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AMAZON'S SUBSCRIPTION-BASED ALEXA+ LOOKS HIGHLY CAPABLE—AND QUESTIONABLE

Amazon will start rolling out its more capable and conversational version of Alexa to US Prime members for free in the next few weeks. Alexa+ will be available to non-Prime subscribers for $20 a month. Amazon has not specified a release date but noted that availability will start with the Echo Show 8, 10, 15, and 21 smart displays. Alexa+ will be compatible with tens of thousands of other devices and services at launch - Amazon trained it to use partner APIs and it has agentic abilities for apps that don't have a full set of external APIs.

INSTAGRAM MAY LAUNCH SEPARATE REELS APP TO TAKE ON TIKTOK

Instagram is reportedly considering launching a separate Reels app focused on short-form video. TikTok's future remains uncertain in the US. President Trump has granted an extension to comply with the law that requires a sale or ban of the platform and floated the possibility of a joint venture between the US and ByteDance, but there are few details on how that might work. The law was enacted due to arguments that TikTok could be used by China as a tool for spying and political manipulation.

REINFORCEMENT LEARNING TRIPLES SPOT'S RUNNING SPEED

The research version of Boston Dynamics' Spot quadruped robot comes with a low-level application programming interface that allows direct control of Spot's joints - it also unlocks some significant performance improvements, including a much faster running speed. The Robotics and AI Institute has been applying reality-grounded reinforcement learning techniques to enable much higher performance from Spot. This article looks at the improvements these techniques have made and also a brand-new hardware platform - an autonomous bicycle that can jump.

INTUITIVE MACHINES' ATHENA LANDER LAUNCHES ON JOURNEY TO THE MOON

Intuitive Machines' Athena lander, launched yesterday on a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket, is now on an arcing path to the moon. It will attempt to land in a region about 100 miles from the Moon's south pole on March 6. The main payload on Athena is a drill designed to dig and pull up lunar soil about four inches at a time, dropping it on a pile on the surface to be analyzed. Athena is also carrying three robotic rovers and a small flying 'hopper'. More details about Athena's payloads are available in the article.

control. See the full findings

SEMAPHORE

Semaphore is a CI/CD platform that can be self-hosted or run on a cloud provider. It futures blazing-fast CI/CD and supports YAML-based configuration, parallel execution, and more. Semaphore can scale from a solo developer to massive engineering teams and is built for the modern cloud. It works seamlessly with containers, Kubernetes, and multi-cloud environments.

CHICORY

Chicory allows developers to run WebAssembly (Wasm) programs with zero native dependencies or JNI. It can run Wasm anywhere the JVM can go. Chicory aims to be able to run even in very restrictive environments.

AUTOMATTIC'S “NUCLEAR WAR” OVER WORDPRESS ACCESS SPARKS POTENTIAL CLASS ACTION

Automattic and its founder Matt Mullenweg may face a potential class action lawsuit claiming that they deliberately abused their power and control over the WordPress ecosystem to purposefully and repeatedly disrupt contracts. The class would include all persons in the US who had ongoing active WPE WordPress Web Hosting plans on or before September 24, 2024, through to December 10, 2024. The lawsuit warns that the entire internet as a whole could be harmed due to Automattic withholding access to open source software anytime a company doesn't cave into payment demands.

NVIDIA'S AI BOOM BRINGS RICHES TO PARTNERS LIKE DELL, AT A COST

Dell's $5 billion deal to supply servers to xAI is an immense win for the computer seller, but the deal only has a narrow margin of profitability. People familiar with the deal say that the deal is expected to yield gross margins only in the mid-single-digits percentage. Nvidia has expanded its product range, reducing opportunities for companies like Dell to bundle higher-margin items. The company's massive leverage is likely to continue at least until rival chipmakers launch competing products.

YOUTUBE SURPASSES 1B MONTHLY PODCAST VIEWERS

YouTube will be implementing changes to mid-roll ads to place them at more appropriate breakpoints in videos to prevent disruptions.

NVIDIA SALES GROW 78% ON AI DEMAND, COMPANY GIVES STRONG GUIDANCE

Nvidia's fourth-quarter earnings beat Wall Street expectations - the company's report signals that it is confident that it will be able to continue its historic run of growth well into 2025.

RESIGNING AS ASAHI LINUX PROJECT LEAD

Hector Martin is leaving the Asahi Linux project effective immediately - this post details the many reasons for the departure.

I WENT TO SQL INJECTION COURT

The 104th Illinois General Assembly is considering a bill that will stop public bodies in Illinois from hiding information from Freedom of Information requests by keeping that information in databases.

