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AMAZON’S TWITCH TO CUT 500 EMPLOYEES, ABOUT 35% OF STAFF

Twitch is poised to cut 35% of its staff, or about 500 workers, in an announcement which could arrive as early as today.

AIM, FIRE, SCAN: THE 80/20 OF EXECUTING ON BIG PROJECTS

There are three key components to executing a big project: AIM (Plan), FIRE (Do), and SCAN (Learn).

SLACK AI

A project demo for a custom Slack AI chatbot to chat with about the unstructured data lying in your Slack channels.

CES 2024 REPORT

A summary of CES so far, which has shown off a Steam Deck alternative, an Apple Vision Pro alternative, new monitors, and better GPUs by Nvidia.

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APPLE VISION PRO AVAILABLE IN THE U.S. ON FEBRUARY 2

Apple's Vision Pro headset will be available beginning on Friday, February 2 at all US Apple store locations and the US Apple Store online. Pre-orders for the device will begin on Friday, January 19. More than 1 million apps across iOS and iPadOS will work automatically on the Vision Pro since visionOS leverages existing developer frameworks. The Vision Pro will be available starting at $3,499 with 256GB of storage.

WAYMO’S DRIVERLESS CARS ARE FINALLY READY FOR THE HIGHWAY

Waymo's fully driverless vehicles will soon start carrying passengers to and from their destinations on Phoenix's freeways. The company will start by offering driverless rides to just employees and their friends before opening up the service to other paying passengers. Waymo will use the data and feedback collected from these passengers to improve the service as it increases the number of miles it drives on highways. Using highways will allow Waymo to provide faster routes, especially for customers traveling to Phoenix's airports.

FROM LG TO SAMSUNG, TRANSPARENT LED DISPLAYS THAT PROJECT FILMS ON GLASS SHAKE UP CES 2024

LG and Samsung have unveiled transparent LED displays that project movies and images on glass-like holograms. LG's Signature OLED TV has a single see-through glass display that uses wireless AV transmission and reception technology to eliminate all kinds of wires other than the power source around the transparent screen. Samsung's transparent MICRO LED display can animate motionless surroundings and objects. Pictures and videos of both displays are available in the article.

SCIENTISTS RESTORE VISION IN MICE, ACHIEVE 170-FOLD GENE EDITING BOOST

Scientists at MIT and Harvard have designed tiny virus-like particles that can carry prime editors into mouse cells with a high success rate to correct a genetic disorder. The technique improves the editing process by 170 times in human cells. It was able to correct genetic mistakes and restore vision when tested on mice with genetic eye problems without creating any unintended changes.

ATTACKS ON MACHINE LEARNING MODELS

This blog attempts to shine a light on the topic of attacks on machine learning models. It aims to inform readers about neural network attacks, a topic worthy of attention for those deploying machine learning models in production. Machine learning models are just as susceptible to attacks as other systems, but they are extra hard to protect as they have both code and data vulnerabilities. Current defenses are not enough, and real fixes may require massive changes to model development. As long as model development involves pattern matching, attacks can never be truly prevented.

WHAT PWA CAN DO TODAY

This site presents a showcase of what's possible with Progressive Web Apps (PWAs) today. PWAs are websites that can be installed on devices to provide an app-like experience. The site itself is a PWA, so it can be installed onto the home screen of any mobile device or on any desktop. Example features include media capture, face detection, authentication, notifications, speech recognition, and multitouch detection.

CUTTING-EDGE TECH IS AT CES 2024. THESE ARE OUR FAVES TODAY

This year's CES underscores how people are increasingly craving more niche devices and longing for the past. It also highlights the ways that AI is becoming more integrated into people's lives. This page presents the best tech highlights as they are announced this week in Las Vegas. The devices so far include a phone that folds backwards, a gaming laptop that weighs only 3.6 pounds, a thermometer that checks blood oxygen and heart rate readings, and a 115-inch 4K LCD TV that's up to five times brighter than most TVs.

STATE OF AI & PREDICTIONS FOR 2024

This article shares thoughts on the state of AI along with some predictions on where the technology is going. It looks at where products built with AI models are today, focusing on products, markets, and people. The article doesn't cover the technical details of architectures and the infrastructure of AI. This year, open source models will catch up with proprietary models and help push inference to edge devices everywhere.

