ReLU neurons to counter spectral bias.

SYNTHFLOW AI (PRODUCT)

Automate customer interactions with AI voice assistants.

MMLU PRO (HUGGING FACE HUB)

MMLU is the standard measure of reasoning and knowledge for language models.

NVIDIA IS NOW MORE VALUABLE THAN APPLE AT $3.01 TRILLION

Nvidia became the second most valuable company in the world on Wednesday afternoon as its market capitalization hit $3.01 trillion.

ROBINHOOD TO BUY CRYPTO EXCHANGE BITSTAMP IN EFFORT TO EXPAND OUTSIDE THE U.S.

Robinhood has announced Robinhood Crypto's worldwide expansion with the acquisition of crypto exchange Bitstamp. The U.K.-based exchange, one of the biggest in Europe, was sold for $200 million cash and is expected to close in the first half of 2025. Robinhood hopes this purchase will help them attract institutional customers.

KRAKEN SAID TO BE RAISING OVER $100M PRE-IPO FUNDING

Crypto exchange Kraken is looking to raise more than $100 million as part of plans to go public in the United States. Rumors have been circulating about Kraken's plans to go public for the past few years, but the firm has recently been fighting accusations from the SEC about operating an unregistered brokerage. The round could be completed by the end of the year.

PRIORITY IS ALL YOU NEED: MEV TAXES

MEV taxes allow apps to capture their MEV without sacrificing composability. By charging a fee as a function of the priority fee of a transaction, smart contracts can capture a variable percentage of MEV. This strategy can only be used on OP Stack L2s at the moment as it relies on a block building algorithm sorting by priority fee.

ALCHEMY INTRODUCES ROLLUP PLATFORM

Infrastructure provider Alchemy has announced its Rollup platform, which offers developers a 99.999% uptime sequencer and all-in-one toolkit. It supports Arbitrum Orbit, OP Stack, and Celestia DA modularity options.

MULTICOIN DISCUSSES “THE ENDGAME FOR STABLECOINS”

Mountain Protocol has launched USDM, a stablecoin backed by US Treasuries. The protocol uses an auto-rebasing feature that accrues daily yield directly in users' wallets, differentiating it from competitors by sharing the yield generated from treasury assets, thus enhancing its appeal as a reliable and innovative financial tool in the stablecoin market.

MAXIMIZING YOUR CHANCES OF GETTING A CRYPTO VC ROLE

Regan Bozman narrates his journey from exploring operator funds to co-founding Free Company, a syndicate that successfully invested in various crypto projects during the 2020-2021 bull market. Despite initial success, changes in member finances and the market led to the dissolution of the syndicate, prompting Bozman to co-found Lattice, a $20M fund that made significant investments in the crypto space.

POSITIVE IMPLICATIONS OF ROBINHOOD'S BITSTAMP ACQUISITION

Robinhood is aggressively expanding its cryptocurrency services and offerings. It most recently acquired BitStamp (daily volume of $196 million and 1.2 million monthly active users) for $200 million. This strategic move, along with Robinhood's 263% month-over-month growth in crypto volumes, positions Robinhood to potentially surpass its equity trading volumes with crypto. The acquisition also enables Robinhood to potentially increase its Assets Under Custody to approximately $30 billion and expand its trading options to match the token pairs offered by BitStamp.

ZK IS STILL UNDERHYPED

ZK and verifiable compute is a new developer primitive that could introduce exciting new applications, much like how the iPhone's camera and GPS led to innovative applications like Instagram, Uber, and Doordash. DeFi protocols could integrate risk modeling in ZK and complex offchain pricing functions that are trustlessly verifiable onchain. Blockchain and ZK could enable ownable, censorship-resistant AI companions and agents or onchain ML.

FRANKLIN TEMPLETON WEIGHS NEW CRYPTO FUND INVESTING IN TOKENS BEYOND BITCOIN, ETHER

Asset manager Franklin Templeton is considering a crypto-focused institutional investment fund.

EVERYTHING IN ETHEREUM'S PECTRA MEGAFORK

Assuming all goes as planned, Ethereum's upcoming Pectra hardfork will be one of the largest ever.

TON WALLET #1 ON GOOGLE PLAY STORE

TON Wallet Tonkeeper is currently #1 for finance on the Google Play Store.

WORMHOLE STAKING LIVE

Interoperability protocol Wormhole has introduced staking for governance.

MONOTYPE JOINS ACADEMIC GROUP THE READABILITY CONSORTIUM TO MAKE THE INTERNET MORE READABLE

Monotype has joined the Readability Consortium alongside Google and Adobe to enhance research on font readability and improve digital reading comprehension. Based at the University of Central Florida, the Consortium comprises over 200 scientists and academics focused on developing better fonts for diverse populations and contexts. Monotype will contribute its extensive font catalog and expertise to help expand this research to non-Latin scripts and operational settings like medical records and transportation.

