TLDR 2023-05-11

Google's annual I/O conference took place yesterday in Mountain View, California. This article covers everything that Google announced at the event. The announcements include a new PaLM 2 artificial intelligence language model, AI writing tools for Gmail, an immersive view for Google Maps, the removal of the waitlist for Bard, generative AI in Search, the Pixel 7a budget Android phone, the Pixel Tablet, and the Pixel Fold.

Microsoft has signed an agreement to purchase fusion electricity from Helion Energy by 2028. Helion Energy must build the fusion system in time or face financial penalties. It aims to generate over 50 megawatts of power. Many experts predict that fusion energy will not be achieved until the end of the decade or several decades from now.

Doctors in the UK have successfully performed an IVF procedure resulting in a child born with DNA from three people. The treatment, called mitochondrial donation treatment, involves taking healthy tissue from the eggs of female donors whose DNA is free from harmful mutations that predispose the mother to inheritable diseases. The material is used to create an embryo that has DNA from both biological parents as well as around 37 genes from the donor's egg. More than 99.8% of the offspring's DNA still comes from the biological parents.

Vast has announced plans to launch a commercial space station by August 2025. The Haven-1 module will be deployed in low-Earth orbit. The module will undergo initial testing for several weeks, after which four astronauts will spend around a month onboard before returning to Earth. Vast has made commercial crew seats for both the initial mission and a second mission in 2026 available for sale. NASA will likely be decommissioning the ISS in 2030, after which it will lease crew time on commercial space stations.

Google has launched an integrated chat tool for coders. Codey was designed specifically to handle queries related to coding and also to Google Cloud general queries. It will be available for Google’s cloud-hosted Workstations service, Visual Studio Code, the Google Shell Editor, and JetBrains’ IDEs. Codey is currently only available to a few trusted testers.

privateGPT allows users to interact with their documents using LLMs without an internet connection. It ensures that no data ever leaves the user's execution environment. privateGPT allows users to easily ingest documents and ask questions of them while keeping everything completely private and secure.

Developers are increasingly turning to AI chatbots for advice instead of Stack Overflow. Traffic to Stack Overflow has been dropping since the introduction of GitHub CoPilot. GitHub traffic is continuing to grow. Developers seem to have pivoted away from searching and posting questions to using AI to generate large chunks of code.

Google has developed smaller and easier to deploy Starline booth prototypes. Starline creates 3D visual and audio models of users so that people using the system feel like they are in the same room. Previous Starline models used entire rooms, but the newest version is smaller and easy to set up. This article describes what it is like using the new Starline.

The leaker has reportedly been fired and will face legal action by Apple.

Hugging Face has released Transformers Agents, a fully multimodal API that allows developers to control over 100,000 models by talking to Transformers and Diffusers.

LLMs allow people to attempt things beyond their current abilities.

It's better to buy a .com domain sooner rather than later if a product is working and people are using it.

Nearshoring is when companies hire or outsource to workers in locales closer to home.

Microsoft won't raise salaries for full-time employees this year but will continue with bonuses, stock awards, and promotions.