Amazon will release a revamped version of its Alexa voice assistant in
October. It will be powered by AI models from Anthropic's Claude
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BIG TECH & STARTUPS
AMAZON TO LAUNCH NEW AI-POWERED ALEXA USING ANTHROPIC'S CLAUDE (3
MINUTE READ) [6]
Amazon will release a revamped version of its Alexa voice assistant
in October. It will be powered by AI models from Anthropic's Claude
rather than Amazon's own in-house AI technology, as Amazon's internal
software reportedly struggled with performance issues during initial
testing. The new Alexa will enable users to engage in more complex, context-aware conversations with the assistant. Amazon plans to offer
the upgraded Alexa as a paid subscription service, separate from
existing Prime memberships, with pricing likely to be between $5 to
$10 per month.
NVIDIA'S FUTURE RELIES ON CHIPS THAT PUSH TECHNOLOGY'S LIMITS (8
MINUTE READ) [7]
Nvidia's Blackwell chips are about twice as big as its predecessors,
housing 2.6 times the number of transistors. Instead of one big piece
of silicon, Blackwell consists of two advanced processors and numerous
memory components joined in a single, delicate mesh of silicon, metal,
and plastic. The manufacturing of each chip has to be close to
perfect, presenting engineering challenges that have a sizable impact
on the bottom line, with each defect rendering a $40,000 chip useless.
This article looks at some of the challenges Nvidia had to overcome to
produce the chip.
¨
SCIENCE & FUTURISTIC TECHNOLOGY
OZEMPIC COULD DELAY AGEING, RESEARCHERS SUGGEST (3 MINUTE READ) [8]
Semaglutide could be used to slow down the process of aging. A study
tracking people aged 45 or older who were overweight and had
cardiovascular disease but not diabetes found that those who took the
drug died at a lower rate from all causes. It also improved heart
failure symptoms and cut levels of inflammation regardless of whether
or not people lost weight. The study reinforces the theory that being overweight increases the risk of death due to many etiologies.
'CLOSER THAN PEOPLE THINK': WOOLLY MAMMOTH 'DE-EXTINCTION' IS NEARING
REALITY Ä AND WE HAVE NO IDEA WHAT HAPPENS NEXT (13 MINUTE READ) [9]
De-extinction science has advanced dramatically in the past two
decades. The technology has progressed to the point that it's more of
an ethical question whether we should revive lost species. While some
companies want to bring back extinct animals to enrich biodiversity,
replenish vital ecological roles, and bolster ecosystem resilience,
scientists are not convinced that bringing back creatures that died
out centuries or millennia ago would offer as much benefit as
preserving the ones that are still hanging on. This article takes a
look at the current technologies and the possible consequences that de-extinction may have on the climate and other animals.
¨
PROGRAMMING, DESIGN & DATA SCIENCE
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Between malicious links and invasive tracking, the modern internet is
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need to stay secure in your online adventures: VPN [11], data breach
Alert, Antivirus [12], ad blocker, alternative identity, and more.
¨ Get Surfshark for 80% off with 3 months EXTRA [13]
VALKEY IS A DIFFERENT KIND OF FORK (5 MINUTE READ) [14]
Valkey is a high-performance key/value datastore forked from Redis.
It has gained a lot of support, with two-thirds of former top Redis
maintainers and developers switching over to the project. Valkey 8.0
introduces serious speed improvements and new futures that Redis users
have wanted for some time, including improved debugging tools,
enhanced documentation, and new command-line utilities for easier
management and monitoring. It maintains full API and CLI compatibility
with Redis and compatibility with the Redis Serialization Protocol,
making migrating from Redis to Valkey easy.
OK, HERE IS MY BEST GUESS ON THE STATE OF LLMS (1 MINUTE READ) [15]
Making a jump similar to the 100x jump going from GPT-3 to GPT-4 is
going to be very hard. It will require a lot more training data and
larger data centers. It is difficult to see whether efforts to improve
models will bear any fruit. Policies like SB 1047 threaten to further
slow down progress.
¨
MISCELLANEOUS
HOW DO YOU CHANGE A CHATBOT'S MIND? (16 MINUTE READ) [16]
Today's AI may seem harmless, but these systems are being woven into
society in ways that may be hard to untangle. It could be problematic
for people if AI has somehow trained a bias against them, for example,
a person whose name was associated with a negative event may be
unfairly discriminated against by other chatbots. Chatbots are highly suggestible - if people add text on the internet and it gets
memorized, it's memorialized in the language model.
NOT EVERYTHING IS PHYSICS (10 MINUTE READ) [17]
Physicists like to write books with grand unified theories of the
world, but that view of the world is limited and we shouldn't expect a
theory or algorithm that explains it all. The universe is made up of
many different worlds, both physical and metaphorical, and many of
these worlds aren't connected to each other in any meaningful way. The
truth is contextual, so it isn't a good idea to reduce everything to fundamentals. Reality being a disjoint collection of domains seems
infinitely more rich than it being a single equation.
¨
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UNIVERSITY (SPONSOR) [18]
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THE THREAT TO OPENAI IS GROWING (5 MINUTE READ) [19]
New competition is coming from startups that promise to undercut
OpenAI's services with cheaper bots that are also better at certain
narrow tasks.
APPLE SUCCESSION STRATEGY: KEEP THE OLD GUARD AROUND AS LONG AS
POSSIBLE (14 MINUTE READ) [20]
Executives quitting Apple don't actually leave - they are usually
moved to other roles, like Luca Maestri, who recently departed his
role as Chief Financial Officer but will still oversee the Information
Systems and Technology unit.
FOUNDER MODE (4 MINUTE READ) [21]
Scaling a startup doesn't always mean switching to manager mode.
WILLINGNESS TO LOOK STUPID (28 MINUTE READ) [22]
If you don't regularly have people thinking you're stupid, you're
either likely having extremely filtered interactions with people, you
are avoiding looking stupid, or you are not noticing when people think
you're stupid.
THE SECRET INSIDE ONE MILLION CHECKBOXES (10 MINUTE READ) [23]
This article explains how the creator of One Million Checkboxes
discovered a group of teens sending him secret messages using binary.
A PRIMER ON WHY MICROBIOME RESEARCH IS HARD (29 MINUTE READ) [24]
There are still technical limitations, unknown unknowns, and other
issues making establishing causality between the microbiome and
disease difficult.
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Dan Ni & Stephen Flanders
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