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  • OpenAI's Chip Ambitions 🤖 , Meta's VR Moves 📡 , and Breakthrough Tech for Deaf Athletes 🖥️

OpenAI's Chip Ambitions 🤖 , Meta's VR Moves 📡 , and Breakthrough Tech for Deaf Athletes 🖥️

10/9/2023

Tech News 📡 

OpenAI, a well-funded AI startup, is reportedly contemplating the development of its own AI chips amidst a worsening chip shortage. Strategies under consideration include acquiring an AI chip manufacturer or initiating an internal chip design effort. The company, currently reliant on GPU-based hardware for developing models like ChatGPT and GPT-4, is exploring these options as the demand for GPUs skyrockets, straining the supply chain. While OpenAI CEO Sam Altman has prioritized acquiring more AI chips, the endeavor of bringing a custom chip to market could be years in the making and demand substantial investment.

Meta is strategizing to mainstream its VR technology by releasing a VR headset without controllers to reduce costs next year, in response to Apple’s Vision Pro announcement. The company aims to make its next headset, codenamed Ventura, even cheaper and more comfortable without compromising screen resolution. Meta is also considering unbundling controllers, allowing customers to use hand gestures or purchase controllers separately. The shift towards emphasizing the practical uses of the headset, such as gaming and productivity, is seen as a direct response to Apple’s Vision Pro pitch.

Trending Startups📱

TalkNotes is an AI-driven voice note-taking app designed to convert hours of note-taking into minutes by transcribing and structuring spoken words. Supporting over 50 languages and boasting a user base of over 1400, the app allows users to record their voice, choose a style for the AI to transcribe into various content forms, and edit & organize the note afterward. The application finds utility in various use-cases like brainstorming, content creation, journaling, interviews, meetings, and educational notes, aiming to make the process of capturing and organizing thoughts efficient and effortless.

Fl0 (pronounced "flow") presents itself as a revolutionary tool that bridges the gap between digital design and development. It enables designers and developers to collaborate seamlessly by converting design into usable code, thereby accelerating the product development process. Fl0 allows designers to create interactive, animated designs using a visual interface, which developers can directly convert into Swift or HTML/CSS code. This not only streamlines the workflow but also ensures that the final product is true to the initial design, minimizing the back-and-forth typically seen in traditional design-development pipelines.

AI 🤖 

ChatGPT Vision, or GPT-4V, introduces a multimodal approach to AI, allowing it to interpret and respond to image prompts alongside text. Users with a ChatGPT Plus account can upload an image and ask questions about it, with the AI scanning the image to provide responses. The applications are vast, from providing recipes based on food images to identifying landmarks. While it opens up new possibilities in human-computer interaction, it's still a work in progress, with OpenAI addressing issues related to ethical use, accuracy, and system limitations.

This ZDNet article delves into advanced AI prompting techniques, offering seven insightful approaches to enhance communication with ChatGPT and other generative AI tools. Tips include specifying output format, using HTML for formatting, iterating with multiple attempts, using long or sets of prompts, providing explicit constraints to a response, specifying the number of words/sentences/characters, and allowing the AI to evaluate its answers. The article emphasizes the importance of specificity and iteration in prompts to achieve desired results and also touches on the use of ChatGPT Plus and the WebPilot plugin to access post-2021 information.

Coding & Development 🖥️  

OpenAI has introduced the Beta version of its Python SDK, aiming to enhance access to the OpenAI API for Python developers. The SDK provides a simplified method for Python applications to interact with the OpenAI API and is available for early testing and feedback before the official launch of version 1.0. The library facilitates various tasks, including chat completions, text completions, embeddings, fine-tuning, moderation, image generation with DALL·E, and speech-to-text functionality with Whisper. Developers can explore the Beta version and provide feedback to shape the final release, which will introduce significant changes and improvements.

Varun Singh shares 10 Python tricks that developers should be aware of in 2023, aiming to facilitate Pythonic ways of performing various tasks. The tricks include checking if all items in a list are equal, deleting all items in a list using slicing, looping over multiple sequences using zip(), merging two dictionaries, sorting a dictionary by value, pretty printing a dictionary, removing duplicates from a list, getting multiple items from a list/dictionary using itemgetter, obtaining all permutations of a string, and utilizing the all() method in Python. These techniques are compiled to assist Python developers in enhancing their coding efficiency and productivity.

Miscellaneous 🌀️  

Steve Jobs, the co-founder of Apple, penned a self-reflective email to himself in 2010, revealing his thoughts on the company's future and his role in it. The email, which was discovered during the Epic Games vs. Apple trial, showcases Jobs contemplating a "holy war" with Google and pondering over Apple's strategy for the TV business. He also expressed concerns about Apple's competitiveness and the potential threats from Google and RIM. Jobs, known for his visionary approach, was contemplating the future of Apple's ecosystem, product differentiation, and strategies to stay ahead in the competitive tech market.

In a candid and somewhat venting post, the author, tef, outlines various aspects of Git that they find frustrating and suboptimal. The article delves into numerous technical and user experience issues with Git, such as its choice of SHA1, unique data formats, and the challenges with changing email or name. The author also critiques Git's two different mechanisms for almost every feature and its adherence to the Unix philosophy, which, while building a robust toolkit, might not always result in the best user tools. The post is a blend of technical critique and user experience frustrations, providing a perspective on how Git, despite its widespread use, has notable areas for improvement.

Gallaudet University's football team, consisting of deaf and hard-of-hearing students, is set to debut a pioneering football helmet that enables coaches to transmit plays to their quarterback via an augmented reality (AR) screen. Developed in collaboration with AT&T, the helmet features a digital display that shows the player the play selected by the coach via a tablet. The technology aims to level the playing field for deaf and hard-of-hearing athletes, especially in mainstream leagues. The NCAA has approved the helmet for use in one game as a trial, and it will be used for the first time in a game against Hilbert College.

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