Meta's open AGI plan 🧠, Figure deploys robots 🤖, Whisper speech generation 👨‍💻

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TLDR 2024-01-19

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Big Tech & Startups

Mark Zuckerberg’s new goal is creating artificial general intelligence (5 minute read)

Mark Zuckerberg has announced plans to achieve artificial general intelligence (AGI). While he doesn't have a timeline for when AGI will be reached or an exact definition for it, he has moved Meta's AI research group FAIR to the same part of the company building generative AI products across its apps. The move aims to allow Meta's AI breakthroughs to more directly reach its users. Meta plans to own more than 340,000 Nvidia H100 GPUs by the end of the year.

The next iOS update will make it harder to break into your iPhone (2 minute read)

Apple's newest security feature, Stolen Device Protection, makes it far harder for thieves to hijack Apple IDs and any financial information stored on the device. It will require users to use Face ID or Touch ID and certain changes may take up to an hour to take effect. The feature addresses a key vulnerability where thieves can lock victims out of their Apple IDs by resetting the password using their passcodes. Stolen Device Protection will be included in the iOS 17.3 release expected next week.

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Science & Futuristic Technology

Figure's humanoid robots are about to enter the workforce at BMW (4 minute read)

Figure is sending its general-purpose humanoid robots to start real-world work at BMW's manufacturing plant in South Carolina. The deal may be one of the first-ever commercial deals involving humanoid robots. While the two companies have yet to announce exactly what Figure's robots will be doing on the factory floor, training has already begun in the company's labs for the first tasks. The partnership is milestone-based, so Figure will have to prove its robots can do useful work before it scales its operations.

Flying Kites Deliver Container-Size Power Generation (4 minute read)

Airborne wind energy is a new field that uses kites instead of turbines to generate energy from wind. Kites are nimbler than turbines and can deliver a more constant energy supply. Netherlands-based company Kitepower has developed a system called Hawk that flies out in 'pumping' cycles - it flies out while pulling at a tether, generating electricity on the ground, and when the tether reaches its maximum length, the ground station winches the kite back in, using only a fraction of the energy it produced. The system fits into a standard shipping container and assembly at a new site takes less than 24 hours.

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Programming, Design & Data Science

Ethical Hacking 101 Workshop: Secure your applications | Feb 8 | 11am EDT (Sponsor)

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WhisperSpeech (GitHub Repo)

WhisperSpeech is a text-to-speech system built by inverting Whisper. The models are currently only trained on the English LibreLight dataset, but future releases will target multiple languages. Samples of synthesized voices are available in the repository.

What's new with ML in production (27 minute read)

Most machine learning in production is still not related to large language models or generative AI, which make up less than 10% of the market at most. At their core, machine learning models are algorithms that perform compression on a corpus of data. A lot has changed in leading-edge machine learning applications over the past year as the industry has moved from smaller, business-specific models that perform specific tasks to very large generalist models that complete text. The pendulum is again shifting to smaller models that people are starting to fine-tune and run on their own. The industry still focuses on compression, but it is changing where and how much it is controlled.

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Miscellaneous

Coming to Grips With Apple’s Seemingly Unshakable Sense of Entitlement to Its Commissions From Third-Party iOS Apps (4 minute read)

Apple has introduced a new tax on web purchases that prevents developers from offering digital items more cheaply on the web. Epic will contest this plan in District Court. Apple is demanding commission from web sales that occur within 7 days of a user tapping through to the web from its new External Purchase Links entitlement in an app - services that already sell over the web can continue to do so in exactly the same way. Some critics say Apple shouldn't and legally can't comply with its anti-steering injunction this way, but it looks like the company isn't doing anything contrary to the law.

Sam Altman Says AI Using Too Much Energy, Will Require Breakthrough Energy Source (2 minute read)

It's no secret that AI models require astronomical amounts of electricity to run. Experts estimate that the industry could soon use as much electricity as an entire country. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman is looking for cheaper energy alternatives. Future models will require even more power to the degree that they'll need a whole new power source. Altman has already invested around $375 million in a nuclear fusion company.

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Researchers confirm what we already knew: Google results really are getting worse (3 minute read)

Search engine results are getting worse as the internet is flooded with low-effort garbage.

What is Scalability Anyway? (2 minute read)

A system is scalable when the cost of adding incremental work is approximately constant.

Amazon’s latest layoffs hit its Buy with Prime unit (1 minute read)

Amazon is laying off about 30 employees in its Buy with Prime unit, less than 5% of the staff in the division.

How to Design an ISA (32 minute read)

An instruction set is a lingua franca between compilers and microarchitecture - the rise of RISC-V as an open base for custom instruction sets has lowered the barrier to entry for people trying to design some or all of an instruction set.

A Massive Amount of Water Ice Has Been Found on Mars, Lurking Beneath The Equator (3 minute read)

A new radar survey of the Medusae Fossae Formation region on the Martian equator has revealed several kilometers-thick slabs of buried water ice.

Workers are filming their layoffs, then posting them to TikTok. What could go wrong? (4 minute read)

While filming your layoff and posting it to social media might feel empowering, critics warn that creators might be acting naive and shortsighted as any company that now googles them will see the video.

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Meta's open AGI plan 🧠, Figure deploys robots 🤖, Whisper speech generation 👨‍💻

TLDR 2024-01-19

Big Tech & Startups

Science & Futuristic Technology

Programming, Design & Data Science

Miscellaneous

Quick Links

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TLDR Hall of Fame

Galaxy S24 📱, DeepMind solves Olympiad geometry 📉, Kindle LLM 🤖

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Tesla bot folds shirt 🤖, YouTube slows ad blockers 📺, hacking AWS bandwidth fees 👨‍💻

Inside SpaceX's all hands 🚀, hidden GPT-4 changes 🤖, AGI timelines 🕒

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