Mozilla layoffs 🦊📉, Amazon’s ‘emergent abilities’ AI 🤖, New type of magnet 🧲
Welcome to today’s SMMRY. The key highlights:
- Mozilla layoffs 🦊📉
- Amazon’s ‘emergent abilities’ AI 🤖
- New type of magnet 🧲
Nvidia passes Alphabet in market cap and is now the third most valuable U.S. company (2 minute read)
Nvidia surpassed Google parent Alphabet in market capitalization yesterday. It's the latest example of how the artificial intelligence boom has sent the chipmaker's stock soaring. NVDA rose over 2% to close at $739.00 per share, giving it a market value of $1.83 trillion to Google's $1.82 trillion market cap. The move comes one day after Nvidia surpassed Amazon in terms of market value.
Apple fans are starting to return their Vision Pros (3 minute read)
There's been an uptick of Vision Pro owners returning their $3,500 headsets in the past few days. Apple allows you to return any product within 14 days of purchase - and for the first wave of Vision Pro buyers, we're right about at that point. Comfort and weight-bearing is among the most cited reasons for returns. People have said the headset gives them headaches and triggers motion sickness as well.
Mozilla lays off 60 people, wants to build AI into Firefox (4 minute read)
Mozilla got a new "interim" CEO just a few days ago, and the first order of business appears to be layoffs. Bloomberg was the first to report that the company is cutting about 60 jobs, or 5 percent of its workforce. A TechCrunch report has a company memo that followed these layoffs, detailing one product shutdown and a "scaling back" of a few others.
The existence of a new kind of magnetism has been confirmed (3 minute read)
A new kind of magnetism has been measured for the first time. Altermagnets, which contain a blend of properties from different classes of existing magnets, could be used to make high capacity and fast memory devices or new kinds of magnetic computers. Researchers at the Paul Scherrer Institute in Switzerland have confirmed the existence of an altermagnet by measuring the electron structure in a crystal.
Largest text-to-speech AI model yet shows 'emergent abilities' (4 minute read)
Researchers at Amazon have trained the largest ever text-to-speech model yet called BASE TTS (Big Adaptive Streamable TTS with Emergent abilities), which they claim exhibits "emergent" qualities improving its ability to speak even complex sentences naturally. For reasons unknown to us, once LLMs grow past a certain point, they start being way more robust and versatile, able to perform tasks they weren't trained to.
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