Google Releases Standalone Gemini AI App for iPhone (1 minute read)
Google has launched a dedicated Gemini app for iOS. It allows iPhone users to interact with Google's AI through text or voice. The app supports iOS-specific features like Dynamic Island integration. It is free to download. Premium features can be accessed through Gemini Advanced subscriptions available as in-app purchases.
Adding payments to your LLM agentic workflows (9 minute read)
This article explores how to integrate the Stripe agent toolkit to enhance AI agents' functionality. Stripe can enable agents to access financial services and tools to help customers earn and spend funds, facilitate common support operations, and bill for usage with metered billing. Its agent toolkit gives AI agents access to the Stripe API, allowing developers to create agentic workflows.
Something weird is happening with LLMs and chess (11 minute read)
This post looks at different AI models' performance at playing chess. Almost all large language models (LLMs) are terrible at chess except gpt-3.5-turbo-instruct. It is unknown what is causing this, but it may be due to different training data, the quality of training data, the effects of instruction tuning, or there may be something particular about different transformer structures. This may explain why people got good results with LLMs and chess two years ago and why the field has been quiet since.
AI Makes Tech Debt More Expensive (3 minute read)
AI tools struggle to generate useful responses in high-debt environments with subtle control flow, long-range dependencies, and unexpected patterns.
Bluesky says 1 million people signed up for the platform in last 24 hours (2 minute read)
Bluesky saw more than a million users sign up to its platform over 24 hours last Thursday. Its app was placed at the top of the free apps chart on the App Store in the US. The platform's CEO claims that Bluesky has a higher engagement than X. Bluesky has plans to launch subscriptions. It recently raised $15 million in a Series A funding round led by Blockchain Capital.
T-Mobile Hacked in Massive Chinese Breach of Telecom Networks (2 minute read)
A Chinese cyber-espionage operation successfully gained entry into multiple US and international telecommunications companies, including T-Mobile. The months-long operation aimed to spy on the cellphone communications of high-value intelligence targets. Attackers were able to access cellphone lines used by senior national security and policy officials across the US government, stealing call logs, unencrypted texts, and some audio from targets. The hackers were able to access information from systems maintained by the carriers to comply with US surveillance requests.
Google may soon let you create email aliases in an effort to fight spam (4 minute read)
Google's 'Shielded Email' system will hide users' emails behind an email forwarding alias system to keep users' email addresses secure and help them steer clear of spam.
DOJ Will Push Google to Sell Chrome to Break Search Monopoly (4 minute read)
Justice Department antitrust officials will ask federal judge Amit Mehta to force Alphabet to sell Google's Chrome browser as part of the ruling that Google illegally monopolized the search market. They will also ask to implement measures related to artificial intelligence and Google's Android smartphone operating system. The proposals have the potential to reshape the online search market and AI industry. States are still considering adding some proposals and some details could change. Google has plans to appeal the antitrust ruling.
Documind is a document processing tool that uses AI to extract structured data from PDFs. It can handle PDF conversions, extract information, and format results as specified by customizable schemas. Documind is designed for flexible deployment on local or cloud environments.
ChatGPT is slipping (6 minute read)
Production code that utilized gpt-4o and gpt-4o-mini suddenly stopped working on November 13, suggesting there was an update to the model that made them incapable of doing the previous task.
How Mark Zuckerberg has fully rebuilt Meta around Llama (48 minute read)
The Llama story could be a pivotal chapter in the ongoing philosophical debate between open-source AI models and closed models. Llama is at the core of a complete strategic pivot by Meta to go all in on generative AI. The release of Llama 2 in July 2023 marked the beginning of a remarkable comeback for Meta and Mark Zuckerberg. Zuckerberg is now seen as a champion of tech democratization.