Weekly#616

  • Google releases its own ‘reasoning’ AI model…The new model, called Gemini 2.0 Flash Thinking Experimental…
  • Navigating the AI Frontier: A Primer on the Evolution and Impact of AI Agents
  • In just 4 months, AI coding assistant Cursor raised another $100M at a $2.5B valuation
  • AI-powered search engine Perplexity has reportedly closed a $500 million funding round, valuing the startup at $9 billion
  • Grammarly is buying Coda to expand AI offerings
  • Sony’s gaming and network services segment accounts for around 37% of its revenue
  • New physics sim trains robots 430,000 times faster than reality
  • ‘World’s first’ grid-scale nuclear fusion power plant announced in the US
  • Japan Sees Nuclear as Cheapest Baseload Power Source in 2040
  • Do Autonomous Vehicles Outperform Latest-Generation Human-Driven Vehicles?
  • The brain microbiome: could understanding it help prevent dementia?
  • IOT: Z-Wave LR standard’s range of up to 1 mile and operate on mesh networks that can support as many as 4,000 devices
  • Apple reportedly won’t launch an iPhone subscription service

Weekly#615

  • Google’s NotebookLM AI podcast hosts can now talk to you, too
  • Google Cloud launches Agentspace to create, deploy agents
  • Google’s new Jules AI agent will help developers fix buggy code
  • What Is (or Was) ‘Perks Culture’?
  • Intel executives say a manufacturing spinoff is possible
  • Introducing Gemini 2.0…Gemini 2.0 is the next chapter for Google AI
  • Incident Report for OpenAI
  • Harvard Is Releasing a Massive Free AI Training Dataset Funded by OpenAI and Microsoft
  • Palantir EVP: “Modern war cannot be won without software“
  • AI Coding Assistants Landscape
  • “…The other was Heschl’s gyrus, a fold on the upper temporal lobe which hosts the auditory cortex (the cortex is the outermost layer of the brain). Better reading ability was linked to a larger anterior part of the temporal lobe in the left hemisphere compared to the right…”

Weekly#614

  • OpenAI announces full “o1” reasoning model, $200 ChatGPT Pro tier…o1-preview successfully solved 83% of problems in the International Mathematics Olympiad qualifying exam, a sharp improvement from GPT-4o’s 13% success rate…
  • Copilot Vision, Microsoft’s AI tool that can read your screen, launches in preview
  • Amazon Web Services announced it’s launching a new AI supercomputer built from its own machine learning chips that could be one of the largest used to train AI models—and tries to rival chipmaking giant Nvidia.
  • Tech predictions for 2025 and beyond by Werner Vogels
  • AWS re:Invent Videos
  • The levels of code AI
  • Apple Prepares Three-Year Modem Rollout to Outdo Qualcomm
  • “…xAI plans to expand its Memphis, Tennessee, supercomputer to house at least one million graphics processing units (GPUs)…the move represents a massive expansion for the supercomputer called Colossus, which currently has 100,000 GPUs to train xAI’s chatbot called Grok…”
  • Music sector workers to lose nearly a quarter of income to AI in next four years, global study finds

Weekly#613

  • “…the Big Four hyperscalers have spent $200 billion in capex, and nearly half of that money goes directly to Nvidia…”
  • Who’s winning the AI race
  • OpenAI gets new $1.5 billion investment from SoftBank
  • Synchronous vs. Asynchronous Standups
  • What is an AI agent?
  • Australia’s Social Media Ban for Under 16s to Become Law
  • Amazon Develops Video AI Model, Hedging Its Reliance on Anthropic
  • Denmark will plant 1 billion trees and convert 10% of farmland into forest
  • Former Android leaders are building an ‘operating system for AI agents
  • Leica Just Recorded the Highest Revenue in Its Entire 100-Year History
  • Alibaba releases an ‘open’ challenger to OpenAI’s o1 reasoning model
  • Meta plans to build a $10B subsea cable spanning the world
  • “…According to researchers at Fujitsu, the number of parameters in AI systems is growing 32-fold approximately every three years…”

Weekly#612

  • Qwen2.5-Coder Series: Powerful, Diverse, Practical
  • Google Develops AlphaQubit to Identify, Correct Quantum Errors
  • The Department of Justice asks court to force Google to spin off Chrome
  • Nvidia (NVDA) Q3 2025 Earnings Call Transcript
  • Companies aren’t prepared for AI-powered bot attacks
  • “…Under the new Windows Resiliency Initiative, Microsoft is working to create a new recovery environment for Windows that will help devices come back online faster if they’re knocked offline…”
  • AI Agents Market Landscape
  • Elon Musk’s xAI Startup Is Valued at $50 Billion in New Funding Round
  • iOS 18.2 beta 4: Here’s what’s new
  • NASA wants SpaceX and Blue Origin to deliver cargo to the moon
  • AI eats the world
  • Microsoft Flight Simulator 2024 arrives with a “full digital twin” of Earth

