Mozilla's open AI project 🤖, GitHub Copilot upgrades 👨‍💻, TikTok fights ban 📱

Sign Up|Jobs|Advertise|View Online TLDR Daily Update 2023-03-23 📱 Big Tech & Startups Shou Zi Chew’s ‘death wish’ mission: Defend TikTok on Capitol Hill (16 minute read) TikTok CEO Shou Zi Chew is set to appear in front of the US Congress in his first congressional hearing to address concerns over the security of TikTok. Some US lawmakers believe TikTok is a Chinese spying and propaganda machine. Chew has been working to allay suspicions and convince lawmakers that ByteDance, the parent company of TikTok, is unconnected to the Chinese government. The outcome of the case will set a precedent for the ability of US lawmakers to ban social media companies. Mozilla launches a new startup focused on ‘trustworthy’ AI (5 minute read) Mozilla has launched a new AI-focused startup called Mozilla.ai. Mozilla.ai's primary goal is to create open source AI that can be trusted. It is for-profit and was created to address the potential risks of AI's capabilities such as generating malware, identifying open-source code exploits, and creating phishing websites. Mozilla obtained a seed investment of $30 million from the Mozilla Foundation for this new venture. While it is bound to ethical principles, Mozilla.ai is open to creating new products and companies as well as open-source projects. 🚀 Science & Futuristic Technology A hormone shot helped drunk mice sober up quickly (3 minute read) A new study has shown that injecting drunk mice with FGF21, a naturally occurring hormone, can help them sober up twice as fast as those that didn't receive the hormone. FGF21 is produced by the liver. It activates nerve cells in the brain, enabling mice to wake up from drunkenness more quickly. Doctors currently have to wait for patients with alcohol poisoning to wake up before addressing their symptoms. A drug that could help people wake up from alcohol poisoning, similar to how Narcan helps with opioid overdoses, would be a significant improvement for treating people rushed to the emergency room. Animals without a brain still form associative memories (4 minute read) Animals in the phylum Cnidaria lack a recognizable brain, although their nerve net performs some similar functions. A study conducted by European researchers found that cnidarians can learn to respond to stimuli, despite their lack of specialized brain structures. While the cnidarians responded to stimuli, it was not in the same way where animals learn to respond to unrelated cues. The cnidarians interpreted multiple stimuli as a single trigger. The study suggests that there is some form of central coordination within cnidarians' nerve nets. 💻 Programming, Design & Data Science GitHub Copilot X is a new ChatGPT-like assistant to help developers write and fix code (5 minute read) GitHub has released an updated version of its AI-assisted coding system GitHub Copilot X. The new update includes OpenAI’s GPT-4 model and a comprehensive chat feature. The chatbot is designed to recognize and explain code, suggest modifications, and fix bugs. Copilot X can accept voice commands and answer questions from voice-based queries. It is currently only available on Microsoft's Visual Studio and Visual Studio Code apps, but GitHub plans to expand it to other IDEs in the future. YTsaurus (GitHub Repo) YTsaurus is a distributed storage and processing platform for big data designed to provide a fault-tolerant environment. It features a multitenant ecosystem, reliability, stability, scalability, and rich functionality. YTsaurus supports up to 1 million CPU cores and thousands of GPUs with exabytes of data on different media. It also has a variety of SDKs and APIs that make it easy to use. Issue Trackers Shouldn't Be Technical Debt. Try Shortcut (Sponsor) Work is frustrating enough. Why make it more frustrating with a slow, bloated issue tracker? Shortcut is the only solution with integrated issue tracking and docs allowing you to plan, develop, build, and ship all in one place. Start building products with a tool that PMs and Engineers actually enjoy. 🎁 Miscellaneous Google Engineering Leader Urs Hölzle Shares Plan on Efficiency (7 minute read) Google engineering head Urs Hölzle plans to increase efficiency by rebalancing the ratio of site reliability engineers to developers through automation. Site reliability engineers manage operations, while software engineers work on infrastructure and products. There is currently one site reliability engineer for every 10 software engineers. The new target will have one site reliability engineer for every 20 software engineers. This has sparked speculation of potential layoffs. Meet Shou Zi Chew, TikTok's 39-year-old CEO who got his start at Facebook and led a Chinese smartphone giant through one of the biggest tech IPOs in history (8 minute read) This article goes in-depth about Shou Zi Chew's life and background. Shou Zi Chew is the CFO of Bytedance and CEO of TikTok. At 39 years old, he attended Harvard Business School and previously interned for Facebook during its start-up phase. Prior to joining Bytedance, Chew was the CFO of Xiaomi and spent two years as an investment banker at Goldman Sachs. ⚡ Quick Links Pebble might be coming back — as a small Android phone (10 minute read) The Small Android Phone Team is making a small Android phone through a community-based project. SEC threatens to sue Coinbase over staking, more (2 minute read) Coinbase received a Wells notice, a formal notice of possible enforcement action, from the SEC on Wednesday. You can now try Microsoft Loop, a Notion competitor with futuristic Office documents (4 minute read) Microsoft Loop is a collaborative hub that can turn any page into a real-time block of content that can be pasted into Microsoft Teams, Outlook, Word on the web, and Whiteboard. I Saw the Face of God in a Semiconductor Factory (50 minute read) A look inside Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company's factories. ‘Graceful way out’: Investors propose some struggling founders close shop and return funding (7 minute read) Some startups have raised too much and a well-planned exit would be better for everyone involved. Model Arbitrage (1 minute read) Model arbitrage refers to the practice of leveraging pre-existing large language models to generate new synthetic datasets for training other models. 👨‍💻 Jobs Sticker Mule - Director of Artificial Intelligence (Fully Remote, $200,000+) Sticker Mule is hiring a Director of Artificial Intelligence to build and direct an 8-15 person AI lab for the Internet's most "kick ass" brand. The Linux Foundation - Senior Manager, Marketing Operations (Fully Remote, $100,000 - $140,000) The Linux Foundation is hiring a Senior Manager to work with team members across numerous open source project communities and meet strategic goals for an organization that helps open technology projects build world class open source software, communities, and companies. Spocket - Frontend engineer (Fully Remote, $36,000 - $47,000) Spocket is hiring a frontend engineer to help solve exciting challenges and develop a growing platform for a company that is revolutionizing the world of eCommerce. You may also like to see more jobs or hire through our free job board. If your company is interested in reaching an audience of tech executives, decision-makers and engineers, you may want to advertise with us. If you have any comments or feedback, just respond to this email! Thanks for reading, Dan Ni If you don't want to receive future editions of TLDR, please click here to unsubscribe.