Meta's next-gen AI 🤖, Rocket Labs' reusable rocket 🚀, building AI apps in practice 👨‍💻

Sign Up|Jobs|Advertise|View Online TLDR Together With  TLDR 2023-07-19 🤔 What if you could automate your AWS security and compliance? (Sponsor) It’s 2023. Your engineering team needs to do more with less. But you also need to have a secure and compliant platform to win customer trust (and enterprise deals). What’s the solution? Drata is the smartest way to achieve continuous SOC 2, ISO 27001, and HIPAA compliance ( + other frameworks). It connects to all your dozens of SaaS apps, automatically collects evidence 24/7, and gives you insights and reports to track progress. Check out the new offering by Drata and AWS! Join 2,000 joint customers that save hundreds of hours a year. Get 30% off your first Drata contract 📱 Big Tech & Startups Meta launches Llama 2, an open source AI model that allows commercial applications (4 minute read) Meta's Llama 2 is a new open-source family of AI language models with a license that allows it to be integrated into commercial products. The models range in size from 7 to 70 billion parameters and they reportedly outperform other open-source chat models on most benchmarks. Llama 2 is available on Microsoft Azure and will be available on AWS, Hugging Face, and other providers. A link to a research paper released by Meta with details on Llama 2's performance, benchmarks, and construction is available in the article. OpenAI holding back GPT-4 image features on fears of privacy issues (2 minute read) OpenAI has curtailed public access to GPT-4's image-recognition abilities as it can potentially recognize specific individuals. The feature could potentially infringe upon privacy laws in regions where the use of biometric information requires explicit consent from users. It could also misrepresent aspects of people's faces, leading to inappropriate or harmful results. There have been instances of the model hallucinating responses, giving users inaccurate information. Microsoft has been testing a limited rollout of the visual analysis tool in its Bing chatbot. 🚀 Science & Futuristic Technology Medicine is plagued by untrustworthy clinical trials. How many studies are faked or flawed? (18 minute read) An anesthetist  renowned for their ability to spot dodgy data in medical trials estimates that 44% of trials contain at least some flawed data and that 26% of papers have flaws  so large that the studies can't be trusted. These studies resemble real research, but close scrutiny will show that the authors were incompetent or that the data was faked. Without access to raw trial data, even experienced investigators may miss hidden flaws. Journals need to assume that all submitted papers are potentially flawed and review the data before publishing them. Rocket Lab successfully retrieves its reusable rocket after splashdown (2 minute read) Rocket Lab successfully retrieved the first stage of its Electron rocket during a mission on Monday. The first stage separated two and a half minutes after Electron lifted off and splashed down into the Pacific Ocean. Rocket Lab aims to reuse its boosters for future missions. The company had planned and attempted to catch its boosters midair using helicopters, but it has changed its procedure to simply collecting the stage from the ocean after tests showed that the boosters fared better than expected after being exposed to water. 💻 Programming, Design & Data Science Introducing the Developer Thriving framework (Sponsor) Engineering leaders are facing pressure from board leadership to quantify engineering performance. This has led companies like Twitter and Salesforce to rely on severely flawed metrics such as lines of code written. New research by the Developer Success Lab at Pluralsight Flow sheds light on how developers want their productivity to be measured and offers recommendations for better measurement. Read the full research report. AutoChain (GitHub Repo) AutoChain aims to enable rapid iteration on generative agents by simplifying agent customization and evaluation. Building and evaluating custom generative AI agents can be difficult and time-consuming with the current generation of tools and frameworks. AutoChain attempts to solve these issues by providing a lightweight and extensible framework, custom tools, and automatic evaluation of agents. It shares similar concepts with LangChain, making it easy for developers familiar with LangChain to navigate. What we don't talk about when we talk about building AI apps (5 minute read) This article discusses common issues that people don't really talk about when developing deep learning apps. Docker images for AI apps can be enormous and take a long time to configure to work correctly in production environments. They can take forever to build and start and it requires a lot of study to learn how to build them. The fast pace of AI development has led to a special kind of dependency hell where it is difficult to create reproducible environments. Different cloud providers use different architectures, making development requirements much more difficult. 🎁 Miscellaneous Threads Usage Drops By Half From Initial Surge (4 minute read) Daily active users for Meta's Threads dropped from 49 million to 23.6 million between July 7 and July 14. Threads' release caused Twitter's traffic to go down 5% in the first two days, and while it has since bounced back, Twitter's traffic is still down 11% year-over-year. Twitter's user retention has been on the decline. Threads is still missing many basic features and a compelling reason for Twitter users to switch over. Meta and Qualcomm team up to run big AI models on phones (2 minute read) Meta's Llama 2 will be able to run on Qualcomm chips on phones and PCs starting in 2024. Large language models have primarily run on large server farms so far due to the technology's need for vast computational power and data. While Qualcomm's chips are well-suited for the kinds of calculations that AI models require, these chips will still have significantly less power than data centers stocked with cutting-edge GPUs. Qualcomm and Meta have worked together in the past, most notably on chips for Meta's Quest virtual reality headsets. ⚡ Quick Links 🆕 Get more malware off your Mac — faster (Sponsor) Millions of satisfied users rely on CleanMyMac's Malware Removal. With the new Moonlock Engine by MacPaw, it runs 2x faster and also scans external drives, mail attachments, and browser extensions. Get 5% off your first CleanMyMac experience with the coupon code TLDRMOONLOCK Companies Requiring Full-Time In-Office Are Struggling to Recruit New Employees (6 minute read) Companies with flexible work policies are growing faster than companies that require workers to be in the office full-time. How to Write a Great README (13 minute read) The README needs to explain what the project does, how to use it, and how people can help out. Typo leaks millions of US military emails to Mali web operator (8 minute read) Millions of emails meant for the US military have been sent to the .ML domain, the country identifier for Mali, due to people mistyping .MIL. Producing Charts with AI (2 minute read) Code Interpreter allows its users to create, edit, and analyze charts using English and it automatically sets up Python environments so users can focus on their work. Generative AI Space and the Mental Imagery of Alien Minds (38 minute read) AI gives humans access to a form of alien mind, allowing us to finally attempt to understand how alien minds might perceive the world. Twitter is working on new publishing tools for long-form articles (3 minute read) Twitter is rebranding Twitter Notes to Twitter Articles, a place for users to post long, complex articles with mixed media. Want more TLDR? We also write newsletters covering AI, crypto, and web dev! TLDR Talent is our exclusive community where we help world-class tech talent and get intros to companies of their choice, along with a number of exciting startups and tech companies curated by TLDR. We give you full control of the process, you can specify if you’re actively searching or passively interested only if something amazing comes along. Set your preferred compensation, seniority/title/role, specific companies (or types of companies) you’d like to work for and more. Click here to apply. 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 and Stephen Flanders If you don't want to receive future editions of TLDR, please click here to unsubscribe.