OpenAI agents 🤖, Sam Altman's $7T chip fund 💰, tech employment in 2024 👨‍💻

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Big Tech & Startups

Sam Altman seeking trillions for AI chip fabrication from UAE, others (4 minute read)

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman is in talks with investors to raise up to $7 trillion for AI chip manufacturing. The project aims to address GPU scarcity as the chips are crucial for training and running large language models. Potential investors include sovereign wealth funds and government entities, which may raise geopolitical concerns. The US has been cautious about allowing foreign control over the supply of microchips - it recently announced a $5 billion investment in R&D to advance US-made semiconductor technologies.

OpenAI's next AI product could be after your job (again) (2 minute read)

OpenAI has been reportedly developing two types of AI agent software for over a year. The first type can be used to automate complex tasks by taking over a customer's device. The second AI agent class handles web-based tasks and can gather public data. It is unclear when the company plans to release these agents.

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Science & Futuristic Technology

With Disney’s magic, Fortnite is poised to win the metaverse (9 minute read)

Epic Games and Disney are designing an entertainment universe text full of Disney-flavored games to play and things to buy. The project will use Epic's technology and Fortnite's social gaming ecosystem to bring Disney characters to life. Disney has invested $1.5 billion into Epic as part of the deal. While Meta has been busy trying to make the Oculus a mainstream consumer product, companies like Epic have been building avatar-driven virtual worlds that are widely available and hardware agnostic.

How to fake a robotics demo for fun and profit (14 minute read)

Developments in robots and CGI are making it harder and harder to tell what's real. Even if the footage is real, video demos are often the best-performing clips - behind every video is likely hours and hours of video that didn't make it into the final cut. CES lacked cool robotic demos, yet there are many amazing videos out there. Viewers should approach these videos with discernment and skepticism. This article covers several ways that robotics videos can be enhanced or faked.

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Programming, Design & Data Science

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(Almost) Every infrastructure decision I endorse or regret after 4 years running infrastructure at a startup (19 minute read)

This article looks at some of the core decisions that an infrastructure lead had to make for a startup over the past four years. It notes whether they recommend or regret the decision and provides details on why. The decisions covered areas such as AWS, processes, SaaS, software, and more.

Toolong (GitHub Repo)

Toolong is a terminal application for viewing, tailing, merging, and searching log files and JSONL. It features live tailing of log files, syntax highlighting for common web server log formats, pretty printed JSONL files, support for .bz and .bz2 files, and merging via auto detection of timestamps. Screenshots and video demos are available in the repository.

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Miscellaneous

All My Thoughts After 40 Hours in the Vision Pro (30 minute read)

This article takes a look at the Apple Vision Pro: its hardware, operating system, and applications. It covers each part of the device, explaining how they work and how they affect the experience. While the technology feels incredible to use, there's currently not that much to do on the device. As the technology gets better, the amount of content will multiply and its value proposition will improve.

Thoughts on Tech Employment (4 minute read)

Tech companies are typically best at adopting new technology, leading to productivity gains. Some roles at tech companies are highly leveraged, like systems, engineering, and design, and the rest of the company exists to support these roles. Businesses wanting to be more efficient will cut inefficiencies in their support roles, especially when technologies exist that can replace them. Tech allows fewer people to create more value for society - it might be time to start finding alternative ways to provide for all living beings.

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Quick Links

Oneschema: a CSV importer you can implement in one day (Sponsor)

Writing a CSV importer from scratch = undifferentiated heavy lifting. With OneSchema, you could have frictionless CSV import as early as tomorrow

Social networks are getting stingy with their data, leaving third-party developers in the lurch (14 minute read)

Social networks have realized the value of the data they are sitting on - the walls they have put up to access their data have resulted in some developers moving to decentralized platforms.

RSS is still pretty great (10 minute read)

RSS feeds are the best way to consume a curated list of high-quality information with very little noise.

Who makes money when AI reads the internet for us? (6 minute read)

New forms of browsing enabled by AI allow people to get information without having to visit websites, removing the incentive for content creators to make content - how creators monetize web pages needs to evolve.

Miracode (GitHub Repo)

Miracode is a readable version of Monocraft, a font based on the typeface used in the Minecraft UI.

OpenAI Hits $2 Billion Revenue Milestone (1 minute read)

OpenAI believes it can more than double this figure in 2025.

Apple Vision Pro Could Take Four Generations to Reach 'Ideal Form' (2 minute read)

The team working on the Vision Pro says there's much to be done before the device can be considered refined enough for customers to use on a day-to-day basis.

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OpenAI agents 🤖, Sam Altman's $7T chip fund 💰, tech employment in 2024 👨‍💻

TLDR 2024-02-12

Big Tech & Startups

Science & Futuristic Technology

Programming, Design & Data Science

Miscellaneous

Quick Links

Older messages

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

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 👨‍💻

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