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Here's the latest tech news from the last 24 hours:

🤖 Meta unveils Llama 2 Long AI that outperforms competitors
🤳 BeReal pushes back at report that it’s losing steam
📱 Kids receive 4,500 notifications daily and hate Facebook
🔒 Founder of crypto hedge fund that lost $10 billion arrested in Singapore
🥽 Scientists find microplastics inside clouds

🤖 Meta unveils Llama 2 Long AI that outperforms competitorsLINK

Meta Platforms has revealed a new AI model called Llama 2 Long, which surpasses competitors like OpenAI's GPT-3.5 Turbo and Claude 2 in generating responses to long user prompts.

The development process of Llama 2 Long involved continually pretraining from the existing Llama 2 model with a dataset of longer texts, and a key modification to the Rotary Positional Embedding encoding.

This advancement demonstrates the potential of Meta's open-source approach in generative AI, earning acknowledgement and enthusiasm from the open-source AI community.

🤳 BeReal pushes back at report that it’s losing steamLINK

BeReal, a popular social app, is reportedly losing users despite new features, according to a report from Similarweb, but BeReal disputes the figures, claiming it's still growing.

The report shows a drop from 20 million to 16.06 million global active users over the last year, while BeReal claims they have more than 25 million active users worldwide.

The decline comes as competition in the social media space continues to grow, with apps like Instagram's Threads gaining popularity, even as BeReal's unique candid photo concept is copied by other major platforms.

📱 Kids receive 4,500 notifications daily and hate FacebookLINK

A new study reveals that children age between 11 to 17 years old receive more than 4,500 notifications on their Android devices every day, mainly from Snapchat and Discord.

Social media platforms, in particular TikTok, are highly engaging the teenagers, with 50% of them using TikTok for an average of nearly two hours daily.

The study also points out a significant decline in Facebook popularity amongst the younger generation, with less than 20% of teens using it during the week of the study.

🔒 Founder of crypto hedge fund that lost $10 billion arrested in SingaporeLINK

Three Arrows Capital's founder, Su Zhu was arrested on Friday in Singapore while trying to leave the country.

Zhu and another founder, Kyle Davies were sentenced to four months in prison for not cooperating with liquidators of their failed hedge fund.

The Singapore-based Three Arrows Capital filed for bankruptcy last summer after the cryptocurrency markets crashed, causing industry-wide damage.

🥽 Scientists find microplastics inside cloudsLINK

Japanese researchers found microplastics, including nine different types of polymers and a type of rubber, inside the cloud water taken from peaks of Mount Fuji and Mount Oyama.

These airborne microplastics are so abundant they might play a part in rapid cloud formation, possibly even altering the climate and contributing to global warming through "plastic rainfall".

The degradation of airborne microplastics in the upper atmosphere releases greenhouse gases that contribute to global warming, thus adding another factor to account for in future global warming projections.

Other news you might like

Blue Origin and Sierra Space's partnership on Orbital Reef project is reportedly at risk, as both companies shift focus to other projects, despite NASA's confirmation of the project's continuity. LINK

Supreme Court will determine whether Florida and Texas laws demanding detailed content moderation explanations from platforms infringe on the First Amendment.LINK

ChatGPT, OpenAI's chatbot, is leveraged by students for cheating, posing a threat to the lucrative essay ghostwriting industry despite a recent decrease in usage.LINK

Streamers are leaving Kick due to safety concerns and the CEO's inappropriate behavior during a stream involving a non-consensual 'prank' with a sex worker.LINK

AI tool "Side Eye" extracts audio information from still images and muted videos, identifying speaker's gender, words, and location, sparking privacy debates.LINK

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