xAI app 📱, Figure's robot in action 🤖, AI scaling limits 📈

Elon Musk poached talent from across the industry in an effort to play catchup with OpenAI. xAI plans to launch a standalone consumer app like ChatGPT ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌  ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ 

Sign Up |Advertise|View Online TLDR Together With TLDR 2024-11-28 🎄Ready for a holiday getaway? The Swiss Alps, or a tropical escape? Your dream vacation might be $1 away! 🌟 (Sponsor) Usually, when someone promises you the 🌏, you take it with a pinch of 🧂 But 1m+ seasoned travelers choose Dollar Flight Club for good reason. For just $1 today, you can save 90% on your next vacation. How does it work? 1️⃣ Set your departure airports. 2️⃣ Get email alerts when deals up to 90% off are announced. 3️⃣ Book your dream trip for next to nothing. E.g.: 🇫🇷France: $282 roundtrip 🇨🇷Costa Rica: $173 roundtrip 🇪🇸Spain: $247 roundtrip 🇺🇸Hawaii: $179 roundtrip🇨🇭Switzerland: $325 roundtrip Exclusive for TLDR: Try the Club for just $1 this holiday season! 📱 Big Tech & Startups Inside Elon Musk's Quest to Beat OpenAI at Its Own Game (7 minute read) Elon Musk started xAI last summer. He poached talent from across the industry in an effort to play catchup with OpenAI. The startup raised at least $11 billion at a valuation of $50 billion in a funding round this month. It is the second most valuable private AI developer behind OpenAI. xAI plans to launch a stand-alone consumer app like ChatGPT as soon as next month. F.T.C. Launches Antitrust Investigation Into Microsoft (5 minute read) The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) has opened an investigation into whether Microsoft has violated antitrust law. The agency recently sent a formal request for information to Microsoft asking about its cloud computing, artificial intelligence, and cybersecurity products. The FTC is particularly interested in how the company bundles its cloud computing offerings with office and security products and the company's growing power in the artificial intelligence space. Regulators in the European Union said earlier this year that Microsoft had violated antitrust rules when it packaged Teams with Office tools like Excel and Word. 🚀 Science & Futuristic Technology Humanoid robot Figure 02 impresses at BMW plant with 400% efficiency upgrade (2 minute read) Figure AI has achieved a 400% increase in speed and a sevenfold improvement in success rate in its Figure 02 robot. The company recently released a video showing Figure 02 performing up to 1,000 placements per day at BMW's Spartanburg plant. The video is available in the article. Figure AI plans to deploy more humanoid robots in real-world environments in 2025. Diamond optical discs could store data for millions of years (4 minute read) Chinese researchers have achieved a record-breaking diamond storage density of 1.85 terabytes per cubic centimeter. The diamonds are able to retain data for millions of years at room temperature without requiring any maintenance. The system currently requires complex lasers, imaging cameras, and other equipment, but the researchers believe they will be able to eventually fit everything inside a microwave oven-sized device. The technology will be particularly useful for governments, research facilities, and large libraries. 💻 Programming, Design & Data Science aisuite (GitHub Repo) aisuite provides developers with a simple unified interface for multiple generative AI providers. It makes it easy to use multiple large language models (LLMs) and compare the results. aisuite allows creators to seamlessly swap out and test responses from different LLM providers without changing any code. It currently supports Anthropic, Azure, Google, AWS, Groq, Mistral, Hugging Face, and Ollama. Comparing AWS S3 with Cloudflare R2: Price, Performance and User Experience (11 minute read) R2 is a storage service by Cloudflare accessible through the S3 API that doesn't charge any egress fees. Developers only pay for storage and read/write/delete requests. This article looks at how R2 compares to AWS' S3 service. S3 is better for latency, but more than 90% of projects and organizations would be better served with R2. 🎁 Miscellaneous Has AI scaling hit a limit? (12 minute read) The AI community has operated on the principle that intelligence emerges from scale for the past four years. This has driven billions in investment and reshaped the field of AI. Signs have emerged in recent months that brute-force scaling alone might not be enough to drive continued improvements in AI. The next breakthrough in AI might not come from making current models bigger, but from making them fundamentally different. Google's plan to keep AI out of search trial remedies isn't going very well (9 minute read) Google's AI products may be restricted as a remedy following the government's win in the search monopoly trial. The Department of Justice has asked for a wide range of remedies to stop Google from potentially using AI to entrench its market dominance in search advertising. They include a ban on exclusive agreements with publishers to train on content and restrictions on investments in or acquisitions of AI products or companies. The DOJ alleges the changes are necessary to clear the way for a thriving search market as AI stands to shake up the competitive landscape. ⚡ Quick Links OpenAI gets new $1.5 billion investment from SoftBank, allowing employees to sell shares in a tender offer (4 minute read) Employees will have until December 24 to decide if they want to participate in the tender offer. Reply on Bluesky and Decentralization (18 minute read) While Bluesky may not be decentralized or federated in its current form, its team is still focused on its design principles and there are still many tasks and milestones left on the checklist. Nintendo Switch 2 release date leak suggests we need to start saving now (2 minute read) The Nintendo Switch 2 will be announced in January next year before being publicly released in March. Why am I writing a JavaScript toolchain in Zig? (11 minute read) Zig's comptime features makes it feasible to implement an esquery port where the queries are processed and optimized at compile time while still being able to operate on a compact syntax tree. Redis Inc seeks control over future of Rust redis-rs client library, amid talk of trademark concerns (3 minute read) Redis has contacted the maintainer of redis-rs with a proposal to take over the Rust package in order to add enterprise-grade features. China Hawks are Manufacturing an AI Arms Race (8 minute read) There is no solid evidence that China is actually racing towards AGI. Love TLDR? Tell your friends and get rewards! 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