#62
ENSv2, Mistral ships again, Ten Cents of Anime, Nvidia rally, Igon Value, Voyager 1 dials back, Hara Hachi Bu, LLM Pricing, VCs πͺ Work and more
ππ» Welcome to the 62nd!
π« Both Nibblers reporting from the hottest areas of North-western India
π° Read #62 on Substack for the best formatting
π§ Podcast version of this edition is available here β #62 | Recast
π’ Get access to bonus links and discussions with fellow Nibblers on Discord
Whatβs happening π°
π The top three most valuable companies today are Microsoft, Apple, and Nvidia, in that order (all AI companies in some form btw) but orders are probably about to change as Nvidia stonks are on a rally (they really are selling shovels in this Gold rush).
β¨ AGI Digest
π The folks at Scale AI released a new Leaderboard called SEAL which evaluates popular models on private datasets to avoid data leaking into future training sets of these model companies. Findings?
Turns out GPT-4o is not as good at coding as it was in the news. GPT-4T is still the undisputed king.
Gemini 1.5 Pro has got a real buff post I/O this year bringing it over Claude 3 Opus. Gemini 1.5 Flash is a good balance of speed and performance as well.
Llama 3 70B Instruct is a real banger for the buck in instruction following
π€ OpenAI is silently signing deals every day to keep building their training data, they signed a deal with Vox Media and The Atlantic, giving them a shit ton of quality content to train on (fun fact: the article links are from βThe Vergeβ which is also part of a deal under Vox Media).
β Microsoft Copilot can now say Hi on Telegram with an official Telegram bot. It is limited to text output and thereβs a daily 30-turn limit, meaning the user and Copilot can only have 30 back-and-forth exchanges. With Meta adding its AI to Instagram & WhatsApp and Google putting Gemini inside the Search and Messaging app, remember that the actual product is you, and what theyβre battling for is your time and attention. Use both of them wisely (guess which is the single app that benefits from both AI & Crypto hype?)
βοΈ Model and Feature Drops
π§Ό Mistral released Codestral, a 22B Code Model licensed under the new Mistral AI Non-Production License trained on over 80 languages with 32k context length boasting 81.1% on HumanEval and 91.6% on HumanEvalFIL. The license though allows you to use it for commercial purposes only via their API and not from the model weights released by them (weβve seen this before with StabilityAI). It is available for free on Le Chat free till August 1 on their API.
πΊ The guys at TencentAI and some students from the Hong Kong released ToonCrafter, a Generative Cartoon Interpolation research project that can achieve SoTA interpolation on animation. Think of it as a system where you can plug in two frames of your animation and it can generate all the intermediate frames (a few seconds long) between them. This is massive for the animation (read waifu) industry. We guess the authors realised this and hence the disclaimer in the repo tch tch tch.
π£οΈ Elevenlabs can now generate sound effects, short instrumental tracks, soundscapes, and a wide variety of character voices - all from a text prompt. You need to sign up on the waitlist to access the API though.
π Perplexity introduced Perplexity Pages, best described by the founder Aarvind as an βAI Wikipediaβ. It is a one-click way to generate and organize content for any topic that youβre researching with citable resources. School and College research projects just got easier!
π 0x Digest
π³οΈ Trump is going more pro-crypto every day, he promised to free Ross Ulbricht (Creator of Silk Road) & will support the right to self-custody to USAβs 50M crypto holders, if re-elected. And mid-week Trump got convicted on all 34 charges in his Hush Money Trial π (itβs a mess out there)
π Matter Labs have filed trademark applications for βzkβ (they are devs of zkSync) and ofc faced a lot of backlash from the community. The community kinda misread the intentions, which Matter Labs later clarified saying βItβll be free to use for the communityβ and theyβll basically trademark and transfer it to Ethereum Community so that no unaligned parties later trademark and misuse it.
π ENS Labs has proposed expanding ENS to Layer 2 (L2s). They're calling it ENSv2 and have shared technical specs for the community to review. Some major changes v2 will bring in will be lower gas fees, higher customizability, and multi-chain interoperability.
