TLDR 2024-02-22

Google's new family of AI language models, Gemma, are free open-weights models built on technology similar to Gemini. Gemma models can run locally on a desktop or laptop computer. There are two models, one with 2 billion parameters and the other with 7 billion. Each model has pre-trained and instruction-tuned variants available. Google claims the 7 billion parameter model outperforms Meta's Llama 2 7B and 13B models on several benchmarks in math, Python code generation, general knowledge, and commonsense reasoning tasks. This is Google's first significant open large language model release since OpenAI's ChatGPT was revealed in late 2022.

Reddit hopes to entice its users to become shareholders to help drive change and make the market more fair to individual traders. 75,000 of the most prolific Redditors will have the opportunity to buy shares before trading starts when the company goes public later this year, possibly as soon as March. The privilege is usually reserved for big investors. Reddit announced its IPO in December 2021, when it was valued at about $10 billion. The site experienced widespread protests in June last year after it killed off many third-party apps by charging for access to its API. Users are still questioning the company's leadership over the decision.

Intel has revealed new chip technologies for its foundry customers. The advances include more dense logic and a 16-fold increase in the connectivity within 3D-stacked chips. Intel is moving from being a company that only produces its own chips to becoming a foundry that makes chips for others. This article takes a look at the new technologies that Intel will be offering in its new business model.

Flying to the Moon is expensive, so NASA decided to reach out to private companies for help. NASA's Commercial Lunar Payload Services (CLPS) program originally aimed to launch its first missions by 2020. Years later, the first vehicles are now ready. Astrobotic's Odysseus lander will attempt to land on the Moon on Thursday. No private company has successfully landed on the Moon yet. If the CLPS program is successful, in a few years, NASA will have laid the foundation for a highway to the Moon.

ReadySet is a transparent database cache for Postgres and MySQL. It provides the performance and scalability of an in-memory key-value store without requiring users to rewrite their apps or manually handle cache invalidation. ReadySet can turn even the most complex SQL reads into lightning-fast lookups. It keeps cached query results in sync with databases automatically by utilizing the database's replication stream. ReadySet can be used along with an existing ORM or database client.

Park UI contains components built on Ark UI that work for any JavaScript or CSS framework. The components have sensible defaults that can be easily customized. Park UI ships packages tailored for each supported CSS framework, allowing developers to only install the components they need. Examples for inspiration are available.

Employers regularly run background checks on potential employees. However, companies don't always make their history public - there's only so much you can learn from career pages and recruiter emails. This article presents an example of what a background check on an employer might look like. The check goes through checking a company's funding rounds, Glassdoor reviews, and court orders. Performing a background check on a company can turn up interesting facts that could help you decide whether you really want to work with them.

Gemini Pro 1.5 is an enormous upgrade for the Gemini series. The model has a 1,000,000 token context size, much larger than Claude 2.1's 200,000 and gpt-4-turbo's 128,000 token context sizes. While the model can still miss things and hallucinate incorrect details, it is able to process and extract text information from short videos. This article contains an example where Gemini Pro 1.5 is used to extract book names from a short video.

Apple's PQ3 cryptographic protocol purports to offer more robust encryption and defense against quantum computing attacks.

A summary of Nvidia's fourth fiscal quarter earnings.

A collection of questions about the AI industry and where it is headed.

Retell AI turns LLM agents into human-like voice agents that can handle tasks like making appointments with customers.

AI is the most Douglas Adams of all technologies - when technology becomes absurd, we must respond with absurd inventions.

The top three phones of 2023 were all the iPhone 14 models, with the iPhone 13 taking the fourth spot before the iPhone 15 models in spots 5, 6, and 7.