Google Gemini Ultra 🧠, 1X's robotics demo 🤖 , Windows launches sudo 🧑‍💻

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Big Tech & Startups

Google launches Gemini Ultra, its most powerful LLM yet (4 minute read)

Google has retired the Bard name and rebranded it to Gemini for the launch of Gemini Ultra, its most capable large language model yet. Gemini Ultra is available through a new $20 Google One tier that also includes 2TB of storage as well as the rest of Google One's feature set. The feature will work in Google Workspace apps. More information about API access for the Ultra model will be shared in the coming weeks.

SpaceX Tests Using Drone Ships to Support Starlink Coverage at Sea (2 minute read)

SpaceX is using its drone ships, designed to act as landing pads for rockets, as gateway stations to bolster Starlink's cover at sea. The company applied for a temporary FCC license last month to test operating up to 12 earth station antennas over the drone ships. SpaceX hasn't revealed details about how the drone ships will serve as backhaul without dedicated fiber connections. The FCC is still weighing the application.

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Science & Futuristic Technology

The most promising AI smart glasses are from a brand you've never heard of (4 minute read)

Brilliant Labs' Frame smart glasses feature an integrated multimodal AI assistant. It lets users navigate and interact with the physical world with multimodal generative AI agents. The glasses use a wide range of AI models to answer questions. Frame has a front-facing sensor to capture images to answer questions, but it discards the data shortly after. It requires a smartphone with an internet connection to operate. A video introducing the device is available in the article.

All Neural Networks. All Autonomous. All 1X speed (4 minute read)

1X deployed its system to learn motor behaviors end-to-end from vision using neural networks in 2023. It recently released a video sharing some of the new capabilities its humanoid androids have learned purely end-to-end from data. The video shows the robots picking up items from shelves and placing them into containers, moving objects from the floor to a box, and performing various other tasks. Every behavior seen in the video is controlled by a single vision-based neural network that emits actions at 10Hz. All capabilities in the video were trained by 1X's android operators.

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Programming, Design & Data Science

LLRT (GitHub Repo)

Low Latency Runtime (LLRT) is a JavaScript runtime designed to address the growing demand for fast and efficient Serverless applications. It offers up to over 10x faster startup and up to 2x overall lower cost compared to other JavaScript runtimes running on AWS Lambda. LLRT only supports a fraction of Node.js APIs and is not a drop-in replacement for Node.js. It conserves both CPU and memory resources by not incorporating a JIT compiler.

Introducing Sudo for Windows! (5 minute read)

Sudo for Windows is a new way for users to run elevated commands directly from an unelevated console session. Microsoft has open-sourced the project and added the feature to the Windows 11 Insider Preview Build 26052. The feature currently supports three configuration options (In a new window, Input closed, and Inline) that can be set through a drop-down menu in the Settings page for the feature. A link to gsudom, an alternative implementation of sudo with additional functionality, is available.

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Miscellaneous

The One-person Billion-dollar Company (13 minute read)

OpenAI co-founder Sam Altman recently said that a one-person billion-dollar company may soon emerge. This will supposedly be made possible with AI tools as work could be outsourced to an army of artificial intelligence agents. The size of the distribution required, coupled with the ability of anyone to make anything with the same AI tools, makes the one-person billion-dollar company incredibly challenging if not impossible. There's a significant opportunity for ambitious people to build solo businesses in the $1-10 million ARR range, but after that, it's probably best to hire people to help grow anyway.

How Good Is Google Gemini Advanced? (9 minute read)

Gemini Advanced, recently rebranded from Bard Advanced, is a $19.99/month service (with a two-month free trial) available in 150 countries in English. It is multimodal and has data analysis capabilities and improved reasoning compared to Gemini Pro, the free version of the model. Gemini Advanced is a GPT-4 class model, but it doesn't obviously blow away GPT-4 in the benchmarks. It is better than GPT-4 in some cases, but GPT-4 is still more sophisticated about using code and accomplishes a number of hard verbal tasks better. Both models still fail and hallucinate at times.

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Quick Links

An intuition for distributed consensus in OLTP systems (15 minute read)

This post shares learnings from working with distributed consensus in transactional databases.

OpenAI compatibility (4 minute read)

Ollama now has built-in compatibility with the OpenAI Chat Completion API.

On whether we’re living in a simulation (12 minute read)

There's no point in worrying if we're living in a simulation.

Mozilla pivots to AI, internet safety: announces new CEO (4 minute read)

Mitchell Baker, one of the co-founders of the Mozilla Project, is stepping down as CEO to focus on AI and internet safety initiatives - the CEO role will be temporarily held by Laura Chambers until a longer-term successor is found.

Google saves your conversations with Gemini for years by default (2 minute read)

Google has released a new support document that outlines the ways in which it collects data from Gemini users.

When "letting it crash" is not enough (5 minute read)

Durable execution is an approach to dealing with failure that stores the minimal amount of data needed to reconstruct an application's state at any time, making local variables indestructible.

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Google Gemini Ultra 🧠, 1X's robotics demo 🤖 , Windows launches sudo 🧑‍💻

TLDR 2024-02-09

Big Tech & Startups

Science & Futuristic Technology

Programming, Design & Data Science

Miscellaneous

Quick Links

Older messages

Disney's Epic Games stake 🎮, Google's morale crisis 📉, jQuery 4.0 👨‍💻

Adam Neumann's WeWork bid 🏢, WhatsApp cross-app messaging 💬, fastest growing dev populations 📈

OpenAI's democratic AI 🤖, Xbox's cross-platform plans 🎮, LLM side projects 👨‍💻

Google ends caching 🔍, Redditors review Vision Pro 🌎, Apple open sources config language 👨‍💻

Tesla's Texas HQ vote 🚗, Arc reimagines browsers 🌎, learning new tools with ChatGPT 👨‍💻

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