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In today's Techpresso:
🤖 Boston Dynamics unveils a new humanoid robot
🏴☠️ Starlink cracks down on growing black market
💰 Andreessen Horowitz raises $7.2 billion, a sign that tech startup market may be bouncing back
📷 Snap adds watermarks to AI-generated images
🎵 Amazon Music launches Maestro, an AI playlist generator
🎁 + 8 other news you might like
🔮 + 7 handpicked research papers and tools
🤖 Boston Dynamics unveils a new humanoid robotLINK
Boston Dynamics introduced a new Atlas robot, an all-electric humanoid designed for commercial use in diverse industrial applications, which is a result of nearly 15 years of development in humanoid robotics. CEO Robert Playter discussed the company's shift from research and development towards commercial products, emphasizing the significant advancements in technology that allow Atlas to perform complex, bimanual tasks and handle heavy, oddly shaped objects in industrial settings. The new Atlas represents a strategic transition towards robots that can perform multiple tasks, focusing on enhancing productivity and usability in practical applications, and is designed with unique features like a high range of motion and strength exceeding that of humans.
🏴☠️ Starlink cracks down on growing black marketLINK
SpaceX is set to terminate Starlink internet service for clients using it outside of officially designated "availability" areas, affecting users in regions like Africa.
The company issued a warning to affected users through email, citing a violation of the Starlink Terms for operating the service outside "Available" areas, with a shutdown planned for April 30.
This move targets users who have been exploiting the Starlink Roam feature for permanent use in areas without official launch or regulatory approval, including those in Africa relying on it due to slow local internet speeds.
💰 Andreessen Horowitz raises $7.2 billion, a sign that tech startup market may be bouncing backLINK
Andreessen Horowitz announced it raised $7.2 billion across five different funds, indicating renewed optimism in the technology startup sector.
The largest portion of the new funding, $3.75 billion, is allocated to the firm's growth fund, targeting later-stage companies and capital-intensive ventures.
This fundraising effort exceeds their initial goal of $6.9 billion, despite a recent downturn in venture investments and a significant reduction in tech IPOs.
📷 Snap adds watermarks to AI-generated imagesLINK
Snap announced its plan to add watermarks to AI-generated images on its platform, featuring a translucent Snap logo with a sparkle emoji.
The company stated that removing the watermark from images would violate its terms of use but did not specify how it would detect such removals.
Snap's approach to enhancing AI safety includes adopting a bug bounty program, implementing visual markers on AI-powered features, and introducing controls for parents in the Family Center.
🎵 Amazon Music launches Maestro, an AI playlist generatorLINK
Amazon's Maestro AI, integrated into Amazon Music, generates new playlists for users with a text prompt, including emoji.
Maestro is initially available to a select group of U.S. users across all Amazon Music tiers, with full songs available for Amazon Music Unlimited subscribers and 30-second previews for others.
The service will exclude offensive language and inappropriate prompts, requiring users to update their Amazon Music app on iOS and Android to access the beta feature.
Other news you might like
Intel and others commit to building open generative AI tools for the enterprise.LINK
Menteebot is a human-sized AI robot that you command with natural language.LINK
Logitech intros free tool for ChatGPT prompts... plus a mouse with an AI button.LINK
Sam Altman explains why OpenAI might steamroll your AI startup.LINK
Apple will 'look at' manufacturing in Indonesia, CEO Cook says, as China diversification push continues.LINK
France's Mistral AI seeks funding at $5 bln valuation, The Information reports.LINK
Telegram to hit one billion users within a year, founder says.LINK
Crypto miner arrested for skipping on millions in cloud server bills.LINK
Latest research and tools
Megalodon: Efficient LLM Pretraining and Inference with Unlimited Context Length: the paper introduces a method for training large language models (LLMs) that allows them to process and understand text inputs of any length efficiently.LINK
Open Source TailwindCSS UI Components: enhances apps with EasyFrontend pre-built Bootstrap v5, Tailwind CSS, React JS components for modern website design.LINK
The Anthropic Cookbook: a collection of notebooks that showcases fun and effective ways to use Claude, including code snippets and guides for developers.LINK
Firefox Proton UI userChrome.css fixes: a project that enhances Firefox's Proton design by allowing users to modify and apply custom themes using userChrome.css, accommodating those who wish to tweak the browser's UI beyond its default settings.LINK
Ollama 0.1.32: a tool that enhances macOS CPU/GPU utilization through a model split process.LINK
The Ballmer Peak: An Empirical Search: the study investigates the purported optimal blood alcohol content for coding productivity, named after Steve Ballmer, finding varied results among participants.LINK
Geiss screensaver and Winamp plug-in source code repository: hosts the latest code for a visualizer that synchronizes with music for screensavers and Winamp.LINK
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