Meta's metaverse crisis 🌎, music generation AI 🎵, how open source is eating AI 👨‍💻

Daily Update 2022-10-10

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Big Tech & Startups

Meta’s flagship metaverse app is too buggy and employees are barely using it (4 minute read)

Meta's Horizon Worlds, its flagship metaverse app, has too many quality issues and even its building team isn't using it very much. The team has been put on quality lockdown for the rest of the year to fix the problems before the app is opened up to more users. The platform was released in VR in December last year and a web version is supposed to be coming soon. Mark Zuckerberg will share major updates to Horizon and its avatar graphics at Meta's annual Connect conference on October 11.

StabilityAI announced AI Music Generator Harmonai based on Dance Diffusion Model (2 minute read)

Harmonai is an organization that publishes open-source generative audio tools to make music production more approachable. Its tools use a process called diffusion, which refines random white noise into sounds based on a pre-trained model with millions of parameters. Harmonai's publicly available Dance Diffusion model can generate up to three seconds of audio. Users can supply their own audio files to train the model or use one of the six pre-trained models available. Examples of audio generated with the model are available in the article.

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Science & Futuristic Technology

‘Chat’ with Musk, Trump or Xi: Ex-Googlers want to give the public AI (11 minute read)

Character.ai's bot allows anyone to chat with impersonations of several people and characters, including Donald Trump, Elon Musk, Albert Einstein, and Sherlock Holmes. The site allows users to create their own bots. It was founded by two ex-Googlers who were part of project LaMDA. A beta of Character.ai was released to the public in September.

World’s first floating pod homes launched in Panama starting at $295,000 (3 minute read)

Ocean Builders is building the world's first community of floating SeaPods in Panama. The units are designed to accommodate two people with a master bedroom, living room, kitchen, bathroom, outdoor patio, and 360-degree ocean views. The pods are entirely customizable with prices starting at $295,000. Overnight guests will be able to stay at the pods starting in December. The pods will be ready for full-time residents by summer next year. Renders of what the pods will look like are available in the article.

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Programming, Design & Data Science

Inline SQL (GitHub Repo)

Inline SQL is an embedded language for running inline SQL in Python programs. It runs operations directly inside the process. Inline SQL can be used for querying local datasets and CSV files and interpolating variables seamlessly.

Tonic (Website)

Tonic is a low profile component framework that is ideal for JAM stacks. It uses native web components and it doesn't require any build tools. Tonic is identical on client and server and composition oriented. A collection of examples is available.

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Miscellaneous

How Open Source is eating AI (16 minute read)

While researchers and well-funded teams are very good at producing new foundational models, it is the open source community that has come up with the best use cases and optimization for these models. Open sourcing AI models is accelerating development. Stable Diffusion, which required 48GB VRAM to run just over a month ago, has now been optimized to run on a mobile device. Open sourcing improves documentation, UI, and accessibility and creates new use cases. The future of open-sourced AI will depend on economic incentives, licensing, and infrastructure.

The non-linear workdays changing the shape of productivity (6 minute read)

Remote work has given rise to new types of working patterns. Some workers are breaking up their work days into smaller blocks, doing tasks whenever works best for them. They are crafting their work schedules around their personal lives. Non-linear workdays are set to take a more prominent role in some jobs and sectors. Experts believe there are many benefits to working asynchronously, as long as certain measures are in place.

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Quick Links

Tremor (GitHub Repo)

Tremor is a React library for building dashboards.

Even After $100 Billion, Self-Driving Cars Are Going Nowhere (23 minute read)

Most efforts to create self-driving cars have failed and it will likely be decades before autonomous vehicles will be available for retail.

What happened to the virtual reality gaming revolution? (26 minute read)

The industry is trying to figure out how VR gaming works and what interactions it supports as the hardware is still being developed.

Moore’s Law is Dead – Long-live the Chiplet! (22 minute read)

Chiplets will open up new markets and use cases.

Musk says Tesla's electric Semi truck has started production (2 minute read)

Tesla will start making deliveries of its long-delayed semi-truck as soon as December 1.

Even Signal is hopping on the Stories bandwagon (2 minute read)

Signal has started beta testing a Stories feature that lets users share videos, images, and text-based messages that vanish after 24 hours.

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Meta's metaverse crisis 🌎, music generation AI 🎵, how open source is eating AI 👨‍💻

Daily Update 2022-10-10

Big Tech & Startups

Science & Futuristic Technology

Programming, Design & Data Science

Miscellaneous

Quick Links

Older messages

Google Pixel event 📱, Meta mass layoffs 📉, TikTok financials leaked 📈

Elon's plans for Twitter 🐦, Google's video AI 🎥, exercising startup options after leaving 💰

Elon will buy Twitter 🐦, Meta rescinds offers 👨‍💻, new social app taking over Stanford 🤓

Apple's ad empire 📱, automating your job 👨‍💻, world's largest camera 📷

Tesla's robot 🤖, Chrome's anti-ad-blocking 🛡️, tech layoff survivors 👨‍💻

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