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A new research paper proposes treating LLMs as "Method Actors" to improve prompt engineering. This approach frames prompts as scripts, guiding the LLM through a performance, similar to how a director guides an actor. The "Method Actors" model breaks down complex tasks into smaller, manageable subtasks, leading to better performance on certain tasks.
GitHub Actions has announced several upcoming breaking changes, including a migration of the `ubuntu-latest` label, the shutdown of Artifact actions v3, updated workflow validation for pull requests from forked repositories, a new webhook rate limit, and network allow list updates for self-hosted runners.
A native, performant bottom sheet component for React Native apps, with features like blur support and asynchronous ref methods.
Tailscale's small infrastructure team (only three engineers) manages a large-scale network efficiently by using its own product.
Amazon S3 now supports conditional writes, allowing users to prevent accidental overwrites of objects by verifying the object's ETag before updating it.
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Google is working on an API for Android 16 that will let system apps perform actions on behalf of users inside applications. The API will be guarded by a permission granted to the default assistant app. Apps will be able to create functions by defining a service that can only be bound by a system process. Details on the new API are scarce, but it appears it will allow Gemini to control apps in a way that Google Assistant never managed to do.
Nvidia has transformed from a niche chipmaker to the main supplier of the hardware that enables generative AI over the past two years. The demand for the chipmaker's latest hardware will outstrip supply for several quarters. Nvidia's biggest customers, which include cloud providers like AWS, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud, are eager to reduce their reliance on - or replace - Nvidia's chips. This article looks at Amazon's chip development journey and how it plans to compete with Nvidia.
Astrocytes, non-neuron brain cells, can be artificially manipulated to suppress or enhance specific memories while leaving all other memories intact. These cells play various roles in the brain, many focused on the health and activity of their neighboring neurons. Scientists hope to be able to develop an astrocyte-targeted treatment for disorders such as PTSD.
Researchers have discovered one of the causes of gray hair: stuck stem melanocyte stem cells. The cells usually travel between compartments of developing hair follicles. They can't make the protein needed to pigment hair when they get stuck, unable to move back to the germ compartment. Making them move again could result in the production of pigment and the return of colored hair.
The idea of Zero Disk Architecture is simple: instead of writing to a storage server, write instead to S3. This means you won't have to manage any storage server - this is all offloaded to AWS. The cost and latency of S3 are both going down as the technology improves. While there are still some tradeoffs to consider, Zero Disk Architecture can be very attractive for systems that don't care about latency.
Foursquare recently made its Points of Interest dataset freely available. This post looks into the dataset. Foursquare was likely earning a good amount of revenue from the dataset as there isn't a lot of competition from the freely available data sets. Companies that produce these datasets can charge yearly rental fees that run into the six-figure territory.
The Bluesky app has exploded to 3.5 million daily active users. Its user base has increased by 300% since Election Day. Journalists, academics, and companies are fleeing X and going to Bluesky instead of Threads possibly due to Threads' decision to downplay political content on the platform. Bluesky is quickly becoming the platform for political and cultural debate.
Amazon is investing an additional $4 billion into Anthropic. Its total investment into the artificial intelligence startup is now $8 billion. Amazon will retain its position as a minority investor. Anthropic will use Amazon Web Services as its primary cloud and training partner.
This post explains how to host a website on Bluesky.
The situation highlights the risks of fintech startups.
The return you get from making bets and investments in people you admire and work well cannot be measured in dollars and cents.
Bluesky is currently not meaningfully decentralized nor federated - to claim that it is moves the goalposts of both those terms.
Slides from Benedict Evans' yearly presentation on macro and strategic trends in the tech industry.
Chinese hackers closely linked to the country's Ministry of State Security were lurking undetected inside the networks of the biggest US telecommunications firms for more than a year.
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Ai2 has unveiled OpenScholar, a retrieval-augmented language model that searches for relevant papers and generates answers grounded in those sources. It will make it easier for scientists to find and synthesize knowledge.
Anthropic is partnering with AWS to improve the quality of trainium inference and tooling as part of a recent investment.
Fable, a game and AI simulation company, built a simulation to explore the OpenAI board dispute involving Sam Altman using an AI decision-making framework called SIM-1. The simulation, which leveraged multi-agent competition and GPT4o, highlighted the unlikelihood of Altman's return as CEO in only 4 out of 20 scenarios. The research underscores AI's potential in simulating complex decision-making environments.
This study tackles the challenge of distorted human figures in text-to-image models by introducing the Human Artifact Dataset (HAD), a large-scale dataset with over 37,000 annotated images.
UnifiedCrawl offers a new way to collect large-scale text data for low-resource languages from Common Crawl using minimal computing power.
Researchers have developed image-to-video diffusion models that generate realistic motion transformations from static images, addressing limitations in traditional methods like affine transformations.
