Google CEO Sundar Pichai has warned employees that more job cuts are coming this year. The company leadership is preparing its AI goals for the year and will publish its 2024 objectives and key results this week. Pichai says that the layoffs won't be at the scale of last year's reductions and will not touch every team. Alphabet shares jumped 55% last year and its revenue in the third quarter returned to double-digit growth alongside a rebound in the digital ad market.
Samsung just held its Galaxy Unpacked event, announcing three new smartphones to start the new year. It also introduced an artificial intelligence platform. The Galaxy S24 Ultra has a 6.8-inch QHD+ Dynamic AMOLED 2X display with a 1-120Hz refresh rate. The Samsung Galaxy S24 boasts a 6.2-inch FHD+ Dynamic AMOLED 2X display that supports a 1-120Hz refresh rate, and the Galaxy S24 Plus features a 6.7-inch QHD+ display. All phones come with Samsung's new Vision booster, which enhances outdoor visibility with its 2,600-nit peak brightness. Galaxy AI includes five key features: Live Translate, Interpreter, Chat Assist, Note Assist, and Transcript Assist.
AlphaGeometry is an AI system that solves complex geometry problems at a level approaching a human Olympiad gold medalist. It can solve 25 out of 30 Olympiad geometry problems within the standard Olympiad time limit - the average human gold medalist solves 25.9 problems in the same time. AlphaGeometry uses a neural language model with a rule-bound deduction engine to find solutions. Its output is both verifiable and clean and it uses classical geometry rules with angles and similar triangles just as students do.
Space tugs are miniature spacecraft that ferry small satellites to designated orbits. They are particularly useful for satellites that launch as part of a rideshare mission that seek to reach a different altitude or inclination than that of the primary payload. Impulse Space has built an in-space tug that can haul bigger satellites to more distant orbits. Helios is sized to fit within a Falcon 9 fairing and designed to fly on any medium- or heavy-lift vehicle to boost its capability. It will allow satellites to reach geostationary orbit within a day at a much lower cost than current alternatives.
Nvidia's RAPIDS project claims that cuDF, a GPU-based Pandas replacement, is up to 80 times faster than Pandas. While these speed-ups are impressive, they're also misleading. The benchmarks compare against Pandas running on a single CPU core - while the Pandas library is single-threaded, fixing this doesn't require using a GPU. It also ignores costs - switching to a GPU may make things faster, but they are significantly more expensive. GPUs may still be an appropriate solution for some tasks, but it will require careful experimentation to determine if they are right for the use case and budget.
AWS will start charging around $4 per month for IPv4 addresses on February 1. While IPv6 is clearly a good thing, there are still challenges to switching to it. The biggest challenge to global adoption is ISP support. A lot of developer tools aren't set up for IPv6 yet. If you want to ensure your company continues to run smoothly after February 1, start making as many changes as possible now.
Apple is giving select members of the media Vision Pro demos this week. This article describes to readers what the experience is like. The demo aims to walk through as many elements as possible in roughly 60 minutes, from face scans to the spatial desktop to movie watching, while unfortunately skipping over gaming. The author wasn't fully convinced the device was a compelling buy at $3,500 as the price is prohibitively expensive for the majority of people interested in the system and there is still a lack of Vision Pro-specific apps on the system.
Amazon has been working on a paid subscription for Alexa, but there have been company conflicts revolving around the new technology. Alexa Plus will supposedly feature all the functionalities that the current Alexa offers, but with a more personalized and conversational AI. It is expected to launch on June 30. Amazon has been struggling to improve the AI, which still provides inaccurate information, and reduce costs.
Apple is protecting its App Store racket with the same kind of indignant entitlement that characterized Microsoft in the late 90s, during its darkest monopoly days.