CHANGE TO ADOBE TERMS & CONDITIONS OUTRAGES MANY PROFESSIONALS

A recent change to Adobe's terms and conditions has caused outrage among professional users who are concerned that the company now claims to access, use, and sublicense its content. Adobe requires users to agree to these new terms to continue using their apps, preventing access until they do so. Professionals, including designers and directors, have expressed strong objections, citing potential breaches of confidentiality and intellectual property rights, and some are considering switching to alternative software.

SHUTTERSTOCK MADE $104 MILLION LICENSING ASSETS TO AI DEVS LAST YEAR

Shutterstock earned $104 million last year from licensing assets to AI developers. It has formed a new multi-year partnership with AI company Reka similar to its existing partnerships with tech giants like Meta and Alphabet. Shutterstock's extensive library of photos, videos, and audio assets makes it a valuable source of legally licensable content for AI training, positioning the company as a critical player in the generative AI industry. The company projects significant growth in this area, anticipating $138 million in revenue from AI licensing deals in 2024 and $250 million annually by 2027.

EVERYONE'S TALKING ABOUT CARA... BUT IS IT ANY GOOD?

Cara offers a familiar user interface that combines elements of Instagram, ArtStation, and LinkedIn. It also offers control over a chronological feed and separation of text-based and image-based posts. Its strict anti-AI policy, dedicated creative community, job board, and ad-free environment make it a haven for artists. Cara's drawbacks include limited reach, sustainability concerns, unfamiliarity, added workload, and potential exploitation.

HOW TO CLASSIFY YOUR DESIGN SYSTEM—A FRAMEWORK

The Design System Attributes Framework is a handy tool for classifying design systems by flexibility, consistency, composability, and completeness. It uses a simple graph to help you see where your design system stands and how to improve it. The framework can help you refine your work and navigate the intricacies of design system strategy.

MEASURING WHAT MATTERS: THE SCIENCE OF UX DESIGN

Metrics alignment is not only a best practice but a necessity for creating products that engage users and achieve business goals. Teams can create exceptional user experiences by leveraging data-driven insights guided by a well-defined North Star and using them to inform product decisions. Using a fictional company as an example, this post shows how key metrics can guide user research, design validation, usability testing, and post-launch performance.

DESIGN EVERYWHERE

An ever-growing collection of carefully curated works from around the world.

CREATE STUNNING VISUALS FOR YOUR SITE BUILDER

HeroKit provides a variety of customizable, visually striking website heroes that can be easily integrated with popular site builders like Squarespace, Webflow, and Wix.

HAND-DRAWN FREE ICONS (FIGMA PLUGIN)

This free icon set features 11,100 hand-drawn vector icons in a doodle style based on a 24px grid.

TO BRAND CONNECTED WIGHT, THUMP STUDIO DISTILLS THE TRUE BEAUTY OF THEIR HOME, THE ISLE OF WIGHT

Thump Studio, a brand and design studio from the Isle of Wight, designed an identity and visual language for Connected Wight, a web portal that connects various island sectors. Featuring a diamond-shaped logo, vibrant pink hero color, and typefaces Manuka and Family, the design promotes interaction among residents, visitors, and enterprises, balancing energy with tranquility.

SKEUOMORPHISM AND THE MORPHOLOGY OF UI

The Froschauerbrunnen fountain in Zürich exemplifies how design can evoke history and meaning in functional objects. In digital production, designers must balance aesthetics, function, and meaning, often using skeuomorphism to incorporate real-world textures and create a familiar, comprehensive visual language despite early interface limitations.

“LEAVE THE DISHES FOR THE ALGORITHM”: HOW LEADING DESIGNERS REALLY INCORPORATE AI

Top designers discussed integrating AI into their work at NYCxDesign, an event organized by Adobe. Among them were Hillary Taymour of Collina Strada, Siying Qu of Private Policy, and Nishat Akhtar, who crafts brand strategies for giants like Nike. They each shared their initial hesitations and eventual discoveries about AI. The discussion focused on ethics and preserving a creative perspective, describing AI as a tool rather than a threat while offering an optimistic future for design.

A RARE USE CASE FOR EM UNITS

Using em units for the text-decoration-offset property in CSS ensures underline offsets scale proportionally with font size.

APPLE'S ADORABLE NEW STICKERS ARE A CELEBRATION OF PAST AND PRESENT

Apple has launched adorable animated stickers celebrating its past and present ahead of WWDC 2024 featuring icons like the Dogcow, a rainbow serif wordmark, Susan Kare's legendary Macintosh icon, and Vision Pro.