OpenAI co-founder John Schulman says he will leave and join rival Anthropic (2 minute read)
OpenAI co-founder John Schulman recently announced that he will leave OpenAI to join Anthropic to deepen his focus on AI alignment. The move comes less than three months after OpenAI disbanded a superalignment team that focused on ensuring that AI systems can be controlled. Schulman has worked at OpenAI since receiving a Ph.D. from the University of California, Berkeley in 2016. Greg Brockman, another co-founder of OpenAI and its president, announced on Monday that he was taking a sabbatical for the rest of the year.
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‘You are a helpful mail assistant,' and other Apple Intelligence instructions (8 minute read)
Apple's latest developer betas contain a handful of the generative AI features that were announced at WWDC. The files for these prompts show how these features work. This article contains screenshots of some of the prompts and makes guesses at what features the prompts are related to. Instructions for how to locate the files within the macOS Sequoia 15.1 developer beta are available.
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Science & Futuristic Technology
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Figure redesigns its humanoid robot from the ground up for slick new F.02 (5 minute read)
Figure's second-generation humanoid robot is aimed at production lines in commercial settings. Its engineers took a ground-up hardware and software redesign approach to developing the robot that included upgrades to the AI systems, computer vision, battery pack, electronics, sensors, and actuators. The robot now has microphones and speakers that allow it to have one-on-one conversations with humans. A video trailer from Figure showing off the robot is available.
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China begins launching a megaconstellation, and it sounds a lot like Starlink (6 minute read)
There are two serious efforts underway in China to develop a rival to SpaceX's Starlink project. The first batch of 18 satellites for one of those projects launched into low-Earth orbit on Tuesday on a Long March 4A rocket. Besides providing civilians with internet, the network could be used for military applications and as a diplomatic tool. The full deployment of these networks will require a significant increase in China's launch capacity.
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Programming, Design & Data Science
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Predictions for the future of software engineering (2 minute read)
Software engineering will likely look radically different in a few years. The introduction of coding agents that complete tasks end-to-end will change how engineers work, making them more like engineering managers who spend more time on the higher level parts of coding. This will have many effects, like creating more software, more engineers, and productivity gains for companies. Marketing may even start being directed to AI agents as companies try to get them to choose their products over a rival's.
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OpenAI: Introducing Structured Outputs in the API (5 minute read)
OpenAI has introduced two new ways to guarantee valid inputs. The first is a new 'strict' option for function definitions and the second is a new feature option for the 'response_format' field that lets users pass a JSON schema to specify a required output. OpenAI's models will now return a 'refusal' message if a model denies a request. The new gpt-4o-2024-08-06 model is 50% cheaper on inputs and 33% on outputs compared to gpt-4o-2024-05-13. It also supports up to 16,384 tokens, up from 4,096.
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Return-to-office mandates hurt employee retention, productivity, survey says (5 minute read)
Employee retention improves when employees have a say in where they work. A recent survey on employee satisfaction found that those who are allowed to choose between in-person, remote, or hybrid work are three times more likely to want to stay at their company. It also found that workers facing return-to-office mandates are 14 times less likely to 'quit and stay'. Several other studies have found similar results.
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Fair Source (GitHub Repo)
Fair Source aims to legitimize the practice of companies meaningfully sharing the code for their core software products while retaining control of their roadmaps and business models - it is not to be confused with Free and Open Source Software.
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