#43
#43
Vision Pro, Sit In Shade, iPhone hangs, Notion Cal, bun shell, Contrails, Stability does smol LMs, Perplexity accelerating, AI dubbing, What is DPO?
Welcome to the 43rd (a prime) edition!
🎧 Podcast version of this edition is available here → #43 | Recast
📢 Get access to bonus links and discuss with fellow Nibblers
What’s happening 📰
🤨 Apple is consolidating its AI teams in Austin, Texas and as a result, a 121-person team based in San Deigo was told “Go Texas or go home”. The team was working on enhancing the Siri experience.
👓 Also, Siri will be crucial in voice navigation on Vision Pro. Talking about that, you can now pre-order Vision Pro, it’ll start shipping on 2nd Feb in the US. It just costs $3,500 (~₹3,00,000/~half a kidney/the cost of DL1 in the EU).
You can use it with your Macbook & all native Apple apps. jokes apart, THESE ARE REALLY exciting times, and RIP monitors, spatial computing is gonna be a cool thing. And yeah Apple allows you to see the real world from the Vision Pro too (and also show your eyes to the world lol), no kidding.🫤 Remember’s Notion acquired Cron (the cool calendar app) in 2022. It was all good, and suddenly Notion decided to rebrand it to “Notion Calendar” and make it a Notion integration. The colors, logo, and everything you loved about Cron now fades away with Notion. But yes, they might now seriously build support for other Calendar providers and Android.
✨ AI Digest
👨💻 Stability AI releases some useful smol Language Models (it’s good to see Stability AI not keeping all their eggs in one basket and doing some good SoTA research outside of diffusion models)
Stable Code 3B: A 3B coding model that outperforms other small models in its category and even beats 7B CodeLlama on some tasks (while still being runnable on your regular home laptop).
Stable LM 2 1.6B: An even smaller family (base and instruction-tuned models) of 1.6B multilingual language models that outperform <2B on most tasks.
🤖 Meta's going to build AGI, and maybe Open Source it, in a recent interview Zuck said that they need to build “AGI”. However, just like all of us, he doesn't have a clear definition of AGI. But he says they'll have more than 600k GPU by EoY and they gonna build it. He said that this will eventually help them with their “Metaverse” goals. Also, Llama 3 is in training!!!
🧬 DermaSensor's AI-powered device to detect skin cancer gets FDA approval. It'll be the first such device and it can detect all three common skin cancers. (they also confirmed that you don't need to Google cold symptoms anymore to conclude you have skin cancer)
🤡 GPT Store is getting flooded with AI Girlfriends, some users even claimed they already formed emotional bonds with some of them 😐
🛠️ Dev Digest
🌭 Bun just released “Bun Shell”, which allows you to run shell commands inside
$``. (and yesrm -rf /is not allowed, more info)
Looks like someone just found out about a ~2yo tool released by Google → zx, which does exactly the same thing.🔒 NextJS shipped a quality-of-life improvement. We can now run HTTPS locally with an experimental flag.
next dev --experimental-https
Source: Tweet
What brings us to awe 😳
🔎 Perplexity is on fire by announcing a partnership with Rabbit R1 and giving away 1 year of Perplexity Pro to the first 100K Rabbit R1 purchases! That’s not all. You can now also set it as the default search engine in Arc browser. [Source: Tweet] (Planning to go back to Arc arc now; Give me a way to sync stuff already!)
Riley, a Staff Engineer at Scale AI, exploited the missing check to remove zero-width characters from the input in the ChatGPT app and tweeted a prompt with zero-width chars making it seem like they hacked it. (although they fixed it in a few minutes on the web app). Interesting because either the dataset contains zero-width instructions or they convert them (If conversion then how? Because the regular NFKC/NFKD normalization does not work with Unicode characters) into proper text before sending it to the model.
Of course! we tried that too, while we were awake & it wasn’t fixed. 🤡 A user on Twitter shared a few simple navigation steps that will hang your iPhone. For some reason, a lot of users followed and replied after a panic period and restarting the phone, that it worked. (what’s crazy is that the bug isn’t even worth the money to reproduce it)
😳 Argentina’s president Javier Milei’s speech at the 2024 WEF Davos Meeting was translated to English by AI (heygen), in his own accent and it was pretty impressive with consistent lipsync. We are surely living in crazy times.
Today I(we) Learnt 📑
✈️ Contrails, the aesthetic white lines that airplanes leave behind add up to more than half the CO2 emission of the aviation industry (i.e. ~3% overall). Take a moment to think about how aesthetically pleasing things can be harmful.
😬 In Slack, if you prefix an emoji with "+" it goes as a reaction to the previous message. [Source: Tom’s Tweet]
📉 Preference Tuning of LLMs refers to training models to align with human intent and preferences. This used to be done via RLHF but now new (and simpler) methods like DPO are being very well-received by the research community while we are also seeing many newer methods to further improve the alignment using techniques like IPO and KTO.
Oh, and if this all feels intimidating, don’t worry about it. The Llama Hitchiking Guide to Local LLMs would be a good place to start to start getting familiar with this stuff.
🤝 You have read ~50% of Nibble, the following section brings tools out from the wild.
What we have been trying 🔖
🔂 unrot.link — A hosted service that takes a URL and returns a new URL that will check whether the URL is still up and, if not, redirect to the Internet Archive copy. You can host your own or get on the approved domains list using the service.
🍕 Jam.Pizza - Apply to jam.dev to cover the pizza costs for your next engineering meetup, up to $250.
📼 DeepwareAI: Scan & detect deepfake videos.
📸 Proteus V2.0: A SDXL fine-tune using DPO that is one of the best ones out there. Even better than Midjourney V6 in some cases.
Builders’ Nest 🛠️
⛅️ Sit In Shade: a website to find the best bus seat to avoid the sun while traveling
🔐 secretlint: Pluggable linting tool to prevent committing credentials. (pre-commit hooks, I’m coming…)
✊ gron: make JSON queryable using
grep📱 What can PWA do today?: A showcase of what is possible with Progressive Web Apps today.
Meme of the week 😌
Off-topic reads/watches 🧗
🎧 Bill Gates’s conversation with Sam Altman, they talked about where is AI headed and how will it impact humanity. Oh BTW, another snippet of Sama’s advice for people in their 20s has also been doing rounds lately.
💸 A Brave New Life - A 6-part series on Financial Freedom: A series of small and insightful articles on achieving financial independence, by truly understanding what money means to you. There are quite some bits of nuggets and the David Foster Wallace speech in the end is the cherry on top 🤌.
Wisdom Bits 👀
“You can't hope to continue accumulating negative experiences, and still turn out to be a positive human being.”
― TokenBender Ji
Wallpaper of the week 🌁
🌌 Link to Wallpaper → wow.nibbles.dev
If you liked what you just read, recommend us to a friend who’d love this too 👇🏻
Weekly Standup 🫡
Nibbler P had a heavy week that will transition into an even heavier week on Monday. In his free time, he tinkered a little with local Stable Diffusion on his laptop, read a little One Piece, and is now going to spend the rest of Sunday relaxing and recharging for the upcoming battles (and celebrating his birthday hehe).
Nibbler A had a loooong work & personal life week. He ended the week by attending a meetup. Doing some personal chores. Still bad at “not taking too much on his plate”.
