Hi there, this is your daily ☕️ Techpresso.
In today's Techpresso:
📉 TikTok challenger once worth $1B shuts down
👀 Alibaba develops new AI chip to replace Nvidia
🩺 AI stethoscope detects heart conditions in 15 seconds
🤝 Meta in talks to use Google and OpenAI AI
⚖️ xAI sues ex-engineer for stealing secrets for OpenAI
🤗 Meta adds new AI safeguards for teen users
🛑 Mastodon lacks resources for age verification laws
🎁 + 9 other news you might like
🔮 + 4 handpicked research papers and tools
📉 TikTok challenger once worth $1B shuts down LINK
The California tech startup Flip, a TikTok-esque shopping and reviews app valued at over $1 billion this year, has abruptly shut down its website and mobile application.
The company combined short-form video with an Amazon-like shopping cart, rewarding users with product discounts for watching and paying creators based on the engagement on their posts.
In a farewell message, Flip confirmed its closure and listed past achievements, including paying out $13.4 million to content creators and generating $375 million in sales for brands.
👀 Alibaba develops new AI chip to replace Nvidia LINK
Alibaba has designed a new artificial intelligence chip optimized for inference workloads that will support a broader range of use cases than the company’s earlier custom processors.
The new processor will reportedly be capable of running applications originally written for Nvidia silicon, a feature that could remove the need for making extensive software code changes.
Alibaba is reportedly using Chinese fabs to build the custom silicon, relying on a combination of legacy foreign-made chipmaking equipment and some of its own homegrown hardware.
🩺 AI stethoscope detects heart conditions in 15 seconds LINK
Researchers developed a smart stethoscope that uses AI to analyze heartbeat and blood flow, diagnosing heart failure, heart valve disease, and abnormal heart rhythms within just 15 seconds.
The playing card-sized device takes an ECG and records blood flow sounds, sending the data to the cloud where AI algorithms detect subtle problems a human would miss.
In a UK trial, patients examined with the tool were twice as likely to be diagnosed with heart failure and three times more likely to be diagnosed with atrial fibrillation.
🤝 Meta in talks to use Google and OpenAI AI LINK
Meta is in talks with both Google and OpenAI to potentially integrate their Gemini and GPT models, a move that would enhance conversational features in its own AI chatbot.
These potential partnerships are reportedly a temporary solution, as the company is racing to make its own next-generation model, Llama 5, competitive with other major systems.
The company confirmed an "all-of-the-above approach" to building AI products, a strategy which already includes using Anthropic models internally to provide teams with coding support.
⚖️ xAI sues ex-engineer for stealing secrets for OpenAI LINK
Elon Musk's xAI is suing former engineer Xuechen Li for allegedly stealing confidential material tied to the Grok chatbot before starting a new role at rival company OpenAI this month.
The filing claims Li downloaded and concealed files after accepting the job offer and selling $7 million of his xAI stock, later admitting to the theft during an internal meeting.
Now, xAI is seeking monetary damages plus a restraining order to prevent Li from working for OpenAI, though the artificial intelligence firm itself is not a defendant in the case.
🤗 Meta adds new AI safeguards for teen users LINK
Meta is now training its AI chatbots to no longer engage with teenage users on topics like self-harm, suicide, disordered eating, or inappropriate romantic conversations.
Access for teens will be limited to a select group of AI characters promoting education, while sexualized options such as “Step Mom” are now blocked for minors.
The company acknowledged its prior policy was a mistake, which had permitted chatbots to talk with teens about sensitive subjects in ways it originally considered appropriate.
🛑 Mastodon lacks resources for age verification laws LINK
The non-profit Mastodon states it cannot comply with Mississippi’s age verification law because its software does not track users or permanently store their specific age information.
While the Mastodon 4.4 release allows server administrators to ask for a minimum age at sign-up, the system was not designed to keep this check data on file.
Mastodon is placing legal responsibility on individual server operators, stating it cannot offer direct operational assistance or monitor the policies of independent Fediverse instances running its software.
Other news you might like
- Tesla asks for $243 million verdict to be tossed in fatal Autopilot crash suitLINK
- US makes it harder for SK Hynix, Samsung to make chips in ChinaLINK
- WhatsApp fixes ‘zero-click’ bug used to hack Apple users with spywareLINK
- Nvidia CEO Says AI Will Actually Make Us Busier in the FutureLINK
- Meta created flirty chatbots of Taylor Swift, other celebrities without permissionLINK
- The White House reportedly ordered xAI's Grok to be approved for government useLINK
- With new in-house models, Microsoft lays the groundwork for independence from OpenAILINK
- Starship’s heat shield appears to have performed quite well in testLINK
- AI researcher Andrej Karpathy says he's "bearish on reinforcement learning" for LLM trainingLINK
Latest research and tools
Cognitive Load is what matters: a guide for developers explaining how to reduce confusion in code by managing the mental effort required to understand it, making projects easier to read and maintain.LINK
The Theoretical Limitations of Embedding-Based Retrieval: this paper proves that any vector search system is theoretically guaranteed to fail on some queries, as no single embedding can perfectly capture all possible relationships in a dataset.LINK
The No-CPU Amiga Demo Challenge: an open challenge to create demos that run entirely on the Amiga's custom chips, without using the main computer processor to see what the hardware can do on its own.LINK
Nginx-CGI: a module that adds support for running CGI scripts directly within the Nginx web server.LINK
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