ASK HN: FORMER DEVS WHO CAN'T GET A JOB, WHAT DID YOU END UP DOING FOR WORK? (HACKER NEWS THREAD)

Unemployed developers are finding jobs in trading, restaurant work, and manual labor or working on their own projects.

VSCLI

vscli is a CLI/TUI that makes it easy to launch dev containers for IDEs like VSCode and Cursor

AMAZON'S ALEXA+

Amazon has introduced Alexa+, an enhanced version of its voice assistant. Alexa+ is a generative AI-powered assistant that is smarter and more conversational.

ELEVENLAB'S SPEECH-TO-TEXT

ElevenLabs is launching its own transcription model, Scribe. It will support 99 languages with high accuracy, word-level timestamps, speaker diarization, and real-world audio adaptability.

GROK 3 APPEARS TO HAVE BRIEFLY CENSORED UNFLATTERING MENTIONS OF TRUMP AND MUSK

Elon Musk's Grok 3 AI model briefly censored mentions of Donald Trump and Musk in misinformation queries but reverted after user feedback. xAI's engineering lead confirmed an employee made the change with good intentions, but it was not aligned with company values. Musk aims to make Grok politically neutral after previous models showed left-leaning tendencies.

QWQ MAX PREVIEW

Qwen has previewed a reasoning model that achieves strong results in math and code. It intends to open-weight release this model along with its powerful Max model.

LOCAL MODELS AS MINIONS

Hazy Research has found that if you use local models via Ollama and use a long context cloud model as the orchestrator, you can achieve 97% task performance at 17% of the cost.

SYSTEM 2 THINKING IN LLMS

A survey on reasoning LLMs like OpenAI's o1/o3 and DeepSeek's R1 that analyzes their step-by-step logical reasoning capabilities and benchmarks their performance against human cognitive abilities.

OLMOCR FOR PDF TEXT EXTRACTION

Allen AI has trained a strong extraction model for PDFs by continued fine tuning of Qwen VL on 200k+ PDFs.

AI SAFETY EVALUATION

AISafetyLab is a comprehensive AI safety framework that covers attack, defense, and evaluation. It includes models, datasets, utilities, and a curated list of AI safety-related papers.

PUBLIC OPINION PREDICTION WITH SURVEY-BASED FINE-TUNING

SubPOP introduces a large dataset for fine-tuning LLMs to predict survey response distributions, reducing prediction gaps and improving generalization to unseen surveys.

MAGMA: A FOUNDATION MODEL FOR MULTIMODAL AI AGENTS (HUGGING FACE HUB)

Magma is a new foundation model for visual agent tasks and excels at video understanding and UI navigation. It is easy to tune.

CLAUDE AI POWERS ALEXA+

Anthropic's Claude AI is now integrated into Alexa+ via Amazon Bedrock, enhancing its capabilities while maintaining strong safety protections against jailbreaking and misuse.

MICROSOFT RELEASES NEW PHI MODELS OPTIMIZED FOR MULTIMODAL PROCESSING

Microsoft has released two new open-source language models, Phi-4-mini and Phi-4-multimodal, emphasizing hardware efficiency and multimodal processing. Phi-4-mini, which has 3.8 billion parameters, focuses on text tasks, while Phi-4-multimodal, with 5.6 billion parameters, processes text, images, audio, and video. Both models outperform similar-sized alternatives and will be available on Hugging Face under an MIT license.

CHARTA HEALTH RAISES $8.1 MILLION

Charta Health raised $8.1M led by Bain Capital Ventures to enhance AI-driven pre-bill chart reviews, reducing billing errors and recapturing lost revenue.

FLORA LAUNCHES CURSOR FOR CREATIVES

FLORA is the first AI-powered creative workflow tool built for creative professionals to 10x their creative output.

GOOGLE'S NEW AI VIDEO MODEL VEO 2 WILL COST 50 CENTS PER SECOND

Google's Veo 2 AI video model costs $0.50 per second, translating to $30 per minute.

COINBASE'S Q4 MIRRORS A CHANGING CRYPTO MARKET AS INSTITUTIONS DOMINATE

Coinbase's Q4 2024 report highlights a shift toward institutional dominance, with institutional trading volume reaching $400B while retail participation dropped to 21% ($94B), down from 36% in 2021. This trend, along with the SEC dropping its case against Coinbase, illustrates growing institutional adoption of crypto, with expanding interest beyond BTC and ETH into higher-risk digital assets.

BITCOIN SLIDES FURTHER BELOW $85,000; ANALYST POINTS TO BASIS TRADES UNWINDING

Bitcoin dropped below $85,000, hitting a low of $83,600—its weakest level since November 2024—amid a broader crypto market slump driven by institutions unwinding basis trades. The sell-off coincided with record $1 billion outflows from U.S. Bitcoin ETFs and declining altcoin prices, with analysts noting weak macro indicators and stagnant CME basis metrics as key concerns. Despite optimism around Trump-era crypto policies, market volatility and fading speculation suggest a challenging near-term outlook before any potential recovery.