Weekly#611

  • Why Engineers Should Study Philosophy…”…When language is no longer the barrier, we can employ the full expressivity of human language to convey to the AI higher concepts and logic, that would capture our request in the most compact and effective way…”
  • OpenAI Nears Launch of AI Agent Tool to Automate Tasks for Users…The new software, codenamed “Operator,” is set to be released in January.
  • “…Restarting a computer may seem like an inconvenience to those who don’t like waiting, but it’s essential for maintaining performance, stability and security as some malware will remain in memory until a reboot…”
  • AI protein-prediction tool AlphaFold3 is now more open…The code underlying the Nobel-prize-winning tool for modelling protein structures can now be downloaded by academics.
  • How Monzo run migrations across 2,800 microservices
  • What happens when Software no longer needs code
  • Google’s Gemini AI now has its own iPhone app
  • “…Anthropic is working with the Department of Energy’s nuclear specialists to ensure its models don’t help people make weapons, the company first shared with Axios…”
  • Disney’s net income increased to $460 million
  • “…Data-rich enterprises like Bayer are working with Microsoft to develop industry-specific gen AI models—and then licensing them to others…”
  • Bluesky crosses the 15 million user mark

Weekly#610

  • iPhones on iOS 18.1 will automatically reboot and lock down after being idle for a while
  • ChatGPT traffic is up over 100% year-over-year. NotebookLM is up over 200% month-over-month.
  • Taiwan chip output to hit record $165bn on AI demand
  • Battery Ventures | State of the OpenCloud | PDF
  • Google rolls out its Gemini AI-powered video presentation app
  • Using the Strangler Fig with Mobile Apps
  • “…However, Cursor has become one of the most popular. Its developer, Anysphere, has seen its revenue grow from $4 million annualized recurring revenue (ARR) in April to $4 million a month as of last month…”
  • Apache OpenServerless
  • How ChatGPT Brought Down an Online Education Giant…Chegg’s stock is down 99%
  • How Samsung fell behind in the AI boom leading to a $126 billion wipeout
  • Global temperatures likely to exceed key limit for first time
  • The other election night winner: Perplexity
  • Perplexity raising new funds at $9 bln valuation
  • Microsoft Unveils Enhanced AI Tools for Developers at GitHub Universe
  • OpenAI acquires chat.com domain name

Weekly#609

  • OpenAI Brings Search Features to ChatGPT in Challenge to Google
  • According to Canalys research, global smartphone shipments grew 5% year on year in Q3 2024, reaching 309.9 million units
  • Apple expands iPhone satellite services deal, commits $1.1bn to expand capacity
  • Google confirms Android 16 is coming earlier than usual, developer preview begins soon
  • Apple reports fourth quarter results
  • Amazon’s cloud unit records highest profit margin in at least a decade
  • Meta is making a robot hand that can ‘feel’ touch
  • Kuo: iPhone 17 will use new Wi-Fi and Bluetooth chip made in-house by Apple
  • “…Visa, President of Technology Rajat Taneja said the company already has more than 500 generative artificial intelligence applications in use…Visa’s deployments include a tool that finds security bugs in code, chatbots designed to act as subject matter experts on various areas of the business and a tool that helps subscribers customize timings of their billing cycles…”
  • Uranus’ moon Miranda may have an ocean beneath its surface, study finds
  • “…We’re training the Llama 4 models on a cluster that is bigger than 100,000 H100s, or bigger than anything that I’ve seen reported for what others are doing…”
  • Meta AI has more than 500 million users

Weekly#608

  • Thoughtworks, Technology Radar
  • Activate 2025 Report
  • Introduction to Kafka Tiered Storage at Uber
  • Introducing the analysis tool in Claude.ai
  • Anthropic unveils updated AI models with new ‘computer use’ feature for automating complex tasks
  • Video scraping: extracting JSON data from a 35 second screen capture
  • “In 2005…Paul Otellini, Intel’s chief executive at the time, presented the board with a startling idea: Buy Nvidia, a Silicon Valley upstart known for chips used for computer graphics. The price tag: as much as $20 billion….”
  • How to Measure Design System at Scale
  • Streamlining Financial Precision: Uber’s Advanced Settlement Accounting System
  • Making Uber’s ExperimentEvaluation Engine 100x Faster
  • Splitting engineering teams into defense and offense
  • Apple Intelligence expands in iOS 18.2 developer beta, adding Genmoji, Visual Intelligence and ChatGPT
  • The year is 2149 and …

Weekly#607

  • State of AI 2024 Report
  • Leading with Artificial Intelligence
  • Will AI lead to superintelligence or just super-automation?
  • bitnet.cpp is the official inference framework for 1-bit LLMs that runs directly on CPUs
  • “…The contract contains a clause that says that if OpenAI builds artificial general intelligence, or A.G.I. — roughly speaking, a machine that matches the power of the human brain — Microsoft loses access to OpenAI’s technologies…“
  • Artificial intelligence and the economy: implications for central banks
  • Former OpenAI technology chief Mira Murati to raise capital for new AI startup
  • Perplexity lets you search your internal enterprise files and the web
  • Building a Global Caching System at Netflix: a Deep Dive to Global Replication
  • How Cell-Based Architecture Enhances Modern Distributed Systems
  • The next winner of the AI boom is also one of its biggest problems…Data centers could consume up to 9% of electricity in the U.S. by the end of the decade