#35
MS Maia 100, Sam is back, Q* achieved?, Amaterasu, 11labs's voice changer, toggleAttribute, 3-day work-week?, termost, browser-window, new {Orca, Inflection, Claude}, No more AI Disney Posters,
👋🏻 It’s 35th, we hope this one finds you well.
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What’s happening 📰
🔃 You might already be aware by now that nature is healing and Sam & Greg are back at OpenAI. This article a good overview of events that happened. And as the tweet below shows, it was not just the OpenAI folks who fretted over their sleep.
✨ Microsoft entered the AI chips business, following rivals Google & Apple.
They have been a big service provider themselves since selling Azure OpenAI services, cognitive, and a lot more. They want to make sure that they meet their own demands before shit hits the fan.
They released two chips - Maia 100 (5nm, 105B transistors) & Cobalt 100.
Source: Microsoft’s Maia 100 🎙️ Amidst the turbulent times and just in time for Thanksgiving, OpenAI made ChatGPT with voice available to all free users. Just tap the headphone icon on your app to talk to the model. BTW, check the TIL section for a tip.
🪜 Chengpeng aka CZ, the CEO of Binance Steps Down after it was found that it did not follow proper compliance controls that aided terrorists, cybercriminals, and child abusers in laundering money through the app.
🚚 TensorFlow Hub is moving to Kaggle Models, trying to be a single place for all TF and Kaggle models, just like Huggingface. HF still remains the largest model hub but it’s good to have multiple options (in one of our previous workplaces, HF was banned, just saying 🙃).
🔊 Voice Changer - Elevenlabs released their voice changer and it’s really good at keeping the voice natural to the original. Better than others in Indian languages but even better (and more natural) with English.
🤖 Elon Musk said Grok (Twitter’s AI Model) will go live for X Premium+ users as early as next week. Who’s rushing to get the premium now?
🏖️ Bill Gates suggests that with advancements in AI, there is a chance of a 3-day work week. Considering his track record of predicting the future of things, we are already planning our free 4 days in the week. (if you don’t know he also said earlier this month that it’s complete nonsense to think that planting trees won’t solve climate issues 🌴)
👀 [Copyright Wars presents] Microsoft AI Image Generator Blocks word ‘Disney’ After Viral Movie Poster Trend, not us hiding our faces for generating tons of Disney posters for Nibble.
✨ AI model & friends drops this week:
⇢ Inflection (creators of Pi) released Inflection 2 with 175 billion and claims its capabilities exceed Google and Meta's top models and “is very close” to catching GPT-4. But we all know benchmarks are not all that matters.
🤖 Anthropic's Claude 2.1 is out and yet again, you want to use them for yourself before believing all the benchmarking. See for yourself.
🐋 Microsoft released Orca 2, which aimed to teach Small Language Models (SML) on how to reason. They released 7B and 13B models, both of which are finetuned on Llama 2 using their synthetic dataset (we advocate more models to be named after animals!)
📈 Google quietly released (and open-sourced) the Switch Transformers C, the largest OSS model by parameter size reaching a whopping 1.6T. This is a Mixture of Experts (MoE) model its architecture is similar to the classic T5 but with the Feed Forward layers replaced by the Sparse MLP layers containing "experts".
📹 Stability AI released Stable Video Diffusion, which allows you to generate video from images or text & again BENCHMARKS says it’s better than competitors (and it actually is).
Source: Stability AI Blog 👻 UC Berkeley introduced Ghostbuster, a tool for detecting text Ghostwritten by LLMs.
What brings us to awe 😳
😮 Every story in the world has one of these six basic plots, with new text-mining tools, researchers analyzed data from thousands of novels and revealed six basic story types (archetypes). Basically, the idea is all the stories you usually read fall into these basic templates.
