Amazon to Launch New AI-Powered Alexa Using Anthropic's Claude (3 minute read)
Amazon will release a revamped version of its Alexa voice assistant in October. It will be powered by AI models from Anthropic's Claude rather than Amazon's own in-house AI technology, as Amazon's internal software reportedly struggled with performance issues during initial testing. The new Alexa will enable users to engage in more complex, context-aware conversations with the assistant. Amazon plans to offer the upgraded Alexa as a paid subscription service, separate from existing Prime memberships, with pricing likely to be between $5 to $10 per month.
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Nvidia's Future Relies on Chips That Push Technology's Limits (8 minute read)
Nvidia's Blackwell chips are about twice as big as its predecessors, housing 2.6 times the number of transistors. Instead of one big piece of silicon, Blackwell consists of two advanced processors and numerous memory components joined in a single, delicate mesh of silicon, metal, and plastic. The manufacturing of each chip has to be close to perfect, presenting engineering challenges that have a sizable impact on the bottom line, with each defect rendering a $40,000 chip useless. This article looks at some of the challenges Nvidia had to overcome to produce the chip.
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Science & Futuristic Technology
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Ozempic could delay ageing, researchers suggest (3 minute read)
Semaglutide could be used to slow down the process of aging. A study tracking people aged 45 or older who were overweight and had cardiovascular disease but not diabetes found that those who took the drug died at a lower rate from all causes. It also improved heart failure symptoms and cut levels of inflammation regardless of whether or not people lost weight. The study reinforces the theory that being overweight increases the risk of death due to many etiologies.
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'Closer than people think': Woolly mammoth 'de-extinction' is nearing reality — and we have no idea what happens next (13 minute read)
De-extinction science has advanced dramatically in the past two decades. The technology has progressed to the point that it's more of an ethical question whether we should revive lost species. While some companies want to bring back extinct animals to enrich biodiversity, replenish vital ecological roles, and bolster ecosystem resilience, scientists are not convinced that bringing back creatures that died out centuries or millennia ago would offer as much benefit as preserving the ones that are still hanging on. This article takes a look at the current technologies and the possible consequences that de-extinction may have on the climate and other animals.
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Programming, Design & Data Science
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Valkey Is a Different Kind of Fork (5 minute read)
Valkey is a high-performance key/value datastore forked from Redis. It has gained a lot of support, with two-thirds of former top Redis maintainers and developers switching over to the project. Valkey 8.0 introduces serious speed improvements and new futures that Redis users have wanted for some time, including improved debugging tools, enhanced documentation, and new command-line utilities for easier management and monitoring. It maintains full API and CLI compatibility with Redis and compatibility with the Redis Serialization Protocol, making migrating from Redis to Valkey easy.
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OK, here is my best guess on the state of LLMs (1 minute read)
Making a jump similar to the 100x jump going from GPT-3 to GPT-4 is going to be very hard. It will require a lot more training data and larger data centers. It is difficult to see whether efforts to improve models will bear any fruit. Policies like SB 1047 threaten to further slow down progress.
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How Do You Change a Chatbot's Mind? (16 minute read)
Today's AI may seem harmless, but these systems are being woven into society in ways that may be hard to untangle. It could be problematic for people if AI has somehow trained a bias against them, for example, a person whose name was associated with a negative event may be unfairly discriminated against by other chatbots. Chatbots are highly suggestible - if people add text on the internet and it gets memorized, it's memorialized in the language model.
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Not everything is physics (10 minute read)
Physicists like to write books with grand unified theories of the world, but that view of the world is limited and we shouldn't expect a theory or algorithm that explains it all. The universe is made up of many different worlds, both physical and metaphorical, and many of these worlds aren't connected to each other in any meaningful way. The truth is contextual, so it isn't a good idea to reduce everything to fundamentals. Reality being a disjoint collection of domains seems infinitely more rich than it being a single equation.
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Willingness to look stupid (28 minute read)
If you don't regularly have people thinking you're stupid, you're either likely having extremely filtered interactions with people, you are avoiding looking stupid, or you are not noticing when people think you're stupid.
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Dan Ni & Stephen Flanders
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