Nibble #15

Threads hurting Bird, AI Alignment, US bans China, Google scrapes, Model compression, Android rebrand, AI summit, tiny vectors, DragGAN, AWS Doc Chat and more

👋🏻 Hola & welcome to Nibble #15
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What’s happening 📰

• OpenAI is now working on Superalignment (they said, give us 4 years & dedicating 20% of the computing, we’ll ship it, another four-year transform 👀 [get it?]), but Yann Senpai yarned a thread saying out loud that this is not a problem that you can just solve, instead, it’s a continuous process 😮

  • What is Alignment? & Why do we need it?

    • As we move towards AGI (super-intelligence), the threat to humanity increases, so we want AI to be smarter than us, but need it to align with our values (no, Bro we are Just not talking about the ruling Party).
      That’s where alignment comes into the picture.
      You say, use RLHF, what’s the issue with that?

      • First of all, RLHF ain’t scalable (anything that requires human intervention isn’t), and secondly, RLHF introduces biases, on what humans like and do more of it.

    • But do we really want AI to go that way (dull and rouge)?
      => No! We need AI to be more creative and smart than us and we need more events like AlphaGo’s Move 37

  • So, to scale alignment and let humans shitpost all day (on the new Jalebi app). OpenAI is going to explore more recursive reward modeling (RRM), debate, and iterated amplification (All these stuff require a separate blog post and we might do it later)

• Oh! yes, talking about OpenAI

  • Some folks figured out that ChatGPT’s Bing integration allowed them to read beyond paywalls and started exploiting it. So, they paused the Bing integration completely (who is laughing now? All hail 12ft.io)

  • GPT-4 goes brrr (generally available now) and went live for 20M paid users.

  • Right when ChatGPT was losing its charm, Code Interpreter goes live for paid users too. What does it mean?
    Well, it could write code earlier too, but now it can test the code and fix itself if required, it can do menial data jobs, crop images, trim videos, and whatnot. [RIP Data Analysts friends! 🙏🏻] (It might become Legendary Grandmaster on Codeforces now, beware tourist Chan!)

• 🌀 Mark Chan took full advantage of Elon’s shitty moves and Threads goes brr! (it literally took ~7 hours to reach 1M users (~30M in less than 24 hours) for this platform, which proves that Dopamine > > > ChatGPT)
  Some key things to note:

  • The seamless login with Insta brought a quick stream of shitposters.

  • Threads account can’t be deleted until you delete your linked Insta. (waiting on how the EU beats the shit outta this app.)

• 🫡 Elon Chan did his best to keep us entertained this week. Twitter went through some crazy 3-hour push-to-prod sprints multiple times, it seems. (not the #BleedBlue we wanted!)

  • They stopped all logged-out users from viewing tweets and rate-limited users on their own app [link]

• • And guess whom they are trying to copy now? The merry Instagram itself! *tring tring* (so now apart from being the worst messaging app, they can also contest for the worst calling app award now)

Source: Andrea Conway on Twitter

• Meta (FB & Insta) had a moat built around their recommendations and we had no doubt about that. The company made a bold move by sharing what influences the recommendations that people get. They are expanding the “Why am I see this?” tab to a big one telling you in detail, how you travelled down the rabbit hole to see the current cringe reel you are watching.

• 👀 In the age of tech bros putting paywalls to remove scrapping, Google said out loud that they’ll scrape everything that comes in their way for AI (we seriously need some discussion over the legality of scraping public data & printing trillions now) Meanwhile, a wise once man said…

• 🛍️ Nvidia quietly acquired Pied Piper, compression company OmniML, a startup specialized in compressing AI models, making it possible to move AI on edge or on devices. (it won’t be too late before Nvidia is petaflops ahead of other companies)

• Android's 🅰️ got bigger & mascot goes skeuomorphic 3D (hard to digest change, TBH, we liked the previous one more)

  

• Google Messages Web app now supports direct reply (one step closer to building an ecosystem, it’s not a coincidence that the app icon is literally a blue bubble 😉)

• 🇮🇳 AI4Bharat researchers to raise $12 million from Peak XV, Lightspeed for own firm (the firm basically is going to create LLMs for India Specific use cases)

• US set to restrict China's access to cloud computing: So that means that for AWS (and others) to provide services in cn-north-1 and cn-northwest-1, it’ll have to go through an approval process with the govt. with proper due-diligence

• MDN brings a playground and AI Help now.

What brings us to awe 🤪

• 🗣️ Duolingo's User Retention: 8 Tactics Tested On 300 Million Users - This was a gripping interactive story about Duolingo’s strategy for user retention. The site itself is so cool, just look at the energy bar on the side (they say that the best strategy is one you won’t figure out and Duolingo goes by it)

• 📈 The Rise of the AI Engineer:

  swyx
  talks about how the advancements in AI do not mean that you just hit the OpenAI API and generation go brrrrrrrrrrrr (no personal attack *sob sob*) and why AI engineers are going to be a real thing!