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The AIMv2 family of vision models leverages a multimodal autoregressive training approach that shows impressive performance across tasks.
AnchorAttention is a new attention mechanism designed to enhance the training of Large Language Models in long-context scenarios. It resolves numerical challenges associated with Rotary Positional Embedding (RoPE) when using BFloat16 precision.
GLMix is a new method for integrating convolutions and multi-head self-attentions (MHSAs) at different granularity levels in vision tasks. Convolutions handle fine-grained local features, while MHSAs operate on coarse-grained semantic slots for global insights.
Open weights system to animate partial human bodies with a reference image and audio input. It uses pose specific VAEs to combine the information from various channels and a reference image to animate.
In this post, Gwern Branwen, an early observer of LLM scaling, discusses AI progress and influences on the development of AGI, emphasizing the importance of scaling and compute over traditional algorithmic breakthroughs. He reflects on the potential role of human intelligence versus AI and the implications of forthcoming technological advances like weight-loss drugs on human behavior. Branwen also shares insights on his writing process and the broader impacts of AI on creative work.
The AI community is divided over "The Bitter Religion" and its focus on scaling computation as the primary driver of AI performance. Some, including OpenAI leaders, believe AGI can be achieved soon through continued scaling, while others argue that alternative scientific advancements are needed. The debate impacts investment and development strategies across AI and adjacent fields, as scaling laws may not be sustainable long-term.
The first video model that can generate video faster than it can be watched.
Documind utilizes AI to extract structured data from PDFs by converting them into images and leveraging OpenAI's API.
LLMs in software development face challenges due to their lack of decomposability and explainability.
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Cantor Fitzgerald has acquired a 5% stake in Tether valued at approximately $600 million, coinciding with the appointment of CEO Howard Lutnick as Trump's Secretary of Commerce. The financial services firm holds the majority of Tether's $134 billion USDT reserves in Treasury bills, acting as the stablecoin issuer's primary banking partner. The political implications of this arrangement are significant, as Lutnick's new role could influence regulatory oversight of Tether, particularly as the company faces investigations for potential illicit activities.
Franklin Templeton, a firm with $1.5 trillion in assets under management, has formed a strategic partnership with the Sui network to support ecosystem builders and deploy novel blockchain technologies. The partnership follows Grayscale's earlier establishment of the Grayscale SUI Trust and the launch of major stablecoins like USDC on the network.
Account Abstraction (AA) simplifies Ethereum wallets by enabling externally owned accounts (EOAs) to function like smart contracts and supporting advanced features like custom signature schemes (e.g., Passkeys). Various EIPs support this (EIP-4337, EIP-3074, and EIP-7702). EIP-4337 enables smart contract wallets, EIP-3074 couples EOAs with smart contracts using new opcodes, and EIP-7702 delegates EOA functionality to external contracts without requiring major EVM changes.
Ethereum's block production is highly centralized, with two entities (Beaverbuild and Titanbuild) responsible for over 95% of blocks, raising concerns about potential transaction censorship. EIP-7805 proposes FOCIL (Fork-choice Enforced Inclusion Lists) to enforce the inclusion of specific transactions in blocks, improving censorship resistance without altering the centralization of block-building itself.
The memecoin sector has been leading the industry in terms of mindshare and retail volume, surpassing DeFi with a market cap exceeding $120 billion. It has evolved since Dogecoin's early dominance through various phases, including the rise of Shiba Inu, Pepe, and Solana-based memes, with new trends emerging nearly weekly this year. Dog-themed tokens remain the largest category, but new coins in the Internet Culture and Sentient AI categories are emerging. Memecoins will likely follow the broader crypto market, with a few established coins maintaining longevity while new opportunities in untapped themes.
Current intent-based applications like CoW Swap and UniswapX operate in isolation, creating fragmented ecosystems that limit broader market efficiency and user experience. A new framework, the Modular Intent Stack, along with the ERC-7683 standard from Across and Uniswap, aims to create a unified infrastructure for cross-chain intents and solver integration. The implementation's three components, standardized intent representation, propagation via DA networks, and decentralized solver selection through Auction AVSs, could transform the fragmented landscape into an “invisible garden” with seamless interactions and composability.
The crypto industry is emerging from a two-year consolidation phase characterized by infrastructure optimization rather than groundbreaking innovation, with speculation and stablecoins emerging as the dominant use cases. Technical improvements have led to abundant blockspace, near-zero transaction fees, and mature tooling, while established protocols like Solana, Ethereum, and Uniswap continue to strengthen their market positions. The next phase of development hinges on regulatory clarity and an influx of new talent.
Launching a new blockchain is very costly, requiring tens of millions of dollars for top-tier infrastructure, ecosystem development, operational costs (e.g., L1 validators, L2 sequencers), and legal compliance. This makes it unlikely that the industry will be able to sustain thousands of chains, so it will probably stabilize to around a few hundred.