TLDR 2024-02-14

OpenAI is experimenting with adding a form of long-term memory to ChatGPT. Users will be able to ask the chatbot to remember something, see what it remembers, and ask it to forget. The feature is currently available to a small number of users for testing. OpenAI hasn't revealed what technique it is using for the system, but the implementation is similar to that of Custom Instructions, a feature that was introduced in July last year.

Mark Zuckerberg recently posted a video to his Instagram account giving his official verdict on the Apple Vision Pro versus the Meta Quest 3. He says that the Quest 3 is the better product. The Quest 3 weighs less and its lack of a wired battery and wider field of view allows for greater motion. While Zuckerberg thinks the Vision Pro is a better entertainment device, he notes that the Quest has a better immersive content library than Apple. The video is available in the article.

Solar Radiation Management (SRM) is starting to gain more attention due to 2023's high temperatures. It's much easier to artificially dim the sun than most people imagine. Injecting sulfur into the stratosphere could be a cheap way to cool down the Earth. It would have an almost instant effect, but once it starts it would be dangerous to suddenly stop. SRM will not fix the root cause of the problem, but it could buy time for us to remove CO2 from the atmosphere. However, its implementation could make us more complacent about fixing the core issues.

A study has identified blood proteins that appear to predict the risk of developing dementia up to 15 years before diagnosis. High levels of the blood proteins GFAP, NEFL, GDF15, and LTBP2 are strongly associated with dementia. Blood levels of these proteins can be outside of normal ranges more than 10 years before symptom onset. The findings, once validated, may lead to the development of blood tests that identify people at risk of developing dementia.

Antithesis is now coming out of stealth after five years of development. One of the fundamental problems of software development is that software has to handle many situations that the developers have never thought of or will never anticipate. To overcome this, Antithesis built a fully-deterministic platform that hunts for bugs in software. The platform is designed to one day be able to find many kinds of bugs in many kinds of software, but it currently focuses on distributed systems reliability/fault tolerance testing. Antithesis is now looking for organizations running distributed systems for testing.

GitButler is a git branch management tool built for modern workflows. It is currently available for macOS and Linux - Windows support is in development. GitButler lets developers work on multiple branches at the same time, allowing them to quickly organize file changes into separate branches while still having them apply to the working directory. It can push branches individually and directly create pull requests.

Many developers agree that most of their best side projects are personal tools. Some of these tools end up being useful to others, so they end up being productized and make money. It's much easier to think about building for yourself compared to thinking about building for the masses. There are still plenty of new things that can be built.

Yann LeCun, Meta's chief AI scientist, received a TIME100 Impact Award for his contributions to the world of artificial intelligence on Sunday. LeCun sat down with TIME before the ceremony to discuss barriers to achieving artificial general intelligence, the merits of Meta's open-source approach, and claims that AI could pose an existential risk to the human race. This article contains an edited transcript of the interview.

Stable Cascade is an image generation model that works at a much smaller latent space than other models like Stable Diffusion.

$7 trillion would help OpenAI increase its chip supply and develop the next generations of GPT as fast as possible.

SGLang is a structured generation language designed for large language models that makes interacting with them faster and more controllable.

The games industry is undergoing a trend of mass layoffs that seems poised to span at least two years.

Mozilla plans to shut down Hubs and scale back its investment in its VPN, Relay, and Online Footprint Scrubber.

Microsoft no longer faces tighter controls on how it can operate Bing in the EU - the EU commission has also closed investigations into Microsoft's Edge and online advertising business.