• ☠️ Meanwhile, Stability AI CEO said there will be No (Human) Programmers in Five Years (btw, 41% of all code right now is AI generated as per GitHub)

• 👔 Business Model Scalability: Internal vs. External: This was a good read. TL;DR below:

  Internal scalability describes how capable the operations of the business model are to expand the customer base and sales in a short time and at low cost. External scalability describes how beneficial the business environment is to expand the customer base and increase sales.

• 🏞️ In a previous issue, we talked about the zoom-out feature of Midjourney v5.2. Well, another cool feature is the Pan and Extend image feature that they released in the same version. And people are generating a lot of interesting stuff with this panning feature.

• 🎬 The Future of Movies explained with MKBHD: Cleo Abram and MKBHD are one of our favorite Tech Youtubers so when they collaborated on this, we had to watch it, and man, it was 🤯

TILs 🤯

• .engineer is a TLD 🥹 (we manifest, a domain instead of a Paper Degree when you graduate and regulate it a little to prevent abuse). BTW we know about it from ai.engineer/summit so go and register yourself for some IRL AI goodness in the coming months.

• MongoDB has pre & post-triggers, just like Postgres.

• NodeJS (express) request bodies might have different order of JSON keys than expected, so if you verify the HMAC Digest of the body, better convert the buffer into the stream and use that.

• Cisco got its name from San Francisco and the logo is actually the Golden gate bridge 🌉

  

• CPU Utilization is Wrong because the utilization metrics not only include the “active” processes but also the “stalled” ones, which TBH is just waiting patiently for their turn to churn that processor.

  

What we have been trying 🔖

• Daito - Web-based 2FA sharing for shared accounts.

• AWS Docs Chat - AWS Support that replies to you every time 🫡

• Webhook.site - Fast track your webhook handling services, using this service to inspect webhooks. (or as they say “Webhooks inspect karne hai? Aa jao dikha dunga!”)

• Auto-redialer: lent some money to someone and now they won't pick up your call? (Well, if it's as hopeless as one of the Nibblers feels, use this)

• Prompt Perfect: Ask AI "What is the best way to command you?". Because who is better to tell that, no?

• Swipefy: Fan of swiping left/right? Well, you can pick your music the same way now!

Builders’ Nest 💪🏻

• DragGAN - Code for the paper on DragGAN, allowing you to drag points to manipulate images quickly. (fake news is the new news, behold!)

  

• embedchain: Framework to easily create LLM-powered bots over any dataset offline.

• fleece: Run your local LLaMA model on VSCode and get code completions from comments

• Codex: Remember the complete Fruitfly Brain Connectome that was mapped some time ago? It’s openly available for you to see and explore, right in your browser!

• livegrep : interactive regex search of ~gigabyte-scale source repositories.

• tinyvector: A tiny nearest-neighbour embedding database built with SQLite and Pytorch.

Meme of the week 👑

Not the first time when birds were threatened by threads | This is a real article BTW

Off-topic reads/watches 🧗

• 🎙️ Ask HN -Are people in tech in the AI Echo chamber? (we feel, we are in an echo chamber, I don’t see people working in agricultural trading getting affected by AI at all)

• 📄 tragic-methods - A collection of scripts depicting the strange quirks of programming languages.

• 🎥 Dr. K from Zerodha <> Kunal Shah talks about AI, Climate Change & Beyoncé

• 🎥 htmx in 100 seconds by Fireship, the way the industry works is full circle. We came from HTML to kinda SSR (Django, PHP, express template), to CSR & SSG, and now with NextJS going back to SSR & some people who are getting even more nostalgic want HTML to be most powerful again.

Ponder worthy words

"Productivity is being able to do things that you were never able to do before."
― Franz Kafka

Job Posts 💼

PS: This section is not sponsored, we hand-pick stuff by ourselves, from the week-long scrolling of the web and email reading. We will usually post Global or India-based opportunities.

• Software Engineer, Machine Learning - Reddit [Remote | US]

• Software Engineer (L4), Privacy Engineering - Netflix [Remote | US]

• Frontend Developer - Verra [Remote | Worldwide]

• Founding Engineer - playbit [San Francisco, CA]

• Sr. Staff Machine Learning Engineer at Mozilla [Remote | Worldwide]

• Founding Full-stack Engineer at GalileoAI

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From the Author’s Lap(top)

You can reach out to us using our nests on the Internet.
- Pushkar, Gujarati Bihari Dikra, loves languages (programming and otherwise) and can be a part-time meme-lord, and a part-time neural network whisperer. [Threads]

- Aashutosh - Rajasthani Baniya, has a craving for memes, loves *-wares (soft, hard, middle, ALL), can talk in italics, is a part-time cat-whisperer, and can tirelessly work towards the bloom doom of humanity. [Threads]

👋🏻 See you at the next one!