OpenAI CEO testifies 🏛️, Tesla Robot progress 🤖, language for guiding LLMs 👨‍💻

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Big Tech & Startups

Here's what happened during OpenAI CEO Sam Altman's first hearing on artificial intelligence (3 minute read)

Lawmakers at the Senate Judiciary subcommittee on privacy and technology stressed the importance of avoiding the errors Congress made at the dawn of social media during a hearing on Tuesday. OpenAI's Sam Altman testified at the hearing. Senators from both sides of the aisle stressed the need to establish guardrails for the technology before any harm is done. Although there weren't any specific proposals, the lawmakers discussed new regulating agencies and licensing AI. Altman agreed that a new system to deal with AI was needed. Some lawmakers noted that it was refreshing for industry executives to push for regulation as strongly as Altman did.

iPhones will be able to speak in your voice with 15 minutes of training (2 minute read)

Apple has revealed a bundle of new accessibility features to be released later this year, possibly with iOS 17. Personal Voice will allow people to create synthesized voices with just 15 minutes of audio. The feature uses on-device machine learning to keep data private and secure. Assistive Access will offer streamlined versions of core apps to lighten cognitive load. A new detection mode in Magnifier is designed to help users interact with physical objects using numerous text labels.

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Science & Futuristic Technology

Tesla Bot can walk very slowly and pick up stuff now (2 minute read)

Tesla revealed new footage of their Tesla Bots during its shareholder meeting event. The video shows the bots in a production-ready chassis. The new model is able to move independently and has updated features, including motor torque control, environment discovery, memorization, and object manipulation. The bot was first revealed last year in a deconstructed form and was unable to walk forward or perform any manual labor. The video is available in the article.

Tweaking Vegetables’ Genes Could Make Them Tastier—And You’ll Get to Try Them Soon (5 minute read)

Plant breeders are using new gene-editing technology to make vegetables taste better. Most breeding decisions favor plant traits that benefit growers rather than consumers. There is a growing interest in prioritizing flavor when breeding new vegetables as technologies like CRISPR and DNA sequencing become cheaper and more accessible. Some companies are using these tools to develop tastier veggies, while others are using more traditional techniques. This article discusses several efforts to change how our vegetables taste.

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Programming, Design & Data Science

Guidance (GitHub Repo)

Guidance enables developers to control modern language models more effectively and efficiently than traditional prompting or chaining. It allows users to merge generation, prompting, and logical control into a single continuous flow, matching how the language model actually processes the text. Guidance features a simple, intuitive syntax, playground-like streaming, smart seed-based generation caching, support for role-based chat models, and easy integration with HuggingFace models.

Tailwind Variants (Website)

Tailwind Variants combines the power of Tailwind with a first-class variant API. It features slots, responsive variants, component composition, and more. Tailwind Variants offers TypeScript auto-completion and type-safety. It is framework agnostic and it efficiently merges conflicting styles.

Amazon EC2 Cheatsheet by Datadog (Sponsor)

All the commands and metrics you need to monitor your EC2 instances. Easily find commands used to run status checks and collect vital EC2 health metrics, as well as parameters and dimensions used to query EC2 statistics. There’s also a quick-start guide on using Datadog to collect metrics and status information to monitor EC2 instances. Get the cheatsheet now (free)

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Miscellaneous

The Rise of FTX, and Sam Bankman-Fried, Was a Great Story. Its Implosion Is Even Better (6 minute read)

FTX's founder, Sam Bankman-Fried, is the focus of several charges leveled by federal prosecutors. These include money laundering, bribery, and orchestrating a fraudulent scheme that resulted in the multibillion-dollar misappropriation of customer money. Bankman-Fried has pleaded not guilty. Michael Lewis was originally planning to just check out Bankman-Fried as a favor to his friend in the fall of 2021, but he ended up receiving a front-row seat to the scandal. His book about Bankman-Fried is set to be released on October 3.

The race to bring generative AI to mobile devices (7 minute read)

Generative AI may be soon integrated into mobile. The push towards advanced AI in software and services has resulted in increased computing costs for tech companies. Operating generative AI on mobile devices could resolve one of the main economical issues with the technology. Most of the work on tailoring models to handsets is still at an experimental stage, so it is too early to see whether these efforts will lead to truly useful mobile applications.

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Quick Links

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Twitter makes its first acquisition with a recruiting startup (1 minute read)

Twitter bought a job-matching tech startup called Laskie.

Microsoft is scanning the inside of password-protected zip files for malware (3 minute read)

Microsoft is attempting to bypass password protection in zip files on its cloud services to scan them for malicious code.

DevPod (GitHub Repo)

DevPod is a client-only tool to create reproducible developer environments on any backend.

Tesla teases its next car with new image, says it’s already being built (2 minute read)

Elon Musk confirmed that Tesla is working on two new vehicles at the company’s annual shareholder meeting.

Self-Replace (GitHub Repo)

Self-replace is a utility that allows binaries to upgrade or uninstall themselves.

Japan’s sleepy tech scene is ready for a comeback (7 minute read)

Japan is the third-richest nation in the world, but its tech startup scene has been held back for years, turning a once-futuristic nation into a digital backwater.

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smart seedbased generation caching OpenAI CEO Sam Altman Senate Judiciary subcommittee Device Machine Learning shareholder meeting event Most breeding decisions single continuous flow simple intuitive syntax firstclass variant API rolebased chat models motor torque control new regulating agencies new detection mode modern language models numerous text labels New Accessibility Features new geneediting technology Data Science Guidance

OpenAI CEO testifies 🏛️, Tesla Robot progress 🤖, language for guiding LLMs 👨‍💻

TLDR 2023-05-17

Big Tech & Startups

Science & Futuristic Technology

Programming, Design & Data Science

Miscellaneous

Quick Links

Key phrases

Older messages

OpenAI's open source model 🤖, build an AI junior dev 👨‍💻, hilariously bad UI📱

M3 MacBooks 💻, the map of GitHub 👨‍💻, finding meaningful work 💼

Twitter's new CEO 🐦, Anthropic triples OpenAI's context window 🤖, why AI will create more devs 👨‍💻

Amazon's home robot 🤖, wearable AI demo 🧠, Python's essential libraries 👨‍💻

Google's coding AI 👨‍💻, Microsoft's fusion bet ⚛️, ChatGPT killing StackOverflow 🤖

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