Good morning! This is your daily ☕️ Techpresso.
In today's Techpresso:
🤖 OpenAI is working on an 'AI health coach'
👀 The email explaining Mark Zuckerberg's extreme makeover
🌐 Quora’s Poe now lets users create and share web apps
🏢 San Francisco office vacancies hit record high despite AI boom
📉 X struggles to grow daily active users
🚀 Europe’s long-delayed flagship rocket is about to launch for the first time
🎁 + 7 other news you might like
🔮 + 7 handpicked research papers and tools
🤖 OpenAI is working on an 'AI health coach'LINK
OpenAI and Arianna Huffington are developing an 'AI health coach' through Thrive AI Health, which will be trained on peer-reviewed science and individual medical data shared by users. Thrive AI Health aims to provide useful health insights, particularly for those with limited access, by suggesting small lifestyle changes in areas like sleep, nutrition, and fitness, without offering formal diagnoses. Despite the potential benefits, concerns about data privacy and the accuracy of health advice persist, highlighting the importance of building trust and ensuring safety in AI health applications.
👀 The email explaining Mark Zuckerberg's extreme makeoverLINK
In a January 2020 email, Mark Zuckerberg described himself as "the most well-known person of my generation," aiming to cultivate a relatable personal brand while leading Meta's efforts to connect with millennials.
Since the pandemic, Zuckerberg has significantly upgraded his style, trading in his usual gray t-shirts for more eye-catching attire, including shearling brown jackets and gold chains, as part of this strategic image overhaul.
The image transformation appears to have bolstered Zuckerberg's public relations, with fellow tech leaders like Spotify founder Daniel Ek praising his new, more authentic persona and renewed sense of responsibility.
🌐 Quora’s Poe now lets users create and share web appsLINK
Quora's Poe has introduced a feature called Previews, enabling users to create interactive web apps such as data visualizations and games directly within chats with chatbots.
Previews allow apps to be developed using multiple chatbots like GPT-4o and Meta's Llama 3, and these can utilize uploaded files and be shared via links.
Unlike Anthropic’s Artifacts, Previews support HTML output with CSS and Javascript from a range of chatbots, although it requires a $20 monthly subscription to access.
🏢 San Francisco office vacancies hit record high despite AI boomLINK
More than one-third of office spaces in San Francisco are empty despite an ongoing AI boom, with the vacancy rate hitting a historic 34.5% in the second quarter of this year, up from 33.9% in the first quarter.
The severe office vacancy issue in San Francisco has led to landlords reducing rent prices to their lowest levels in almost a decade, with the average rent dropping to $68.27 per square foot in the second quarter, a significant decrease from pre-pandemic rates.
Despite efforts to attract back tech workers and the presence of AI firms, San Francisco's commercial real estate market remains in a critical state, with more than 53 companies moving their headquarters out of the city since 2020.
📉 X struggles to grow daily active usersLINK
X, previously Twitter, has experienced sluggish user growth under Elon Musk, with daily active user growth plunging to less than 2% by 2024, totaling approximately 251 million daily users.
App download data indicates that Meta's Threads outpaces X significantly, with Threads securing over 51 million iOS downloads and 87 million Android downloads this year, compared to X's 20 million iOS and 45 million Android downloads.
Despite high web traffic, with over 2 billion monthly visits to X against Threads' 51.5 million, X's pivot to new features and monetization strategies under Musk has met with mixed success, impacting its revenue negatively by 40%.
🚀 Europe’s long-delayed flagship rocket is about to launch for the first timeLINK
Europe's Ariane 6 rocket is set to launch from French Guiana, four years behind schedule but crucial for European space missions with a budget of over $4 billion.
The Ariane 6 will serve as Europe's primary launcher for a decade, supporting scientific, navigational, and military missions, as well as commercial ventures like Amazon's Project Kuiper.
The initial launch window for the Ariane 6 opens Tuesday at 2 PM EDT, with the mission including deploying small satellites and testing the rocket's upper stage through various maneuvers.
Other news you might like
‘We’re living in a nightmare:’ inside the health crisis of a Texas Bitcoin town.LINK
Etsy loses its ‘handmade’ and ‘vintage’ labels as it takes on Temu and Amazon.LINK
Google Maps reportedly testing pop-ups that want you to visit sponsored locations.LINK
NATO plans to send internet to space if subsea cables are cut.LINK
Meta unveils a $25-per-month, interest-free Quest 3 payment plan. Is this deal worth it?LINK
iOS 18 has a new ‘dynamic’ color-shifting wallpaper.LINK
Apple director backs Swift to replace C++ as choice programming language.LINK
Latest research and tools
C++ patterns for low-latency applications including high-frequency trading: this paper explains how specific patterns in C++ can be optimized for applications requiring low latency, such as high-frequency trading.LINK
MobileLLM: a training tool for optimizing smaller language models for use on mobile devices, achieving higher accuracy in commonsense reasoning tasks with fewer parameters.LINK
Tegon: an open-source, AI-first issue tracking software that automates tasks, optimizes workflows, and enriches task context to enhance productivity and collaboration among engineering teams.LINK
LightRAG: a PyTorch library that aids in developing and optimizing applications for large language models, focusing on functionality for building and tweaking Retriever-Agent-Generator pipelines with ease and efficiency, ensuring the codebase is light, modular, robust, and fully understandable.LINK
RE2: a fast, safe, thread-friendly alternative to backtracking regular expression engines, designed for processing large data sets with high throughput.LINK
WAL Implementation in Golang: a tool that records data changes ahead of database modifications, enabling users to recover information or replay data after issues, suitable for various file systems and designed for simplicity.LINK
Sljit: a platform-independent compiler that generates machine code at runtime, optimizing code execution across different operating systems and processor architectures.LINK
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