TLDR 2024-03-25

Stability AI CEO resigns 🧠, OpenAI pitches Hollywood 🎥, Boom Supersonic flies ✈️

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Big Tech & Startups

Stability AI CEO resigns to ‘pursue decentralized AI’ (2 minute read)

Emad Mostaque is stepping down as CEO of Stability AI. The company will be led by two interim co-CEOs, COO Shan Shan Wong and CTO Christian Laforte. Mostaque stepped down partly due to the push toward the development of commercialized AI products. He says he is leaving the company to pursue decentralized AI.

OpenAI Heading To Hollywood To Pitch Revolutionary “Sora” (2 minute read)

OpenAI plans to meet with Hollywood studios, talent agencies, and media executives to show the potential of its Sora software this week. Sora will likely be released to the public later this year. The model could potentially upend the way movies are made. OpenAI will likely follow its strategy of working in collaboration with the industry through a process of iterative deployment to ensure safe implementation.
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Science & Futuristic Technology

Elon Musk Claims Neuralink Already Allowing Blind Monkeys to See Again (3 minute read)

According to Elon Musk, Neuralink's 'Blindsight' product is already working on monkeys to restore vision. The resolution is pretty low, but researchers are looking for ways to increase the clarity of images. It is unclear whether the monkeys were born blind and how much of their optic nerves were still intact. The device could be made available to far more people if Neuralink was able to bypass both the eye and the optic nerve.

It’s a few years late, but a prototype supersonic airplane has taken flight (2 minute read)

Boom Supersonic flew its prototype supersonic jet for the first time on Friday. XB-1 reached an altitude of 7,120 feet and a maximum speed of 273 mph, achieving all of its objectives. The prototype is intended to test materials and aerodynamics for a larger commercial aircraft. A picture of the XB-1 aircraft taking off on its inaugural flight is available in the article.
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Programming, Design & Data Science

Garnet (GitHub Repo)

Garnet is a remote cache store that offers strong performance, scalability, storage, recovery, cluster sharding, key migration, and replication features. It works with existing Redis clients and can handle multi-key transactions. Garnet has a fast pluggable network design for high end-to-end performance. It can reduce costs for large services.

Lapdev (GitHub Repo)

Lapdev is a self-hosted application that creates remote development environments anywhere. It can scale from a single machine to a global fleet of servers. Lapdev uses Devcontainer open specification for defining development environments as code. It can be used to help onboard developers to new projects without wasting hours on preparing environments on their machines.
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Miscellaneous

CUDA is Still a Giant Moat for NVIDIA (8 minute read)

Nvidia controls both its GPUs and CUDA, giving it a killer advantage. CUDA makes it easy to reap the benefits of the hardware that Nvidia makes. One of the reasons for Nvidia's dominance is its years and billions of dollars in investment into the CUDA ecosystem. It may be possible in the future for competing projects to take over, but it will take quite a while for the impacts of Nvidia's heavy long-term strategy to go away.

216. United States v. Apple (54 minute read)

The US Department of Justice, 16 states, and the District of Columbia are suing Apple for abusing its market position illegally under the Sherman Antitrust Act. The process will likely take up to a decade or more to complete, even though a settlement or withdrawal is possible at any time. This article takes an in-depth look at the case and makes predictions on its outcomes. A link to the filing is available in the article.
Quick Links

iOS 18 Lets Users Customize Layout of Home Screen App Icons (1 minute read)

App icons in iOS 18 will likely remain locked to an invisible grid system on the Home Screen, but users will be able to create blank spaces, rows, and columns between them.

BYD’s new EV, starting at less than $10,000, is stoking fear across the industry (4 minute read)

BYD's new EV, the Seagull EV Honor Edition, starts from as low as $9,700 - while BYD has no plans to enter the US passenger EV market, the release is pushing pressure on US automakers to slash prices.

OpenDevin (GitHub Repo)

OpenDevin is an open-source project that aims to replicate Devin, an autonomous AI software engineer capable of executing complex engineering tasks and collaborating on software development projects.

Unexplanations: sql is syntactic sugar for relational algebra (13 minute read)

Syntactic sugar refers to common operations that could also be expressed in alternative, more verbose forms.

magick.css (7 minute read)

magick.css is a mostly classless CSS framework, designed to be easy to use and understand, that retains its look and functionality across all devices and screen sizes and works entirely without JavaScript.

Bloomberg spent over $10M training a GPT-3.5 class AI on its own financial data last year (1 minute read)

GPT-4 8k beat Bloomberg's model on almost all finance tasks without specialized finance training.
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