1. Rags to riches – a steady rise from bad to good fortune
2. Riches to rags – a fall from good to bad, a tragedy
3. Icarus – a rise then a fall in fortune
4. Oedipus – a fall, a rise then a fall again
5. Cinderella – rise, fall, rise
6. Man in a hole – fall, rise
The first rule of this GIF is “We don’t talk about this GIF”. ☄ The Amaterasu (named after the Japanese Sun Goddess, and not the Uchiha clan’s jutsu) particle, a particle with energy exceeding 240 exa-electron volts (EeV), millions of times more than particles produced in the Large Hadron Collider was detected, the signal came on May 27, 2021 & were found while doing routine data check at the Telescope Array Project in Utah.
The interesting part is there is nothing in the universe that can be tracked back to produce such high-energy cosmic waves.
Artist-generated image of high energy cosmic waves falling on array telescope detectors. 🚨 OpenAI researchers warned the board about Q* (Q-star) before they fired Sam.
Q-star is said to be a "humanity-threatening" discovery, as it means that the models can do basic mathematics, which no model earlier was ever able to achieve.
But we all know internally it is just some clever RL and we’re better waiting and seeing what that is instead of speculating what it might be.
A day before Sam was fired he also said "Is this a tool we've built or a creature we have built?", reportedly from a leaked video.
Although Yan LeCun said and I repeat “Please ignore the deluge of complete nonsense about Q*”🤖 Bard can now fetch content from YouTube videos for you, so basically you don’t have to watch the video and directly ask Bard for things like the quantity of salt in the recipe you are cooking. (so yes, it can essentially watch on your behalf)
Source: The Verge
Today I(we) Learnt 📑
📍 Apart from URL & URI, there is a non-standardized URC, Uniform Resource Characteristic which points to the metadata of a resource rather than the resource itself. Eg:
view-source:https://nibbles.dev/🗣️ Get frustrated when you’re talking to ChatGPT and it cuts you off in the middle when you take a small pause and start interrupting? Just press and hold the middle circular blob while speaking and release it when you’re done.
ChatGPT App ⏺️ toggleAttribute: a fairly new method on DOM elements, that toggles a Boolean attribute (removing it if it is present and adding it if it is not present). Eg: Grammarly adds
data-gramm
🤝 You have read ~50% of Nibble, the following section brings tools out from the wild.
What we have been trying 🔖
🔒 s-checkup: Security monitoring as a service, currently free and fully functional, to help you find vulnerabilities in your websites and apps.
📟 browser-window Used in demos as a way to fake a Safari-esque web browser window.
❤️ Coupl: India's first neo-bank for couples (taking "keeping money and personal relationships separate" to the next level).
Also, Nibbler P said he has a Coupl account & now looking for a better one, DMs are open (hurry seats filling fast).
Builders’ Nest 🛠️
🪄 loro - a library that makes it breezy to build collaborative & synced apps. (hint: CRDT)
👨🏻💻 termost - A framework to build your next CLI application: Get the most out of your terminal
📊 Friends Don't Let Friends Make Bad Graphs - An opinionated essay about good and bad practices in data visualization.
🐪 Performance of llama.cpp on Apple Silicon - A collection of short
llama.cppbenchmarks on various Apple Silicon hardware.
Meme of the week 😌
Off-topic reads/watches 🧗
🫂 Sam Altman wrote about Greg Brockerman on his blog 7 years ago describing his quick commitment, excellent recruitment skills, and adaptability.
💎 Ruby on Rails: The Documentary by Honeypot, another touching documentary by them, felt like I should learn Ruby ASAP and join 37signals.
Wisdom Bits 👀
"A man who is a master of patience is master of everything else."
— George Savile
If you liked what you just read, recommend us to a friend who’d love this too 👇🏻
Weekly Standup 🫡
Nibbler P slowly transitioned back to his non-vacation mode this week. Met a few friends, read lots of stuff and got to know through blood tests that he’s become a little unhealthy so he will make sure he moves his body a little more now.
Nibbler A had a full week (just like this edition), worked hard, played some chess, voted, caught up with AoT & JJK, scrolled a lot through
eX feed, and traveled back to BLR.