What Computers Cannot Do: The Consequences of Turing-Completeness (32 minute read)
This article helps readers understand the limits of computers and what computers cannot do. Most programmers seem to not understand these hard limits or what they mean. Understanding Turing-completeness and its consequences for our finite machines, which are technically not Turing-complete, is important for programming.
GPT-5 might arrive this summer as a “materially better” update to ChatGPT (3 minute read)
OpenAI is expected to release a major AI model, possibly GPT-5, sometime in mid-2024, likely during the summer. The new model will likely be a multimodel large language model with similar capabilities to GPT-4, but better. OpenAI is still reportedly training the model, after which it will go through internal safety testing to identify any issues before public release. Other issues, besides those that may come up from testing, may delay the launch.
Scientists say they can cut HIV out of cells (2 minute read)
Scientists from the University of Amsterdam claim they have successfully eliminated HIV from infected cells using CRISPR gene-editing technology. The work remains a proof-of-concept and will not become a cure for the disease any time soon. The study's findings are still being scrutinized.
Stability AI Is Falling Apart (3 minute read)
Several key developers at Stability AI, creators of the popular text-to-image generator Stable Diffusion, have resigned.
Stability AI CEO resigns to ‘pursue decentralized AI’ (2 minute read)
Emad Mostaque is stepping down as CEO of Stability AI. The company will be led by two interim co-CEOs, COO Shan Shan Wong and CTO Christian Laforte. Mostaque stepped down partly due to the push toward the development of commercialized AI products. He says he is leaving the company to pursue decentralized AI.
U.S. Sues Apple, Accusing It of Maintaining an iPhone Monopoly (12 minute read)
Apple is being sued by the US for employing a strategy that relies on exclusionary anticompetitive conduct that hurts both consumers and developers. The 88-page lawsuit says that the company violated antitrust laws with practices that were intended to keep customers reliant on their iPhones and make them less likely to switch to competing devices. It seeks to put an end to those practices and possibly a breakup of the company. The lawsuit is likely to drag out for years before any type of resolution.
216. United States v. Apple (54 minute read)
The US Department of Justice, 16 states, and the District of Columbia are suing Apple for abusing its market position illegally under the Sherman Antitrust Act. The process will likely take up to a decade or more to complete, even though a settlement or withdrawal is possible at any time. This article takes an in-depth look at the case and makes predictions on its outcomes. A link to the filing is available in the article.
OpenAI Heading To Hollywood To Pitch Revolutionary “Sora” (2 minute read)
OpenAI plans to meet with Hollywood studios, talent agencies, and media executives to show the potential of its Sora software this week. Sora will likely be released to the public later this year. The model could potentially upend the way movies are made. OpenAI will likely follow its strategy of working in collaboration with the industry through a process of iterative deployment to ensure safe implementation.
As AI booms, land near nuclear power plants becomes hot real estate (3 minute read)
Land near power plants is set to become a hot commodity due to AI. Several data center operators, including AWS and Microsoft, have explored nuclear-powered options for their operations. While most projects are looking to build on the land surrounding nuclear plants, some projects, like Microsoft's, are exploring the idea of installing tiny modular plants to power existing data centers. While small modular reactors are not yet ready for production, there are still more than 400 reactors around the globe to collocate with.
Nvidia’s AI chip dominance is being targeted by Google, Intel, and Arm (2 minute read)
The Unified Acceleration (UXL) Foundation, a group formed by Intel, Google, Arm, Qualcomm, Samsung, and other tech companies, is developing open-source software to prevent AI developers from being locked into Nvidia's proprietary technology.
Facebook snooped on users’ Snapchat traffic in secret project, documents reveal (4 minute read)
Facebook had a secret project that intercepted and decrypted Snapchat network traffic to understand user behavior and help Facebook compete with Snapchat.
“The king is dead” — Claude 3 surpasses GPT-4 on Chatbot Arena for the first time (4 minute read)
Anthropic's Claude 3 Opus has surpassed OpenAI's GPT-4 for the first time on Chatbot Arena. Chatbot Arena is a leaderboard run by the Large Model Systems Organization, a research organization dedicated to open models. Its site allows visitors to rate outputs from various models, enabling it to calculate the best models in aggregate. While Claude's rise is notable, GPT-4 is now over a year old.
The one about the web developer job market (35 minute read)
The developer job market is the worst it has been in over two decades, even with the AI bubble in full force. It is unlikely to ever fully bounce back. Finding a good job is only going to get harder - the overall market might fluctuate, but there isn't much on the horizon that seems likely to turn the decline around. Effective documentation, information, and training will likely start getting harder to find, especially in areas where AI is even less effective than normal.
Amazon will maintain a minority stake in the company but won't have an Anthropic board seat.