Good morning! This is your daily ☕️ Techpresso.
In today's Techpresso:
👓 Meta smart glasses can be used to dox anyone in seconds, study finds
💰 OpenAI is now valued at $157 billion
💥 Nvidia stunned the world with a ChatGPT rival that’s as good as GPT-4o
🥕 Microsoft to employees: you can continue working from home unless productivity drops
🚀 NASA is working on a plan to replace its space station, but time is running out
🎁 + 9 other news you might like
🔮 + 5 handpicked research papers and tools
👓 Meta smart glasses can be used to dox anyone in seconds, study findsLINK
Harvard students demonstrated how Meta's smart glasses combined with facial recognition technology can dox individuals by revealing personal details like identities and phone numbers, using tools like I-XRAY and public databases in real-time.
The demo used existing technologies such as Meta's Ray-Ban smart glasses and the PimEyes search engine, showing how a simple photo capture can quickly connect to public data, including names and addresses, raising privacy concerns.
Meta has privacy guidelines for its smart glasses, but the tiny notification light is hard to detect in bright light, leading to potential misuse despite the company warning users to respect others' privacy and follow recording etiquette.
💰 OpenAI is now valued at $157 billionLINK
OpenAI has raised $6.6 billion in a new funding round, which has nearly doubled its valuation to $157 billion from a previous $86 billion, as reported by The Wall Street Journal.
The latest financing requires OpenAI to shift from its nonprofit model to a fully for-profit company, or investors have the right to retract their investments.
Major contributors to this funding round include Thrive Capital with a $1.25 billion investment and long-time supporter Microsoft, which added just under $1 billion more, with new investors like SoftBank and Nvidia also participating.
💥 Nvidia stunned the world with a ChatGPT rival that’s as good as GPT-4oLINK
In early October 2024, Nvidia surprised the AI community by unveiling NVLM 1.0, a series of advanced multimodal language models with capabilities matching those of the GPT-4o model from ChatGPT.
Instead of releasing a direct competitor to consumer-facing AI applications like ChatGPT or Claude, Nvidia is opting to allow others to create their own AI solutions by making the model weights of NVLM publicly accessible.
Nvidia, previously renowned for supplying essential chips for AI processes, is now demonstrating its prowess in generative AI through its innovative approach to sharing AI technology development resources.
🥕 Microsoft to employees: you can continue working from home unless productivity dropsLINK
Microsoft has decided to allow employees to continue working from home, maintaining flexibility as long as it does not affect productivity, contrasting with companies like Amazon that have mandated a return to the office.
Scott Guthrie, Microsoft Executive Vice President, assured workers in a meeting that the company values flexible working arrangements, though productivity must remain steady to keep the remote work model viable.
The remote work setup is considered beneficial for both employees and Microsoft, though the company remains cautious about the risks, such as decreased productivity and potential misuse of work hours for personal activities.
🚀 NASA is working on a plan to replace its space station, but time is running outLINK
NASA is planning to replace the International Space Station by finalizing a strategy for operations in low-Earth orbit after 2030, with contracts to be awarded to private companies for developing smaller space stations.
Several companies like Blue Origin and Axiom Space have been involved in preliminary work on commercial space stations, yet face significant challenges such as financial difficulties and meeting NASA's complex requirements, with no guaranteed success.
Despite uncertainties and potential gaps in having a continuous presence in low-Earth orbit post-2030, NASA must decide whether it should remain committed to supporting private space stations to continue human activity in space beyond the International Space Station's operational life.
Other news you might like
OpenAI asks investors to avoid five AI startups including Sutskever's SSI, sources say.LINK
The ‘WordPress’ fight is now a lawsuit.LINK
Judge finds new California election deepfake ban unconstitutional.LINK
“Obviously a failure”: Sonos execs not getting bonuses due to app fiasco.LINK
Amazon will “ramp up” Prime Video ads in 2025.LINK
Bank of America customers see $0 balances amid nationwide outage.LINK
Apple explores radical all-glass MacBook in latest patent.LINK
Venture firm CRV returns $275 million citing overvaluation of mature startups.LINK
Microsoft releases Office 2024, the latest buy-once-own-forever version of Office.LINK
Latest research and tools
WALDO: a detection AI model designed to identify specific objects, such as vehicles and utility poles, in overhead images from various altitudes, useful for tasks requiring object recognition in large-scale imagery.LINK
Kameo: a Rust library for creating fault-tolerant, distributed, and asynchronous actors using Tokio, facilitating seamless communication across nodes with features like scalability, backpressure handling, and panic recovery.LINK
TinyJS: a lightweight JavaScript library that simplifies the creation of HTML elements, property assignment, and DOM element selection with unique $ and $$ shortcuts, enhancing web development efficiency.LINK
QBittorrent: an open-source BitTorrent client designed to be a lightweight alternative to other clients, offering ad-free usage, stability, and a variety of features.LINK
Serving 70B-Scale LLMs Efficiently on Low-Resource Edge Devices: the paper discusses methods for running large language models (LLMs) efficiently on devices with limited resources.LINK
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