Reddit has informed moderators that it plans to replace resistant moderation teams to keep spaces open and accessible to users. Reddit's Moderator Code of Conduct says that Reddit has the duty to keep communities operational if users rely upon them. Many subreddits went dark between Monday and Wednesday to protest Reddit's pricing for its API. Some have made the decision to continue the blackout indefinitely. Reddit's CEO said that the blackouts had no significant impact and that there were no plans to change the API pricing.
The Combined Charging System Type 1 (CCS1) standard seemed like it had become the charging system for electric vehicles until recently, when Ford and General Motors both signed deals to adapt their electric vehicles to use Tesla's North American Charging Standard (NACS). While the majority of new EVs in the US will use the NACS in the future, recently passed legislation will mean that CCS1 charging infrastructure will still be built into public charging network charging ports. Updating the regulation would cause extensive retrofit costs for public charging networks.
Virgin Galactic is starting commercial spaceflight services at the end of the month. The company plans to begin working through its ticket-holder backlog through monthly launches after two initial missions. The first will be a scientific research mission and the second will be the first real private astronaut flight. Virgin Galactic plans to increase its launch cadence to reduce scarcity and lower the price. Its launch method involves dropping a spacecraft from a custom carrier jet at a high altitude and taking off from there.
Intel is starting to ship its Tunnel Falls processor to research labs. The 12-qubit chip will be sent to the Universities of Maryland, Rochester, and Wisconsin and the Sandia National Lab. Intel hopes that researchers will help the company characterize sources of error and determine which form of qubits provide the best performance. Details about the Tunnel Falls processor and how it works are available in the article.
The Vercel AI SDK is a library for building edge-ready AI-powered streaming text and chat UIs. It features React and Svelte helpers for streaming text responses and building UIs, first-class support for LangChain, OpenAI, Anthropic, and HuggingFace, Edge Runtime compatibility, and callbacks for saving completed streaming responses to a database. The SDK can be used to build a ChatGPT-like app with just a few lines of code.
The adoption of language model APIs is creating a new stack. This article looks at data from a survey across 33 companies in the Sequoia network to better understand the applications people are building and the stacks they are using. Almost all the companies surveyed use OpenAI's GPT and believe that a retrieval system is a key part of their stack. The field is moving too quickly for anyone to be confident in predicting what the end-state stack will look like, but LLM APIs and frameworks like LangChain are likely here to stay. It is still early days for the AI industry and there will be more opportunities for founders as the technology continues to develop.
While we now have practical VR devices that are far beyond prototypes or proofs of concepts, we haven't yet seen mass-market adoption. VR devices will get a lot better in the future, but it is still unknown whether they will become popular like smartphones or PCs. Apple has decided it isn't worth making or selling a device without the capabilities that the Vision Pro has. Unlike Meta, which is working to deliver hardware at the right price, Apple is creating the right hardware and waiting for prices to drop.
Wargraphs, a Paris-based company with one employee and two products, League of Graphs and Porofessor, was acquired by MOBA Network last week for 50 million Euros. The company's tools can be used to help players see and understand invaluable statistics for the game League of Legends. Wargraphs made 12.3 million Euros in sales during the year leading up to November 2022 by selling advertisements. Its apps have over 800,000 daily users. MOBA Network plans to further develop the assets and expand into new games and markets.
Squarespace has entered a definitive asset purchase agreement with Google and will acquire the assets associated with the Google Domains business, which include approximately 10 million domains spread across millions of customers.
Prof Yan LeCun says that while there is no question that AI will surpass human intelligence, we are still many years away from reaching that level, and people won’t build something if they realize it's not safe.