AVALANCHE LAUNCHES THE AVAX CARD

The Avalanche Foundation, in partnership with Rain, has launched the Avalanche Card, enabling seamless crypto payments anywhere Visa is accepted, with a focus on underbanked regions. By bridging decentralized finance with real-world transactions, the card enables users in Latin America, Nigeria, and Southeast Asia, to name a few, to access stable, borderless financial solutions without reliance on traditional banking.

BANK OF AMERICA TO LAUNCH USD-PEGGED CRYPTO STABLECOIN

Bank of America CEO Brian Moynihan has announced plans to launch a USD-pegged crypto stablecoin, contingent on favorable legislation under the Trump administration's pro-crypto policies. Moynihan likened stablecoins to money market funds or bank accounts, emphasizing their utility as a natural evolution in digital payments. The bank's potential entry into the stablecoin market aligns with its annual $4 billion investment in new technologies, signaling a strategic push into the evolving crypto sector.

HYPERLEAKAGE: A CRITICAL VULNERABILITY IN HYPERLIQUID'S MOBILE LINKING FEATURE

Hyperliquid, a top decentralized exchange, faces a critical security flaw in its mobile linking feature, where QR codes transmit users' trading private keys via URL parameters to an AWS CDN—exposing them to potential insider access. Although the keys lack withdrawal permissions, attackers could exploit them to manipulate trades, risking user funds and platform stability. Hyperliquid's co-founder downplayed the issue despite a $1,000 bounty awarded for its disclosure. This vulnerability underscores the urgent need for stronger security protocols in DeFi to protect user assets and maintain trust in decentralized systems.

5 DEFI APPLICATIONS POSSIBLE ONLY ON EIGENLAYER

EigenLayer's AVSs enable novel DeFi applications by allowing offchain computation to blend with onchain security. Five specific innovations made possible include exchange volume-based fee tiers, dynamic asymmetric fees for AMMs, advanced options pricing for derivatives, compliant privacy mixers with policy enforcement, and AI-powered yield rebalancing protocols. These applications utilize AVSs like Lagrange, Brevis, Oracle, Reclaim Protocol, and Hyperbolic Labs to perform offchain computations cheaply, integrate trusted external data, and automate sophisticated financial strategies.

BYBIT RELEASES AUDIT REPORT

Bybit's audit report revealed that the recent hack targeting its cold wallet stemmed from compromised servers at infrastructure partner SAFE, not Bybit itself, with attackers injecting malicious JavaScript code into Gnosis SAFE's UI.

MEMECOINS ARE NEVER COMING BACK

Memecoins on Solana are effectively dead, with high-profile rugpulls like LIBRA and MELANIA ruining investor confidence. Unlike utility tokens or even NFTs, memecoins lack dedicated holders who believe in an underlying project, making them purely momentum-based investments that collapse rapidly with dwindling excitement. Nearly $4B has been extracted through trading fees, MEV, and insider profits — comparable with last cycle's NFT boom.

PHANTOM ACQUIRES SIMPLEHASH

Phantom has acquired SimpleHash, a leading token data platform, to enhance its wallet with real-time pricing, NFT metadata, and advanced spam detection across 80+ blockchains. This marks Phantom's third acquisition in eight months, aligning with its goal to build a user-friendly, data-driven crypto platform. Existing SimpleHash services will be phased out as its team integrates with Phantom to deliver faster, more reliable asset tracking and security features for millions of users.

SEN. LUMMIS SAYS WASHINGTON IS 'ON THE PRECIPICE' OF STABLECOIN AND CRYPTO REGULATION BILLS

Sen. Cynthia Lummis stated that Washington is close to finalizing bipartisan legislation for stablecoins and broader crypto market regulations, with hopes that President Trump will sign the bills by year-end.

SEC CLOSES INVESTIGATION INTO CRYPTO EXCHANGE GEMINI, CAMERON WINKLEVOSS SAYS

The outcome of this case follows a series of rollbacks of regulatory cases against the crypto industry following President Trump's election.

FBI ISSUES SECURITY ADVISORY

The FBI confirmed that North Korea's Lazarus Group was behind the $1.5B Bybit hack and urged crypto service providers to block transactions linked to the hackers.

ZACHXBT JOINS PARADIGM AS AN ADVISOR

ZachXBT has played a key role in holding bad actors accountable and has helped recover over $350 million for victims of hacks and scams.