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Meta trained AI on FB and IG posts

Nothing to be surprised at here I don’t think: Meta Platforms used public Facebook and Instagram posts to train parts of its new Meta AI virtual assistant, but excluded private posts shared only with family and friends in an effort to respect consumers’ privacy, the company’s top policy executive told Reuters in an interview. Meta also did not use private chats on its messaging...

Blue Light glasses are probably useless

Summary from this Guardian article: there doesn’t seem to be much benefit from wearing blue light filtering glasses. Or for that matter, reducing your screen time before bed. At least not due to blue light emissions anyway. But reading something stressful, or watching something exciting… that will likely impact your sleep no matter how much blue light is involved. I have a few friends...

Apple iPhone Micro QR Codes

Apple prints two tiny QR codes on every iPhone screen. The news about this is focussed on it being part of a crackdown on dodgy fault complaints, but that’s not what interests me here… I just like to imagine what it was like to be on the team tasked with this piece of the iPhone manufacturing process. It’s amazingly complex, and had to overcome issues with it potentially...

BeReal and Threads

Remember when BeReal had people excited? No, me either. But last year, there was interest in its reported 20 million daily active users were growing. (I’ll avoid discussion of how unreliable the numbers are, let’s use them as a comparison point.) A year later, it’s possibly a little higher at 25 million, or perhaps not, depending on who you read. Note: that number is global. US...

Meta AI quietly grows, while Jasper declines

Wow. Meta just keeps rolling out the releases this year. This week Llama 2 expands with Llama 2 Long and rubs shoulders with ChatGPT 3.5 Turbo (not 4.0 to be clear) and Claude 2 in terms of context windows. Meanwhile, Jasper feels the heat and lowers its projections and internal valuation (to $1.2B). This, hot on the heels of OpenAI announcing a staggering internal valuation (of $90B) the other...

What do HubSpot customers really care about?

Hint: It’s probably not product announcements from INBOUND. For listeners to our podcast, and HubSpot partners like us, HubSpot’s annual INBOUND conference is a highlight of the year. But for the majority of HubSpot customers that we work with, most didn’t even know it was on. To them HubSpot is just one app amongst many – a single pond in a raging river of applications – that their...

OpenAI valuing itself around $90B

Via a report in the Wall Street Journal, OpenAI is looking to allow staff to sell shares at prices that value the company in the $80-90B mark. Note: there’s no intention for the company to go public. To put that in perspective, in Australia, there are only two companies who have a higher market cap. Put another way, OpenAI is valuing itself more than almost every company in Australia...

Amazon invests in Anthropic

Perhaps not surprising that Amazon has invested heavily in Anthropic (makers of Claude).

Meanwhile ChatGPT releases another big update, rolling out voice and image capabilities.

What a year it has been so far, and it still feels like we’re just beginning.

Kevin Systrom comments about Threads

From an interview with Kevin Systrom, when asked about Threads, he mentions he can see both a bear case and a bull case: The bear case: It’s more or less what exists elsewhere, and there’s not much differentiated value. While you can get lots of attention very quickly for competing with Elon Musk, that attention turns into real judgment when it either provides value or doesn’t...

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