Google CEO Sundar Pichai Says Search to Feature Chat AI (8 minute read)
Google is integrating conversational AI features into its search engine. The integration will enable Search to respond to a more diverse range of queries. CEO Sundar Pichai has dismissed warnings that chatbots could threaten the company's search business. Google has ramped up investment in AI while cutting costs in other areas. It has been testing AI features within Gmail and other work-related products.
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Anthropic’s $5B, 4-year plan to take on OpenAI (3 minute read)
Anthropic is raising up to $5 billion in a series C fundraising round to rival OpenAI and expand into over a dozen major industries. The company plans to build a 'frontier model' called Claude-next that is ten times more capable than today's best AI. Claude-Next will use a next-gen algorithm for AI self-teaching. It will require spending $1 billion within the next 18 months to develop. Anthropic estimates the frontier model will require several orders of magnitude more processing power than even the most massive models today.
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Science & Futuristic Technology
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Synthetic embryos have been implanted into monkey wombs (5 minute read)
Scientists have generated synthetic embryos from monkey stem cells for the first time. The embryos were transferred to the uterus of adult monkeys, leading to initial signs of pregnancy. Although the embryos ceased development within 20 days of transfer, this work represents the furthest progress made so far toward developing lab-grown embryos in primates. This breakthrough suggests the possibility of generating human fetuses using stem cells instead of sperm and egg.
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Giant Study Pinpoints Specific Gut Bacteria Linked to Alzheimer's (3 minute read)
A genome-wide association study in the US indicates a relationship between genetic factors and inflammatory gut microflora in healthy brain function. The study found a genetic connection between specific genera of gut bacteria and Alzheimer's disease. It also found a link between the microbes and a genetic risk factor for the neurodegenerative disorder and revealed protective bacterial groups which can counter inflammation. The exact mechanism of the relationship still remains poorly understood.
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Programming, Design & Data Science
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Build faster with Buck2: Our open source build system (7 minute read)
Meta has released Buck2, a large-scale build system that has undergone a complete rewrite. Buck2 features core and language-specific rules that have been completely separated, advanced parallelism, remote execution, virtual file system integration, and a redesigned output console. It aims to increase speed and efficiency while encouraging fast iteration for developers and engineers. Buck2 was tested internally at Meta to be twice as fast as Buck1.
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Chrome ships WebGPU (3 minute read)
WebGPU is now available on Chrome 113 by default. WebGPU is a new web graphics API that allows for more flexible GPU programming and offers access to advanced capabilities that WebGL does not provide. It exposes modern hardware capabilities, allowing rendering and computation operations on a GPU. WebGPU significantly reduces the JavaScript workload for the same graphics and offers more than three times the improvements in machine learning model inferences. It is currently only available on ChromeOS, macOS, and Windows. WebGPU support for other platforms is coming later this year.
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Top 8 takeaways from the Cerebral Valley AI conference (2 minute read)
The Cerebral Valley Summit in San Francisco last week featured a few dozen CEOs from the top generative AI startups. This article contains 8 takeaways from the event. Startups can build defensible companies using OpenAI's APIs. OpenAI is predicted to capture over 70% of the market share for API usage. The AI community is working on smaller and cheaper open source models. For startups to succeed, entrepreneurs need to focus more on monetization models and developing a pricing strategy that captures the added value.
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Two New Salary Transparency Websites (6 minute read)
Comprehensive.io allows users to browse by company and range while Levels.fyi Jobs tries to fill the gap in total compensation estimates for job postings that list base salary, but not equity or bonus components.
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JSON vs XML (40 minute read)
This article contains a transcript of a podcast featuring Douglas Crockford where he shares the story of JSON, his battles against XML, and more.
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LLMParser (GitHub Repo)
LLMParser is a tool for classifying and extracting structured data from text with large language models.
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Skeleton (GitHub Repo)
Skeleton is a UI toolkit that allows developers to create reactive web interfaces with Svelte and Tailwind CSS.
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