TLDR 2025-02-14

TLDR is hiring part time curators to launch our TLDR Fintech newsletter.

TLDR Fintech already has over 200,000 pre-registered subscribers, it's a great way to build a personal brand within the fintech community.

The ideal candidate would have deep experience working directly in the fintech space, and enjoy analyzing news and trends within the space.

Time commitment is ~2-3 hours/week paid at a rate of $100/hr. To apply please send your LinkedIn or resume to jobs@tldr.tech along with a couple sentences on why you'd be a good fit!

Both Apple and Google restored TikTok to their app stores in the US on Thursday. Other ByteDance apps were also restored. President Trump has said that he would like the US to own a 50% share in TikTok through a joint venture with other tech companies. Competing social networks have been trying to bank on TikTok's uncertain future by releasing rival features and apps.

Elon Musk's offer to buy OpenAI for $97.4 billion has a clear deadline: May 10. There is a stipulation that the buyers are able to examine OpenAI's financial and business records and interview OpenAI staff before the all-cash transaction is finalized. The offer undermines Musk's legal claims that OpenAI's startup's assets can't be transferred away for private gain. Musk will drop the bid to acquire OpenAI if the board commits to keeping it as a nonprofit.

Uber is expanding its partnership with Avride to include autonomous deliveries in Jersey City. Customers in the city can now have their orders delivered by one of Avride's autonomous sidewalk delivery robots. Avride's first robotaxi deployment in the US will be in Dallas this year. The startup has also partnered with Grubhub to bring delivery bots to university campuses across the US.

The UK's Advanced Research and Intervention Agency (Aria) is funding a trial to test a brain-computer interface that directly alters brain activity using ultrasound to boost mood. The technology could revolutionize the treatment of conditions such as depression, addiction, OCD, and epilepsy by rebalancing disrupted patterns of brain activity. The device was developed by a US-based non-profit called Forest Neurotech. The trial will recruit patients who have had a part of their skull temporarily removed so that the device can be tested without having to perform surgery. It will run for three and a half years starting in March, and if successful, the device will move into full clinical trials.

One of the ultimate aims of protein design is to build entirely new enzymes from scratch. Scientists have traditionally discovered enzymes in nature and then adapted them through trial and error. New advances in AI may eventually lead to ways to create bespoke enzymes from the ground up, but doing so remains a formidable challenge. Many of the protein structural databases used to train models consist overwhelmingly of structures gleaned from 'frozen' images, preventing them from making accurate recreations of dynamic structures.

It's possible to use macOS folder actions to automate various tasks, including converting MOV to MP4 and images to WEBP, downloading videos from YouTube, and more. This article explains how to set these automations up. macOS folder actions turn folders into an interface for any CLI app, making the desktop even more useful than ever.

People seem to be confused about what can be concluded about scaling large language models. At this point, it is not plausible to precisely predict how far we are from unlocking all of the remaining functions that large language models are capable of. We don't even know all of the component functions of human intelligence - every time we solve something previously out of reach, it turns out that human-level generality is even further out of reach. The invention of human-level artificial general intelligence will disrupt history, but that point is still pretty far off.

Arm has signed Meta as a customer and will start making chips this year. The first in-house Arm chip will be unveiled as early as this summer. The semiconductor company usually licenses its chip blueprints, so making its own chips is a notable change in strategy. This will turn some of Arm's existing customers into competitors.

The large-scale engagement of corporations in open source needs to be treated seriously because it has and will continue to have negative consequences even if every individual involved is participating in good faith.

Apple may soon allow third-party retailers to sell its Vision Pro headset.

Meta CTO Andrew Bosworth said employees were free to quit if they think that it's okay to leak to the media because of policy disagreements.

The integration of AI has stifled the adoption of new and potentially superior technologies due to training data cutoffs and system prompt influence.

It may be possible to have 'a country of geniuses' within a data center by as early as 2026 - companies will need to be prepared for this future.

This post tells the story of how a doomed open-source project was turned into a fast-growing AI company.