TLDR 2024-12-27

Microsoft and OpenAI's definition of artificial general intelligence (AGI) is 'a system that can generate at least $100 billion in profits'. The companies agreed on the definition in 2023 as part of an agreement which had a clause that stated that OpenAI would stop allowing Microsoft to use any new technology it develops after AGI is achieved. OpenAI and Microsoft have been on diverging paths for some time now. Microsoft needs its own proprietary tech and OpenAI needs more money.

DeepSeek, a Chinese AI research lab, has released DeepSeek-V3, a Mixture-of-Experts model that features a total of 671B parameters. The model was trained on 14.8 trillion tokens. It has been released on GitHub along with a detailed paper outlining its capabilities. The model outperformed Meta's flagship Llama 3.1 405B parameter model and many other closed-source models on benchmark scores.

China launched 10 internet satellites on a Long March 5B rocket earlier this month. The satellites entered their predetermined orbits smoothly and the mission was a complete success. They are the first batch for Guowang, a broadband megaconstellation in low earth orbit (LEO) that will eventually consist of nearly 13,000 spacecraft. Guowang will be one of two Chinese versions of SpaceX's Starlink LEO megaconstellation.

Captura is a company that plans to electrochemically strip carbon dioxide out of the ocean, store or use it, then return the water to the sea, where it will naturally absorb more carbon dioxide from the air. It will start pumping as much of the Pacific ocean as it can in a few months at Hawaii's Keāhole Point. Besides Captura, there are dozens of similar field trials and pilot projects that will start scaling up their facilities in 2025.

Ghostty is a terminal emulator that doesn't force you to choose between speed, features, or native UIs. It can be used as a drop-in replacement for your existing terminal emulator. In addition to being a standalone terminal emulator, Ghostty is also a C-compatible library for embedding a fast, feature-rich terminal emulator in any 3rd party project.

awrit is a full graphical web browser for Kitty terminal with mouse and keyboard support. It works best with Kitty v0.28 or newer. awrit can be used to display documentation from DevDocs, watch the changes from Vite come to life, create a tiled layout without a tiling window manager, and add fancy UI using web technologies.

The release of o3 suggests the next few years are going to be insane. This post details some predictions about how AI will change the world over the next few years. The predictions cover areas such as AI agents, the software engineering industry, science and research, war and societal chaos, what happens if AI goes rogue, and more.

Google may have bought Character AI because Character AI had figured out how to run its models without costing a fortune. Character AI was able to serve millions of users without bleeding money. Google is now giving away flash models for free on AI Studio - this wouldn't be possible without figuring out how to make inference really cheap. Pre-training has hit diminishing returns, so companies are shifting toward chain-of-thought prompting and inference-time optimizations.

ChatGPT search is surprisingly competitive when it comes to informational queries, but Google is better at almost all queries except content gap analysis.

While Apple keeps adding cool new software features, there still isn't an immediate, obvious reason to buy a Vision Pro.

Loyal, a US biotech start-up, plans to release LOY-002, a pill that could give dogs a minimum of one extra year of healthy life, early next year.

POSIX time assumes the length of the day is 86,400 seconds, which is not always true.

DeepSeek-V3's training only cost $5.576 million - it took around 55 days on a 2048xH800 cluster.

The optimal approach for a domain when considering both performance and operational resilience is for the domain to be served by two distinct dual-stack diverse anycast nameservers.