Good morning! This is your daily ☕️ Techpresso.
In today's Techpresso:
🛰️ World’s first wooden satellite launched into space
💶 Apple is facing a mammoth $38 billion fine in Europe
📉 Apple warns future products may never be as profitable as iPhone
🧠 Anthropic surprises experts with an “intelligence” price increase
🙅♂️ Amazon denies that 5-day office mandate is a 'backdoor layoff'
🎁 + 8 other news you might like
🔮 + 2 handpicked research papers and tools
🛰️ World’s first wooden satellite launched into spaceLINK
Japan launched the world's first wooden-panelled satellite, LignoSat, to explore the use of wood as a sustainable and viable material for future space missions.
Developed by Kyoto University, the 900g satellite was sent on a SpaceX mission to the International Space Station, demonstrating innovation with magnolia wood panels crafted without screws or glue.
Wood is expected to endure the harsh space environment well, as the absence of oxygen and water prevents rotting and combustion, making it a potentially eco-friendly alternative to metals.
💶 Apple is facing a mammoth $38 billion fine in EuropeLINK
The European Union is preparing to impose its first notable fine on Apple under the new Digital Markets Act (DMA) for App Store violations, aiming to curb tech monopolies.
The EU hasn't clarified the exact DMA rules Apple is breaching, but penalties could amount to 10% of global annual sales or 5% of daily revenue, with possible continual fees.
Despite Apple modifying its practices to align with the DMA, including removing the Core Technology Fee, the EU questions if these changes effectively promote market competition.
📉 Apple warns future products may never be as profitable as iPhoneLINK
Apple cautions investors that its newer products might not match the profitability of the iPhone, a concern highlighted in its most recent annual report.
The company's updated report points to potential risks as emerging offerings could generate less revenue and lower profit margins, impacting Apple's financial performance.
Apple is developing artificial intelligence and augmented reality technologies, with limited sales seen for products like the Vision Pro headset partly due to high costs.
🧠 Anthropic surprises experts with an “intelligence” price increaseLINK
Anthropic introduced Claude 3.5 Haiku, its latest small AI model, which is priced four times higher than its predecessor, changing the usual AI model pricing trends.
The price hike for Claude 3.5 Haiku is attributed to its reported increase in "intelligence," as it outperformed the older Claude 3 Opus model in several benchmark tests.
The new pricing, now at $1 per million input tokens and $5 per million output tokens, has drawn mixed reactions from the AI community due to its impact on competitiveness.
🙅♂️ Amazon denies that 5-day office mandate is a 'backdoor layoff'LINK
Amazon CEO Andy Jassy refuted claims that the new five-day in-office requirement is intended as a way to cut staff or as a concession to city governments.
The return-to-office policy, effective January 2, 2023, shifts from a previous three-day requirement, causing backlash from employees who argue they are equally efficient working remotely.
Despite criticism, Jassy emphasized that the return to office is about enhancing Amazon's culture, while AWS leader Matt Garman stated employees dissatisfied with the policy could choose to leave.
Other news you might like
Nvidia just became the world’s largest company amid AI boom.LINK
Mozilla Foundation lays off 30% staff, drops advocacy division.LINK
Instagram to use AI to catch teens lying about their age and automatically move them to restricted accounts.LINK
AMD unveils AMD OLMo, its first 1B-parameter LLM with strong reasoning.LINK
AI startup Perplexity AI is close to raising $500 million round at a $9 billion valuation.LINK
Google has no duty to refund gift card scam victims, judge finds.LINK
NRO chief: “You can’t hide” from our new swarm of SpaceX-built spy satellites.LINK
Reddit Overtakes Snap In Market Value After Election Day Rally.LINK
Latest research and tools
Tencent Hunyuan-Large: an open-source, transformer-based Mixture of Experts (MoE) model, boasting 389 billion parameters, designed for optimizing resource consumption in AI while improving performance in natural language processing, computer vision, and more.LINK
Whirlwind: an asynchronous, thread-safe hashmap for Rust that allows for high-performance, concurrent data access with a customizable number of shards.LINK
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