Good morning! This is your daily ☕️ Techpresso.
In today's Techpresso:
🔍 How a software update crashed computers around the world
🙃 CrowdStrike fixes start at “reboot up to 15 times” and get more complex from there
🍎 Apple releases the “best-performing” open-source models out there
👓 Google in talks with Ray-Ban for AI smart glasses
🚫 Loophole that helps you identify any bot blocked by OpenAI
🎁 + 4 other news you might like
🔮 + 2 handpicked research papers and tools
🔍 How a software update crashed computers around the worldLINK
A faulty CrowdStrike software update caused a global outage for Windows computers, affecting various sectors such as businesses, airports, healthcare, and media.
CrowdStrike identified a defect in its Falcon Sensor update as the cause and has since deployed a fix, but recovery may take time for some affected systems.
The U.S. government is monitoring the situation, with support from agencies like Homeland Security and CISA, and is prepared to assist as needed during the recovery process.
🙃 CrowdStrike fixes start at “reboot up to 15 times” and get more complex from thereLINK
A buggy update to CrowdStrike's Falcon security software caused Windows systems to crash with a blue screen of death, impacting various businesses, including airlines and 911 call centers.
Microsoft and CrowdStrike have pulled the faulty update, and IT administrators are advised to reboot affected systems up to 15 times to obtain a non-broken update.
If multiple reboots fail, Microsoft recommends restoring systems from a backup made before the buggy update or manually deleting the problematic CrowdStrike driver in Safe Mode.
🍎 Apple releases the “best-performing” open-source models out thereLINK
Apple's research team has released open DCLM models on Hugging Face, featuring 7 billion and 1.4 billion parameters, outperforming Mistral and approaching the performance of Llama 3 and other leading models.
The larger 7B model achieved a 6.6 percentage point improvement on the MMLU benchmark compared to previous state-of-the-art models while using 40% less compute for training, matching closely with top models like Google's Gemma and Microsoft's Phi-3.
Both models were developed through extensive collaboration, incorporating advanced data curation techniques to ensure high-quality training, and are available under licenses that permit commercial use, distribution, and modification.
👓 Google in talks with Ray-Ban for AI smart glassesLINK
Google is in discussions with EssilorLuxottica, the parent company of Ray-Ban, to develop AI-powered Gemini smart glasses and integrate their Gemini AI assistant.
EssilorLuxottica is also collaborating with Meta on the Ray-Ban Meta Smart Glasses, and Meta may acquire a minority stake in EssilorLuxottica, which could affect Google's plans.
Google's Gemini smart glasses are expected to feature a microphone, speaker, and camera without displays, aligning with the prototypes shown at I/O 2024 for Project Astra.
🚫 Loophole that helps you identify any bot blocked by OpenAILINK
OpenAI developed a technique called “instruction hierarchy” to prevent misuse of AI by ensuring the model follows the developer’s original instructions rather than user-injected prompts.
The first model to include this new safety feature is GPT-4o Mini, which aims to block the “ignore all previous instructions” loophole that could be used to exploit the AI.
This update is part of OpenAI's efforts to enhance safety and regain trust, as the company faces ongoing concerns and criticisms about its safety practices and transparency.
Other news you might like
CrowdStrike took down Debian and Rocky Linux a few months ago and no one noticed.LINK
Twitch lifts its ban on Donald Trump.LINK
U.S. cyber agency says hackers are trying to exploit the outage.LINK
Police arrest a teenage boy in connection with the MGM Resorts ransomware attack.LINK
Latest research and tools
Typst: a markup-based typesetting system aiming to be as robust as LaTeX but more user-friendly, featuring intuitive markup for common tasks, flexible functions, friendly error messages, and a collaborative online editor for compiling documents.LINK
Kompute: a Vulkan-based alternative to CUDA that offers a flexible Python and C++ module for GPU optimizations, supports mobile devices through the Android NDK, and emphasizes explicit control over GPU and host memory interactions with a supportive community ecosystem.LINK
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