THEY’RE NOT CHEAP, BUT NVIDIA’S NEW SUPER GPUS ARE A STEP IN THE RIGHT DIRECTION

Nvidia's new Super GPUs use the same architecture and support all the same features as their non-Super versions but with bumped specs and tweaked prices that make them more appealing.

MISSING THE POINT OF WEBASSEMBLY

Webassembly is a fundamental abstraction boundary that divides computing systems into pieces.

AMERICA’S FIRST LUNAR LANDER IN A HALF-CENTURY WON’T REACH THE MOON

The Peregrine lander appears to have a propellant leak that will prevent it from reaching the Moon.

TWILIO CEO LAWSON STEPS DOWN AFTER BRUISING ACTIVIST BATTLES

Jeff Lawson will be replaced by Khozema Shipchandler, a longtime Twilio executive, a move that is unlikely to placate activists who are pushing for the divestiture of the business and possibly the sale of the whole company.

AN OVERVIEW OF DISTRIBUTED POSTGRESQL ARCHITECTURES

There are many types of distributed PostgreSQL architectures, each with a different set of tradeoffs - even with state-of-the-art tools, deploying a distributed database system is never a solved problem.

AFTER TAKING CREDIBILITY HIT, CARTA ANNOUNCES IT IS EXITING THE SECONDARIES BUSINESS: “WE HAVE DECIDED TO PRIORITIZE TRUST”

Carta claims that the revenue derived from secondary trading on the platform is minuscule compared with its other business offerings.

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OPENAI AND JOURNALISM

OpenAI addressed The New York Times lawsuit by emphasizing collaboration with news organizations, claiming that AI training with public content is fair use, committing to eliminating rare content regurgitation in their models, and expressing surprise over the lawsuit, given their ongoing efforts to address concerns.

GETTY AND NVIDIA BRING GENERATIVE AI TO STOCK PHOTOS

Getty Images and Nvidia have enhanced their AI collaboration with the launch of Generative AI by iStock, a platform for creating stock photos tailored for small and medium businesses that uses Nvidia's Picasso model and trained on Getty and iStock libraries.

MICROSOFT IS ADDING A COPILOT KEY TO KEYBOARDS

A new Copilot key, the first big change to the Windows PC keyboard layout in nearly three decades, will ship on a variety of new PCs and laptops from Microsoft’s partners, providing quick access to Microsoft’s AI-powered Windows Copilot experience straight from a keyboard button press.

DEEPSEEK PAPER

One of the best coding models of last year was the DeepSeek LLM. It got close to GPT-3.5 on many benchmarks (even if it is likely 3x the size). Information about model training, token counts, model architecture, and more has been released in a technical report.

DENOISING VISION TRANSFORMERS

Vision Transformers (ViT) have taken over the vision community. They still sometimes display grid-like artifacts in their embeddings. This has made the community hesitant to adopt them for downstream tasks. This work proposes an update to the positional embeddings that eliminates this issue and gives a 25%+ boost for downstream vision tasks.

4D FACE VIDEO EDITING

Researchers have developed a face video editing architecture that combines GAN-NeRF technology for 3D consistency and a novel stabilizer for smooth temporal coherence. This method excels in editing videos by maintaining consistent views and seamless transitions between frames.

Schedule a demo to learn more

Skeptical? This case study shows how Salesloft saves $750k/year

in QA engineering + executes >300 tests in parallel on every PR in minutes.

LLM GATEWAY

Portkey AI recently open sourced its gateway, which allows for routing between many different language models.

ALOHA CODE

The ALOHA robotics system took the internet by storm with its incredible cooking and household task demonstration. It uses a number of interesting training techniques (mostly imitation learning). This repository contains some baseline training algorithms for the ALOHA system in simulation.

CREWAI AUTONOMOUS AGENT ORCHESTRATION

CrewAI is a platform for orchestrating role-playing, autonomous AI agents aimed at enhancing collaborative intelligence and enabling these agents to work together effectively in complex tasks. It provides a structure for sophisticated multi-agent interactions and is designed for various applications, including smart assistant platforms and automated customer service.

INTEGRATING CLIP AND SAM FOR ENHANCED IMAGE SEGMENTATION

This project introduces the Open-Vocabulary SAM, a framework that combines the strengths of CLIP and SAM models for improved image segmentation and recognition.

