Friday, March 13, 2026

Meta's AI flop πŸ€–, Google Maps redesign πŸ—Ί️, Perplexity Agent API πŸ§‘‍πŸ’» 

Meta's new foundational AI model, Avocado, has fallen short on internal tests for reason, coding, and writing. The model's release will be delayed ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌  ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ 

TLDR

Together With SerpApi

TLDR 2026-03-13

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Big Tech & Startups

Meta Delays Rollout of New AI Model After Performance Concerns (4 minute read)

Meta's new foundational AI model, Avocado, has fallen short on internal tests for reason, coding, and writing. It is not performing as strongly as the leading AI models from rivals like Google, OpenAI, and Anthropic. The model's release will be delayed until at least May while Meta works on improving it. Meta's leaders are already thinking about the next AI model, which will be named Watermelon.
Google Maps gets its biggest navigation redesign in a decade, plus more AI (3 minute read)

Google Maps has implemented a feature called Ask Maps that helps users plan trips and answers complex questions about locations. Powered by Gemini, it is accessible via a button up near the search bar. It works like a chatbot, so users can send follow-up prompts to refine and expand on its suggestions. Ask Maps is rolling out now in the US and India, but only on Android and iOS. Web support will come later.
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Science & Futuristic Technology

Building a Home Robot With Zero Robot Data (3 minute read)

Data-first home robot company Sunday Robotics has announced a Series B raise. The company's unique approach claims zero robot data, with a focus on real-world data only. It uses exact duplicates of tools mounted on robot arms to collect all of its robot data while data collectors wear a hat that captures wide field-of-view RGB camera images. The company has developed a glove that allows it to create a distributed network of operators to collect high-quality, diverse data at a massive scale.
The Elusive Cost Savings of the Prefabricated Home (42 minute read)

Factory-manufactured homes can, in certain cases, yield substantial cost savings over conventional construction. A single-wide manufactured home is probably around 40% to 50% cheaper than an equivalent site-built home. However, these savings quickly disappear with larger and more complex homes. This doesn't mean the industrialization of home building is a doomed enterprise, but it does show how it is an enormously complex problem.
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Programming, Design & Data Science

Crusoe BYOM: 5x Higher Throughput for Custom Models (Sponsor)

You've built the perfect fine-tuned model - but running it on generic cloud infrastructure, you're going to hit performance bottlenecks. The culprit? Standard infra that wasn't designed for proprietary architectures.

Crusoe's Bring Your Own Model (BYOM) is your ticket to scale without compromise. Powered by MemoryAlloy™ technology, Crusoe optimizes its inference engine specifically for your unique weights, achieving:

→ 5x higher throughput.

→ Breakthrough Time-To-First-Token speed compared to stock vLLM.

→ Dedicated capacity and "glass box" visibility.

→ Total IP ownership stays with model builders.

Stop letting infrastructure hold back your AI innovation. Scale your fine-tuned models with precision

The Perplexity API platform is now a full-stack, model-agnostic API platform for building agents (3 minute read)

The Perplexity API platform replaces model providers, search layers, and embeddings. It allows developers to swap between the latest frontier models and configure curated presets, tool access, step limits, and token budgets, all from one endpoint. Developers have direct access to the same index that powers Perplexity to call real-time information with citations within apps and agents. They will also have access to the same execution environment that Perplexity uses internally as a standalone service.
Shopify/liquid: Performance: 53% faster parse+render, 61% fewer allocations (2 minute read)

Shopify's Liquid is an open-source Ruby template engine somewhat inspired by Django. Its developer found dozens of new performance micro-optimizations using a variant of Andrej Karpathy's Autoresearch, a system that runs hundreds of semi-autonomous experiments to find new effective training techniques. Implementing the optimizations resulted in a 53% improvement on benchmarks, an impressive improvement for a code base that's been tweaked with hundreds of contributors over 20 years. The experiment shows how effective the Autoresearch pattern can be.
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Miscellaneous

The Shape of the Thing (5 minute read)

The market instability in February was a preview of what it feels like when the increasing ability of AI starts to interact with markets, jobs, and governments all at once. While feelings of uncertainty will likely spread further, uncertainty is not the same as helplessness. The choices that individuals and organizations make now matter because there is still time to influence the direction the technology develops. Every organization trying to figure out a good way to use AI right now is setting a precedent for everyone else.
This Might Be the Last Job You Have (7 minute read)

A huge amount of modern work is already hollow. People sit in meetings that don't matter, produce things that won't last, and perform a version of productivity that everyone silently pretends is real. Most mass layoffs aren't really due to some AI revolution, but because those jobs were already obsolete. AI is bringing in an era where the constraints of work that told us what to do, who to be, and how to spend our days are dissolving. It will take us some time to learn how to deal with this freedom.

Quick Links

TLDR is hiring a Senior Software Engineer, Applied AI ($250k-$350k, Fully Remote)

As the first engineer on TLDR's new Applied AI team, you'll build AI agents and composable Claude Skills to let non-technical teammates create their own AI workflows. Learn more.
Microsoft to Make New 'Xbox Mode' Available on All Windows 11 PCs Next Month (1 minute read)

Xbox mode is a controller-optimized interface that lets players browse their library, launch games, use Game Bar, and switch between apps.
Don't Vibe — Prove (16 minute read)

This post describes a vibe coding system that uses types as specifications, which forces compilers to reject code until they can produce a valid proof that the output satisfies the specification.
Amazon is determined to use AI for everything – even when it slows down work (15 minute read)

Amazon's internal AI tool, Kiro, frequently hallucinates and generates flawed code that software developers have to spend time fixing.
Vite 8.0 is out! (12 minute read)

Vite 8 delivers up to 10-30x faster builds while maintaining full plugin compatibility.
The Middle Loop (6 minute read)

There is still plenty of engineering work in software engineering, even if it looks different.

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Thanks for reading,
Dan Ni & Stephen Flanders


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