Behind the scenes: How AI is reshaping Google (1 minute read)
Google has decided to reshuffle some of its departments to further speed up its AI development. The first part of this change involves the Gemini app team being absorbed by DeepMind. Another big change involves the Assistant teams moving to Platforms and Devices. Prabhakar Raghavan, SVP of search and ads, is changing roles to become Google's chief technologist. Nick Fox, who was a part of Raghavan's leadership team, will be taking over Raghavan's old position and be in charge of Search, Ads, Geo, and Commerce products.
It's possible to record a screen capture of a browsing session and then use Google Gemini to extract numbers from the video. While these language models shouldn't be trusted not to make mistakes, it appears that the Gemini 1.5 Flash 002 model is sufficient enough to complete the task consistently. Extracting data from a 35-second video costs less than a tenth of a cent. Video scraping allows developers to have total control over what is exposed to the AI model. This article walks readers through how to do it.
Automattic offered employees another chance to quit over WordPress drama (2 minute read)
Automattic offered employees nine months of pay if they disagreed with the WP Engine dispute.
OpenAI, Microsoft reportedly hire banks to renegotiate partnership terms (2 minute read)
OpenAI and Microsoft have both hired investment banks to help revise the terms of their partnership as OpenAI plans to restructure to reincorporate its for-profit arm as a benefit corporation and remove caps that previously limited investors' returns. The negotiations are said to focus on how big of a stake Microsoft will receive in OpenAI following the restructuring. Microsoft has invested over $13 billion into OpenAI since 2019. The current terms of the partnership say that Microsoft will receive most of OpenAI's initial profits until it recoups its investment. OpenAI doesn't expect to become profitable until 2029.
Did Automattic commit open source theft? (17 minute read)
Automattic, the VC-funded company behind WordPress, is in a full-blown corporate conflict with WP Engine, a popular managed WordPress hosting service. As part of the conflict, Automattic forked a popular plugin made by WP Engine, replaced the plugin in the plugin directory, and is migrating over 2 million of the plugin's customers silently onto the fork. The reviews for the plugin have remained as if nothing has changed and any reviews pointing out the heist are being actively removed. The silent change, aimed at reducing WP Engine's revenue, broke some production sites. The incident is a nightmare scenario for companies serious about supply chain security - the WordPress.org plugin directory is no longer reliable.
@truth_terminal has just become the first AI in history to become a millionaire (3 minute read)
Goatseus Maximus, a crypto based on AIs posting about a meme, is almost worth half a billion dollars and continues to grow.
xAI, Elon Musk's AI startup, launches an API (3 minute read)
The xAI API is now available. It currently only has a single model, grok-beta, which is priced at $5 per million input tokens or $15 per million output tokens. The API supports function calling and its documentation suggests that it will eventually include vision models capable of analyzing both text and images.
Daze, a creative, AI-powered messaging app for Gen Z, is blowing up prelaunch (3 minute read)
Daze is a free-form messenger service aimed at younger audiences with a suite of fun and creative features.
Anthropic publicly releases AI tool that can take over the user's mouse cursor (4 minute read)
Anthropic's new Computer Use tool can take control of users' mouse cursors and perform basic tasks on their computers. It is now available exclusively with Anthropic's mid-range 3.5 Sonnet model via the API. It works by taking rapid successive screengrabs, so it can miss short-lived notifications and other changes and is incapable of some common actions like drag-and-drop. The tool is still cumbersome and error-prone at times. A video from Anthropic explaining the tool is available in the article.
Svelte 5 is alive (5 minute read)
Svelte 5 is finally stable after almost 18 months of development. It is the most significant release in the project's history. Svelte 5 is a ground-up rewrite, which means that apps will be faster, smaller, and more reliable. It allows developers to write more consistent and idiomatic code and there's less stuff to learn for newcomers. Svelte 5 is almost completely compatible with Svelte 4 and the initial upgrade will be completely seamless for the majority of users.
Suchir Balaji, a former researcher at OpenAI, recently wrote in his personal blog that he believes the company is not complying with US copyright law, adding to the growing number of voices that say the company's giant data scraping business is based on shaky legal ground. Balaji worked at OpenAI for four years before leaving this summer. He says that AI companies are destroying the commercial viability of the individuals, businesses, and internet services that created the digital data used to train AI systems. OpenAI claims it builds its AI models using publicly available data in a legal and fair way. The company is currently dealing with multiple lawsuits for its use of copyright material.