Good morning! This is your daily ☕️ Techpresso.
In today's Techpresso:
🔮 Meta releases its most powerful AI model yet
💰 Google talks to acquire Wiz for $23 billion fall through
💸 Alexa is losing Amazon billions of dollars
🍪 Google scraps plan to remove cookies from Chrome
🇪🇺 EU officials say Meta may be violating consumer laws with paid 'ad-free' plan
🎁 + 7 other news you might like
🔮 + 5 handpicked research papers and tools
🔮 Meta releases its most powerful AI model yetLINK
Meta has released Llama 3.1 405B, its largest open-source AI model to date, featuring 405 billion parameters which enhance its problem-solving abilities.
Trained with 16,000 Nvidia H100 GPUs, Llama 3.1 405B is competitive with leading AI models like OpenAI’s GPT-4 and Anthropic’s Claude 3.5 Sonnet, though it has specific strengths and weaknesses.
Meta's new AI model is available for download or cloud usage and powers chatbots on platforms like WhatsApp and Meta.ai, showcasing capabilities in coding, mathematical queries, and multilingual document summarization.
💰 Google talks to acquire Wiz for $23 billion fall throughLINK
Cybersecurity startup Wiz has turned down a $23 billion acquisition proposal from Alphabet, Google's parent company, opting instead to pursue an initial public offering.
Wiz co-founder Assaf Rappaport highlighted antitrust and investor concerns as key reasons for rejecting the deal, aiming for $1 billion in annual recurring revenue alongside the IPO.
Neither Wiz nor Alphabet have confirmed discussions about the deal, which would have been Google's largest acquisition, with Wiz providing cloud-based security solutions for enterprise clients.
💸 Alexa is losing Amazon billions of dollarsLINK
Amazon plans to launch a paid version of Alexa to address the over $25 billion losses incurred by its devices business from 2017 to 2021, as reported by The Wall Street Journal.
The enhanced Alexa, which may cost up to $10 per month, is expected to be released soon, though employees have concerns about whether the technology is ready.
The new Alexa, featuring generative AI for improved conversational abilities, faces technical delays and competition from free AI assistants, raising doubts about customers' willingness to pay for it.
🍪 Google scraps plan to remove cookies from ChromeLINK
Google has decided not to disable third-party cookies in Chrome and will instead prompt users to choose whether to allow them.
The initial plan to remove third-party cookies faced opposition from competitors, regulators, and privacy advocates, leading to its abandonment.
Google will continue to offer Privacy Sandbox APIs and will improve privacy for Incognito Mode with anti-IP tracking features.
🇪🇺 EU officials say Meta may be violating consumer laws with paid 'ad-free' planLINK
Meta has been given a deadline of September 1, 2024, to address concerns from EU consumer protection authorities over its 'pay or consent' model for Facebook and Instagram users.
The EU's Consumer Protection Cooperation Network is investigating whether Meta's requirement for users to either accept ad tracking or pay a subscription is misleading or aggressive under EU consumer protection laws.
Failure to resolve the identified issues may lead to enforcement measures, including potential penalties that could amount to up to 4% of Meta's global annual turnover.
Other news you might like
GM ditches Cruise’s custom-designed driverless car.LINK
Telegram’s userbase climbs to 950M, plans to launch app store.LINK
Microsoft says EU rules made CrowdStrike outage possible.LINK
Study: TikTok Lite is a 'safety hazard' for millions of users around the world.LINK
US spot ether ETFs set to make market debut in another win for crypto industry.LINK
Japanese supermarket uses AI to track employees' smiles and service.LINK
Lab-grown brains are unlikely to achieve consciousness anytime soon.LINK
Latest research and tools
Timeshift: a backup tool for Linux that creates incremental snapshots of the file system, enabling users to restore their system to previous states, excluding personal files for system protection, supporting both RSYNC and BTRFS modes.LINK
Maestro: a workflow orchestrator open-sourced by Netflix, offering workflow-as-a-service for data platform users, managing hundreds of thousands of workflows daily with high scalability and reliability.LINK
Sharpl: a minimalistic Lisp interpreter written in C# designed for easy embedding, featuring a simple REPL, native support for common Lisp constructs, and a design aiming for simplicity with a codebase of about 4000 lines and no external dependencies.LINK
Open Data Capture: a web-based electronic data capture platform designed for clinical data collection with a focus on flexibility and security, using modern web technologies and offering features like in-browser instrument building and JWT authentication for secure access.LINK
Planck stars, White Holes, Remnants and Planck-mass quasi-particles: the paper explores theoretical objects that could resolve the information paradox by suggesting stars collapsing under gravity turn into dense remnants, producing white holes and Planck-mass particles instead of singularities.LINK
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