#40
Apple's Ferret, NYT sues OAI, Alibaba generating digital avatars (again), we have tesla at home, pika is out, mistral internal model, shazam working, 2023 layoff roundup
👋🏻 Welcome to the 40ᵗʰ Nibble and here’s to an amazing 2024 ahead!
Happy New Year’s Eve (Sylvester)! 🥂
🎧 Podcast version of this edition is available here → #40 | Recast
📢 Get access to bonus links and discuss with fellow Nibblers
What’s happening 📰
👨🏻⚖️ In this
flusue-season, NY Times sued Microsoft and OpenAI for copyright infringement (or as they never had a paid partnership?)🎓 Oh! Talking about suings, Code.org sued Byju’s company WhiteHat Jr. (yeah! the one behind Wolf Gupta) in a US court, as they failed to pay the promised $4M over 4 years for a coding platform license.
✨ Apple is so back, they just released an OSS multimodal LLM called Ferret, and they are working with Cornell University on this one. Also, they really silently released this. Sources from Reddit say that it was trained on 8x A100 GPUs with 80GB memory. (no Nvidia 😉)
📱 Alibaba has released Make-A-Character (Mach), reportedly a high-quality Text-to-3D character generation within minutes (are they building a software suite to take over social media/TikTok now?)
🚘 Mankaran Singh dropped a tweet showing Flowpilot, an open-source driver assistance system built on top of OpenPilot (by comma.ai), that can run on most Windows, Linux, and Android machines.
In the tweet, he showed how he is using an old Redmi Note 9 Pro to run Flowpilot and self-drive his Alto K-10 on Indian roads 👏🏻 (Bro took “eat that frog” seriously). Flowpilot is open-sourced too.📷 Pika 1.0 by Pika Labs (the text/image to video tool that we covered in #36) is out of the waitlist now and is available to everybody through pika.art. We know our readers are a creative bunch and will generate something fun while we sip on our evening coffee after publishing this.
🇮🇳 OpenAI to host the first-ever developer gathering in India (yes, Bengaluru) in Jan 2024. The aim is to coordinate better between devs in the Silicon Valleys of the world.
🫣 Mistral has an internal mistral-medium model only available via their endpoint and “relies on an internal prototype model” and beats GPT-3.5 on major benchmarks (self-published). Hoping for them to test and release it soon and start 2024 with a bang!
Source: Mistral Endpoint Docs 🚔 Arion Kurtaj, one of the key members of Lapsus$ was handed an indefinite hospital order.
Lapsus$ is responsible for leaking GTA-VI videos and has previously attacked Uber, Nvidia, and Rockstar Games costing them ~$10M.💰 OpenAI might raise some funding at a $100B valuation, making it the second-most valuable startup in the US, right after SpaceX. (reminds me of Baby, You're A Rich Man 🎶)
What brings us to awe 😳
🏢 Behind the scenes building IBM Watsonx, an AI and data platform that focuses on creating trustworthy, efficient LLMs, utilizing a lakehouse data architecture, and emphasizing robust governance for enterprise applications.
🪄 abracadabra: How does Shazam work? explains the amazing way in which audio identification systems work and what you should start with if you were to build one. Ofc! it is magic how Shazam works, but mathematically it’s beautiful.
Register and recognize using finger-printing and hashing (from the same article) ⚡️ NextJS is planning to move to Lightening CSS, An extremely fast CSS parser, transformer, bundler, and minifier. [Source Tweet]
😪 The biggest layoffs of 2023: 2023 was no easy year for the tech job market so here are some numbers on what we have seen happen. Amazon unsurprisingly stays on top of the list here as well with 27k layoff with Accenture taking the second place at 19k.
Today I(we) Learnt 📑
💰 Almost Half of Warren Buffett-led Berkshire Hathaway's $365 Billion Portfolio Is Invested in Only 1 Stock and it's AAPL. (yup! the ones behind Apple Maps)
🧂 Salt and salary: were Roman soldiers paid in salt?: Breaking the myth of ‘salary’ meaning that the Roman soldiers were paid in salt, this article states that the English word 'salary' originates from the Latin 'salarium', linked to 'sal' (salt), but there's no evidence it meant being paid in salt. Worthy of a read.
📞 From “How does Shazam work?” in the section above, we came to know that Shazam started as a phone number before it was an app. You could call and sing to it and it would tell you the song's name.
🤝 You have read ~50% of Nibble, the following section brings tools out from the wild.
What we have been trying 🔖
😭 Cry once a week: Use if needed. Do not ask us why is this under “What we have been trying”. No, we do not cry… *grabs a tissue*.
📋 cv: Print-friendly, minimalist CV page in NextJS, fork and play. (if you were procrastinating making your landing page, maybe fork this fill the JSON, and chill for a while)
📝 Clearword: a real-time AI meeting assistant that creates summary notes and completes actions live during your calls.
🤳 Avatar Fun: Turn Your Selfies into Awesome Avatars (we’ve been playing around with this and we absolutely love it!)
👨🏻💻 AoC Algorithms for each day, if you are like us and started the AoC, but didn’t finish. But anyways would like to learn how every problem was solved by people this is a great Reddit thread.
Builders’ Nest 🛠️
📊 package-majors: a tool that tells you how often major versions of a given npm package were downloaded during the past week.
📈 Observable Plot: The JavaScript library for exploratory data visualization
🍓 strawberry: Zero-dependency, a build-free framework for the artisanal web.
🛠️ pip-tools: A set of tools to keep your pinned Python dependencies fresh.
☝️ Bash One-Liners for LLMs: One-liners to run
llamafilemodels to complete various tasks.
Meme of the week 😌
Off-topic reads/watches 🧗
💪🏻 Commit to competence in this coming year by DHH, he said to love what you do and see how you can improve every day. At this point DHH’s blog are like is my go-to self-help book pages.
📈 Tech job is a power law job by Manas J Saloi (unlike his tweets, this one stays). Really small 2-minute read, a reality check.
🏎️ Cars and Business by Jason Fried, a quick analogy between business and cars and how we came from Analog to Digital in both, and why is one better than the other. (just like us on a nostalgic Sunday, we already know what he is going to choose)
𝞹 Math - 2023's Biggest Breakthroughs (shared by ajay.guru), super exciting things happened this year. ngl Nibbler A was turned on by the end of the video. (TIL from this Einstein’s Tile)
Wisdom Bits 👀
"Lost is only possible if you are fixed on getting somewhere specific."
— Seth Godin
If you liked what you just read, recommend us to a friend who’d love this too 👇🏻
Weekly Standup 🫡
Nibbler P had a very very loooong train ride back home and is with his family as he says goodbye to a very interesting year. He would sit back, relax, and plan out what he’d like to achieve this coming year.
Nibbler A had a usual work week, interesting, busy, and fun. He played more badminton & chess last week than he expected. Watched a few animes & movies. Got a little under the weather at the end, so he’s resting and waiting for another year to end.