THE NEW YORK TIMES’S AI OPPORTUNITY

The New York Times' lawsuit against OpenAI and Microsoft claims that their AI technologies, including ChatGPT, were trained using millions of the newspaper's copyrighted articles, leading to AI-generated outputs that compete directly with the Times' services. The lawsuit seeks billions in damages and the destruction of AI models and data that used the Times' content, arguing that this constitutes copyright infringement and undermines the newspaper's investment in journalism, raising significant questions about the legalities of AI training practices and the impact of AI on traditional content creators.

DIFFUSING INTO THE FUTURE: REINFORCEMENT LEARNING WITH DIFFUSION MODELS

How diffusion models advance RL. This repository categorizes their applications and points towards future interdisciplinary research opportunities.

Factiva

CBI ANALYST (PRODUCT)

CBI Analyst is an always-on AI-driven research analyst.

MIXTRAL IN TINYGRAD

A very simple implementation of inference of the new Mistral MoE model using the Tinygrad library.

RENDERING OF SHARP IMAGES FROM BLURRY INPUTS

Sharp-NeRF introduces a grid-based approach to Neural Radiance Fields, efficiently transforming blurry images into sharp, detailed views.

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BITCOIN BLASTS PAST $47K FROM ETF EXCITEMENT

Anticipation over a possible spot Bitcoin ETF approval this week has led Bitcoin to go over $47,000 for the first time since April 2022. Investors are awaiting a regulatory decision for the first spot-based bitcoin ETF in the US. Most market observers expect an approval, which would dramatically expand the investor base for the asset and attract large inflows. Multiple issuers have revealed the fees they plan to charge investors.

SPOT BITCOIN ETF APPLICANTS RACE TO THE BOTTOM FOR FEES

Spot bitcoin ETF applicants, including BlackRock, Fidelity, and VanEck, are competing on fees to gain market share if approved. Bitwise leads with zero fees initially, then 0.24%, followed by Ark/21Shares with similar terms and a 0.25% fee. BlackRock offers fees as low as 0.2%, increasing later, while other firms like VanEck, Fidelity, and Invesco/Galaxy have varying fee structures.

INTRODUCING SAMO AND SAGA TOOLS

Solana project Samoyedcoin is launching two new products. The first is an airdrop of SAMO tokens for the first 3000 Saga phone holders who submit a claim. The second is a tool that makes it easy for any project to launch an airdrop for Saga holders.

MANTA ANNOUNCES AIRDROP FOR CELESTIA USERS (1 MINUTE VIDEO)

Following up on its initial airdrop announcement, Manta Network has confirmed that an additional airdrop will include the Celestia community, although the eligibility criteria have not been released yet. This is the third major airdrop that’s been confirmed for Celestia stakers in the past week, following Dymension and Saga.

MASTER THREAD FOR AIRDROP FARMING AND POINTS PROGRAM

A collection of 45 confirmed and potential airdrops for projects in verticals ranging from Restaking to Starknet. The list includes cross-chain airdrops, Solana airdrops, Cosmos airdrops, and more.

SEVEN CONCLUSIONS FROM DELPHI’S YEAR AHEAD FOR INFRASTRUCTURE REPORT

Crypto research firm Delphi Digital has released its Year Ahead for Infrastructure Report. The report includes updates on L2s, alternative data availability layers like Celestia, and Solana infrastructure projects. L2s are still mostly on Stage 0. Solana is reaching all-time highs on DEX volumes, NFT volumes, and DAUs relative to ETH. Solana Payments is predicted to break out in 2024.

FISCAL AND MONETARY DIVERGENCE

This post discusses the divergence between U.S. fiscal and monetary policies and their impact on different parts of the economy. In recent years, the U.S. experienced a shift from monetary to fiscal dominance, impacting inflation, bond markets, and liquidity. The Fed's aggressive rate hikes to combat inflation contrasted with the Treasury's liquidity-boosting measures, leading to a complex macroeconomic environment. These actions affected financial markets and the broader economy, highlighting the significant impact of centralized fiscal and monetary policies. This divergence is expected to continue, with fiscal policy likely remaining dominant in the 2020s and 2030s, influencing U.S. GDP growth and the performance of various asset classes, including crypto.