π οΈ Dev & Design Digest
β‘οΈ Callstack introduced Re.Pack V5 Preview, one major change is it moved from Webpack β Rspack bringing 5-10x perf improvements in almost all the operations.
π¦ Celest 0.4 allows you to import and run Flutter packages in Dart backends. This is major good news because many of the amazing packages in the Dart ecosystem depend on Flutter or
dart:ui. And if you simply need a data type or utility from these packages, you were out of luck.π± Google accidently pushed to ~2500 internal documents to GitHub early last week, some of them being related to "Search Algo", the documents raised tons of questions on what Google had sad earlier about their secret Search Algo. SEO markets can change with this new info. Later this week, Google accepted that they documents are in fact legit BUT incomplete and stale. Below is a video by Fireship explaining it in short.
What brings us to awe π³
ποΈ ai.comβs redirection went from ChatGPT to x.ai to Gemini all within the last 1 year. We wonder whether these companies traded this domain or one entity is orchestrating it.
π°οΈ How NASA engineers fixed a bug from 15 Billion Miles away, a concise article by The Technology Brother briefly explains what happened.
TL;DR β Voyager 1 is back in action πΊπ»π£οΈ The invention of the transformer (the AI architecture on which all LLMs are based) was fuelled by Apple's releasing Siri. Shared by TDM on X.
π§ AI headphones let the wearer listen to a single person in a crowd, by looking at them just once.
Today I (we) Learnt π
π The name of the Japanese company Daihatsu is a combination of the first kanji character of the word "Osaka" (倧) and the first character of the word "engine manufacture" (ηΊεζ©θ£½ι , hatsudΕki seizΕ). The reading of the "倧" is changed from "Ε" to "dai" in the combination, giving "dai hatsu". (itβs interesting because the word feels like a native Nihongo word)
π₯ Hara Hachi Bu (translates to βstomach eight partsβ) is a saying in Okinawa (yes the Blue Zone of longevity) that advises people to stop eating when they're 80% full.
π€‘ The βIgon Valueβ Problem As coined by @sapinker, itβs when journalists write about a technical topic and reveal by some slip that they know nothing about it. (ah yes! The term itself has a meta origin)
π€ You have read ~50% of Nibble, the following section brings tools out from the wild.
What we have been trying π
π° delve, a ChatGPTesque UI for delving into your rabbit holes.
π» HappyDaze shares uplifting news stories, scientific advancements, and inspiring ideas. (reminds me of No Negative Mondays by Dainik Bhaskar)
π€ Canβt sleep? CantSleepReads has some stories to read that should bore you to sleep.
Buildersβ Nest π οΈ
π΅ LLM Pricing: Compare cloud LLM pricing & performance across different providers from one screen.
ποΈ superfile: This is a pretty fancy and modern terminal file manager.
β‘οΈ Fast Node Manager (
fnm): Just like nvm but written in Rust, hence βfastβ.πΊ llama.cpp is now available in Homebrew Core.
Meme of the week π
Off-topic reads/watches π§
π¬ Taking Risk by Tom Blomfield is a comparison of the stark difference in risk aversion between the UK and the US even though both have the same number of universities in the QS World University Rankings 2024.
βοΈ Are you pitching or are you asking? by Seth Godin
πͺ How VCs killed the meaning of work? by The Ken. A paid article but worth the money and probably the truest thing youβll read about the industry this year (you can also get a free trial of The Ken if you are not sure about getting a sub.)
Wisdom Bits π
βVictorious warriors win first and then go to war, while defeated warriors go to war first and then seek to win.β
β Sun Tzu
Wallpaper of the week π
π Grab this weekβs wallpaper β wow.nibbles.dev
Weekly Standup π«
Nibbler A is somehow juggling between work and home chores (they increase as you grow up). He is probably reading his printed version of βHow Git Works?β and wrapping up some work from the week. He plans to stay still in the daytime until he doesnβt get back to BLR.
Nibbler P has been watching some Monogatari lately while constantly trying to keep up with his runs. He ran his first 5k which makes him grin really wide as he writes this.
If you liked what you just read, recommend us to a friend whoβd love this too ππ»