Good morning! This is your daily ☕️ Techpresso.
On this day, 29 years ago, the Yahoo! search engine was officially launched, setting the stage for its IPO at $13 per share, soaring to a peak of $475 before plummeting to $8.02 within a span from 1996 to 2001.
In today's Techpresso:
🥴 Google co-founder says company 'definitely messed up'
🚫 Facebook, Instagram, and Threads are all down
🤔 Microsoft compares New York Times to '80s movie studios trying to ban VCRs
💼 Fired Twitter execs are suing Elon Musk for over $128 million
🔊 ChatGPT can read its answers out loud
🎁 + 7 other news you might like
🔮 + 4 handpicked research papers and tools
🥴 Google co-founder says company 'definitely messed up'LINK
Sergey Brin admitted Google 'definitely messed up' with the Gemini AI's image generation, highlighting issues like historically inaccurate images and the need for more thorough testing. Brin, a core contributor to Gemini, came out of retirement due to the exciting trajectory of AI, amidst the backdrop of Google's 'code red' in response to OpenAI's ChatGPT. Criticism of Gemini's biases and errors, including its portrayal of people of color and responses in written form, led to Brin addressing concerns over the AI's unintended left-leaning output.
🚫 Facebook, Instagram, and Threads are all downLINK
Facebook, Instagram, and Threads, all owned by Meta, are experiencing a significant outage affecting many users since around 10AM ET.
Facebook is forcibly logging users out, Instagram's feed and story functions are sporadically non-functional, while Threads is entirely inaccessible due to an error message.
Despite the widespread issues across these platforms, WhatsApp continues to operate normally, and Meta has not yet officially addressed the outage.
🤔 Microsoft compares New York Times to '80s movie studios trying to ban VCRsLINK
Microsoft filed a motion to dismiss the New York Times' copyright infringement lawsuit against OpenAI, comparing the newspaper's stance to 1980s movie studios' attempts to block VCRs, arguing that generative AI, like the VCR, does not hinder the original content's market.
The company, as OpenAI's largest supporter, asserts that copyright law does not obstruct ChatGPT's development because the training content does not substantially affect the market for the original content.
Microsoft and OpenAI contend that ChatGPT does not replicate or substitute for New York Times content, emphasizing that the AI's training on such articles does not significantly contribute to its development.
💼 Fired Twitter execs are suing Elon Musk for over $128 millionLINK
Former Twitter executives, Parag Agrawal, Ned Segal, Vijaya Gadde, and Sean Edgett, are suing Elon Musk for over $128 million in severance payments after being fired following his acquisition of the company.
The lawsuit alleges Musk aimed to avoid paying $200 million by firing them before their stock options vested, citing Musk's own words from a biography as evidence.
Despite accusations from Musk's X about the executives' negligence and misconduct, the lawsuit asserts their actions were approved by the company's board, including the payment of $90 million to legal teams involved in the acquisition.
🔊 ChatGPT can read its answers out loudLINK
OpenAI introduced a Read Aloud feature for ChatGPT, enabling it to vocalize responses in five voice options across 37 languages, available on both web and mobile applications.
The feature, compatible with GPT-4 and GPT-3.5 versions, automatically detects the text's language and is an advancement in OpenAI's multimodal capabilities.
Users can activate the Read Aloud feature via a tap and hold on mobile apps or by clicking a speaker icon on the web, allowing for playback control such as play, pause, or rewind.
Other news you might like
Tesla’s Berlin factory shuts down after suspected transformer arson.LINK
Now everyone can edit their Instagram DMs.LINK
Steve Jobs once asked LVMH boss Bernard Arnault for advice on opening Apple Stores when his peers thought it was ‘completely crazy’.LINK
Competition in AI video generation heats up as Deepmind alums unveil Haiper.LINK
New dressing robot can 'mimic' the actions of care workers.LINK
Cloudflare is adding a firewall to help keep your LLM safe.LINK
Stablecoin Tether crosses $100 billion tokens in circulation.LINK
Latest research and tools
Puter: an advanced open-source desktop environment in the browser that enables the creation of remote desktop environments, acts as an interface for cloud storage services, and allows for the building and hosting of websites, web apps, and games.LINK
Study on tree-based models vs. deep learning: tree-based models remain superior for tabular data due to their structure-adapting capabilities.LINK
Nuke: a memory arena implementation for Go that improves performance, enhances cache locality, and increases garbage collection efficiency by allocating large blocks of memory at once.LINK
Sigmoid Loss for Language Image Pre-Training (2023): the paper introduces a new method improving how computer models learn from images and texts together.LINK
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