Tuesday, March 4, 2025

Perplexity AI phone πŸ“±, stablecoin wars πŸͺ™, Yoke infrastructure as code πŸ‘¨‍πŸ’»

Deutsche Telekom and Perplexity are partnering to develop an AI phone that will have Perplexity's AI integrated on a system-wide level ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌  ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ 

TLDR

Together With QA Wolf

TLDR 2025-03-04

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πŸ“±

Big Tech & Startups

T-Mobile's parent company is making an AI Phone with Perplexity (3 minute read)

Deutsche Telekom and Perplexity are partnering to develop an AI phone that will have Perplexity's AI integrated on a system-wide level. Users will be able to interact with the phone's AI assistant even on the lock screen. The phone will offer access to various AI providers. It will have some agentic capabilities, but it is unclear yet how it will execute tasks. The phone will be officially launched in the second half of this year priced at under a thousand dollars and hit the shelves at some point in 2026.
Amazon-backed AI firm Anthropic valued at $61.5 billion after latest round (3 minute read)

Anthropic has just closed a funding round at a $61.5 billion post-money valuation. The $3.5 billion round was led by Lightspeed Venture Partners - other investors included Salesforce, Cisco, and Fidelity. Anthropic plans to use the funds to advance its development of next-generation AI. It plans to expand its compute capacity, deepen its research in mechanistic interpretability and alignment, and accelerate its international expansion in Asia and Europe.
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Science & Futuristic Technology

NASA's upcoming telescope launch aims to address some existential questions (2 minute read)

NASA plans to launch a telescope this week to provide insight into how the universe began. The SPHEREx telescope has a very wide field of view. It can detect infrared light and other wavelengths too long to be seen with the naked eye. The mission will image the entire universe four times over two years and create a very large data set about the visible universe.
Roche rolls out new DNA 'sequencing-by-expansion' approach (3 minute read)

Sequencing-by-expansion is a new proprietary method that pulls apart DNA molecules and amplifies the signal of each individual base, allowing scientists to avoid the time requirements of cycle-based sequencing as well as the comparable difficulties in distinguishing true signals among the noise. The technology is still in development and not yet commercially available, but it could one day be suitable for whole genome and exome sequencing as well as parsing RNA. The science behind the technology represents a significant breakthrough that addresses the limitations of existing sequencing solutions. It has the potential to revolutionize the use of sequencing in research and healthcare.
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Programming, Design & Data Science

Most ads get ignored—here's where they don't (Sponsor)

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agents.json (GitHub Repo)

The agents.json Specification is an open specification that formally describes contracts for API and agent interactions. It is built on OpenAPI, the gold standard for describing how API endpoints work and can be executed. The specification introduces flows and links to enable AI agents to take the right sequence of actions.
Yoke is really cool (14 minute read)

Yoke is a project that takes the idea of Infrastructure as Code to the next level. It allows developers to write infrastructure definitions in Go or Rust, compile them to WebAssembly, and then take input and output from Kubernetes manifests that get applied to the cluster. Yoke has a feature called Air Traffic Control, which is a Kubernetes operator that lets developers define infrastructure as CustomResourceDefinitions - the data in the CustomResource is passed into the Flight you associate with it, and the Flight generates the manifests that get applied to the cluster. Air Traffic Control makes deploying things to clusters easier than ever.
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Miscellaneous

The Kill-or-Be-Killed Fight for Crypto's Future (20 minute read)

The call to bring crypto into the mainstream through government regulation has opened up a kill-or-be-killed battle among industry players. New laws could be devastating for individual players depending on what side of new rules they are on. Tether may be an industry leader, but Circle has been calling for greater regulation that would benefit Circle at Tether's expense. This article details the battle between Circle and Tether, which has been going on since crypto trading hit the mainstream in 2020.
Yes, we did shut down Salesforce a year ago, as we have many SaaS providers (4 minute read)

Klarna shut down around 1,200 SaaS a year ago as it had developed an internal tech stack that brought data and knowledge together, resulting in serious productivity gains. The company found it was able to use AI to quickly deploy new interfaces and interactions. There was no longer any need for it to continue with a lot of its SaaS as the tech stack allowed it to consolidate its technology and knowledge and remove the silos. Besides the savings, Klarna gained the unification and standardization of its knowledge and data.

Quick Links

Evals are not all you need (6 minute read)

Evals aren't great due to their false appeal as a substitute for proper testing with users.
Observations About LLM Inference Pricing (19 minute read)

Pricing for the same model can differ substantially across providers - model size is a good predictor of price.
DuckDB goes distributed? DeepSeek's smallpond takes on Big Data (12 minute read)

DeepSeek's smallpond project allows the company to scale up simply without having to rely on complex and heavy distributed frameworks by default 'just in case'.
Are AIs People? (34 minute read)

There will quite likely be sentient AI systems in the future.
On GPT-4.5 (27 minute read)

GPT-4.5 has a different form factor with unique advantages that are hard to describe precisely in words.
Ollama Function Caller (GitHub Repo)

The Ollama function caller is a command-line tool for prompting Ollama models locally that supports streaming and gives users access to important settings, like context length and temperature.

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Thanks for reading,
Dan Ni & Stephen Flanders


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