Behind the scenes: How AI is reshaping Google (1 minute read)
Google has decided to reshuffle some of its departments to further speed up its AI development. The first part of this change involves the Gemini app team being absorbed by DeepMind. Another big change involves the Assistant teams moving to Platforms and Devices. Prabhakar Raghavan, SVP of search and ads, is changing roles to become Google's chief technologist. Nick Fox, who was a part of Raghavan's leadership team, will be taking over Raghavan's old position and be in charge of Search, Ads, Geo, and Commerce products.
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Microsoft and OpenAI's Close Partnership Shows Signs of Fraying (7 minute read)
Ties between Microsoft and OpenAI have started to fray. The partnership has been strained by financial pressure on OpenAI, concern about OpenAI's stability, and disagreements between employees of the two companies. OpenAI has been trying to renegotiate its deal with Microsoft to help it secure more computing power and reduce expenses, but Microsoft executives have grown concerned that the company's AI work is too dependent on OpenAI. Microsoft has started to hedge its bet on OpenAI by building its own technologies.
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Science & Futuristic Technology
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Scientists claim breakthrough to bringing back Tasmanian tiger from extinction (3 minute read)
Colossal Biosciences, a Dallas-based company, claims to have extracted a thylacine DNA sequence that is 99.9% the same as the original from a 108-year-old specimen preserved in alcohol at a museum in Melbourne, Australia. The company aims to eventually bring back the thylacine, along with other species, back from extinction. While some argue that it is unethical to return long-extinct animals to habitats degraded by human activity, the company's research has produced beneficial advances that can be applied across current living animals. Its efforts could help protect threatened species.
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Sam Altman's Worldcoin becomes World and shows new iris-scanning Orb to prove your humanity (3 minute read)
Sam Altman's Worldcoin crypto project has changed its name to just 'World', potentially signaling the project's interest in expanding its identity beyond its original cryptocurrency mission. Tools for Humanity, the startup behind the project, has unveiled the next generation of its iris-scanning 'Orb' and other tools. The new Orb is easier to mass-produce, has fewer parts, and operates three times faster than the previous version. One of the new tools is called Deep Face - it is an attempt to combat online deepfakes and impersonation using Tools for Humanity's human-verification services.
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Programming, Design & Data Science
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Our cloud-exit savings will now top ten million over five years (3 minute read)
37signals brought its cloud bill down from $3.2 million a year to $1.3 million by pulling seven cloud apps out of AWS and into its own hardware. Its expenditure on all new hardware has been entirely recouped. Most of the $1.3 million spend is still on AWS S3 - the company's cloud storage contract doesn't expire until next summer and it plans to stop using AWS when the contract expires. Moving completely away from AWS is expected to save the company another $4 million over five years.
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Video scraping: extracting JSON data from a 35 second screen capture for less than 1/10th of a cent (4 minute read)
It's possible to record a screen capture of a browsing session and then use Google Gemini to extract numbers from the video. While these language models shouldn't be trusted not to make mistakes, it appears that the Gemini 1.5 Flash 002 model is sufficient enough to complete the task consistently. Extracting data from a 35-second video costs less than a tenth of a cent. Video scraping allows developers to have total control over what is exposed to the AI model. This article walks readers through how to do it.
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Amazon AWS CEO: Quit if you don't want to return to office (2 minute read)
AWS CEO Matt Garman suggested during an all-hands meeting for AWS on Thursday that employees who did not wish to work for Amazon in-office five days a week should quit. He claimed that nine out of ten workers he had spoken with supported the new 5-day-per-week in-office policy, which takes effect in January. Many Amazon employees have said that the new policy will waste time with additional commuting and that the benefits of working from the office are not supported by independent data. Garman says that it's too hard to accomplish company goals with the current mandatory three days of in-office work.
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Meta fires staff for ‘using free meal vouchers to buy household goods' (3 minute read)
Meta has reportedly fired about 24 staff at its Los Angeles offices for using their meal credits to buy household goods. Meta usually feeds staff for free from canteens at its larger offices, but those at smaller sites are given daily credits to order food through delivery services. Some workers were found to be abusing the system, including sending food home when they were not in the office. Employees who had only occasionally broken the rules were reprimanded but were able to keep their jobs.
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