Good morning! This is your daily ☕️ Techpresso.
On this day in 2008, Hulu launched in the United States
In today's Techpresso:
🤔 TikTok might be building an Instagram alternative
🙃 Midjourney bans all its competitor's employees
🚫 Google restricts election-related queries for its Gemini chatbot
📲 Apple to let developers distribute apps directly from their websites
💰 AI startups reach record funding of nearly $50 billion in 2023
🎁 + 9 other news you might like
🔮 + 4 handpicked research papers and tools
🤔 TikTok might be building an Instagram alternativeLINK
ByteDance, TikTok's parent company, is speculated to be developing a photo-sharing app called TikTok Photos, potentially competing with Instagram, based on code and icons found in TikTok's APK file. TikTok Photos aims to connect 'like-minded people who enjoy photo posts,' with features tailored for various creators, including world travelers and food bloggers, emphasizing easy enjoyment and discovery of photo posts. The move to create TikTok Photos follows TikTok's strategy to expand its content offerings, including 30-minute videos and text posts, as it seeks to diversify and compete across multiple digital content fronts.
🙃 Midjourney bans all its competitor's employeesLINK
Midjourney banned all Stability AI employees from using its service, citing a systems outage caused by data scraping efforts linked to Stability AI employees.
The company announced the ban and a new policy against "aggressive automation" after identifying botnet-like activity from Stability AI during a server outage.
Stability AI CEO Emad Mostaque is looking into the incident, and Midjourney's founder David Holz has provided information for the internal investigation.
🚫 Google restricts election-related queries for its Gemini chatbotLINK
Google has begun restricting Gemini queries related to elections globally in countries where elections are taking place, to prevent the dissemination of false or misleading information.
The restrictions were implemented amid concerns over generative AI's potential impact on elections and followed an advisory from India requiring tech firms to obtain government permission before introducing new AI models.
Despite the restrictions, the effectiveness of the restrictions is under question as some users found ways to bypass them, and it's uncertain if Google will lift these restrictions post-elections.
📲 Apple to let developers distribute apps directly from their websitesLINK
Apple plans to allow some developers to distribute their iOS apps directly from websites in EU countries, with a software update enabling this feature "later this spring."
Developers must adhere to stringent Apple requirements, including app notarization and registering website domains through App Store Connect, to use web distribution.
The process to distribute apps directly to iPhone users in the EU involves several restrictions, including a requirement for developers to have over 1 million first annual installs on iOS in the EU and to meet specific criteria for Apple's Developer Program.
💰 AI startups reach record funding of nearly $50 billion in 2023LINK
AI startups reached a record funding of nearly $50 billion in 2023, with significant contributions from companies like OpenAI and Anthropic.
Investment trends showed over 70 funding rounds exceeding $100 million each, partly due to major companies' investments, including Microsoft's $10 billion in OpenAI.
While large tech companies are venturing to dominate the AI market, specialized AI startups like Midjourney manage to maintain niches by offering superior products.
Other news you might like
Microsoft officially launches Copilot GPT Builder for Copilot Pro subscribers.LINK
Apple developed a monster chip for its Apple Car project, report says.LINK
Midjourney's consistent characters could be a minor update with major economic impact.LINK
Apple is working on an AI-powered platform that might make mobile ads even more annoying.LINK
Should artists be paid for training data? OpenAI VP wouldn’t say.LINK
Meta's Ray-Ban smart glasses are becoming AI-powered tour guides.LINK
French startup Mistral AI vows to maintain open source.LINK
Uber CEO at SXSW: 'Our Competition Is Car Ownership'.LINK
PostgreSQL and Databricks founders join forces for DBOS to create a new type of operating system.LINK
Latest research and tools
Transformer Debugger (TDB): a tool by OpenAI's Superalignment team that helps investigate behaviors of small language models by combining interpretability techniques with sparse autoencoders, facilitating the understanding of why models behave in certain ways without initial coding.LINK
Stealing Part of a Production Language Model: researchers demonstrate methods to replicate parts of a proprietary language model without authorized access.LINK
Is Cosine-Similarity of Embeddings Really About Similarity?: the paper questions if cosine similarity accurately reflects true similarity between embeddings.LINK
Bitwarden Server: a project containing APIs, databases, and other core infrastructure for the backend of Bitwarden client applications, developed in C# using .NET Core and deployable via Docker on multiple platforms.LINK
Want to get the latest news differently? Find us on:
See you tomorrow for a new dose of ☕️ Techpresso!
-min.png){kind=small}
.png){kind=small}
