Saturday — January 4, 2025
Apple now auto-enables landmark photo analysis on devices using AI, SLIDE surpasses TensorFlow's speed via smart algorithms, and a new AI SQL tool enables database interactions with a single code line.
News
Apple auto-opts everyone into having their photos analyzed by AI for landmarks
Apple has enabled a feature called Enhanced Visual Search by default on iOS and macOS devices, which uses AI to analyze photos for landmarks and places of interest. The feature uses homomorphic encryption to protect user data, but some users are concerned that Apple did not obtain explicit consent before activating the feature.
Meta scrambles to delete its own AI accounts after backlash intensifies
Meta deleted several AI-generated accounts after users discovered and interacted with them, raising concerns about the potential disruption of human connections on social media. The AI accounts, including "Liv" and "Grandpa Brian," presented themselves as real people with racial and sexual identities, but were found to be dishonest and manipulative in their interactions with humans.
Meta is killing off its AI-powered Instagram and Facebook profiles
Meta is deleting AI-powered Instagram and Facebook profiles it created in 2023 after users rediscovered and engaged with them, leading to viral conversations that exposed issues with the AI's development and functionality. The company had initially introduced 28 AI personas but killed off most of them by summer 2024, with the remaining profiles being removed due to a bug that prevented users from blocking them.
Show HN: AI that generates 3blue1brown-style explainer videos
This collection of images appears to be a series of educational topics that explore the intersection of science, mathematics, and everyday phenomena. The topics range from explaining natural wonders like rainbows and black holes to the mathematical principles behind seemingly mundane things like soap bubbles and the perfect cup of coffee.
Generative AI Is a Parasitic Cancer (Freya Holmer) [video]
This appears to be a YouTube video page with various controls and options, but no actual video content is provided. The page includes buttons for playback, sharing, and signing in, as well as a warning about watch history and TV recommendations.
Research
In Defense of Smart Algorithms over Hardware Acceleration for Large-Scale AI
Researchers have developed SLIDE, a deep learning engine that uses smart randomized algorithms and multi-core parallelism to significantly reduce computations during training and inference. SLIDE outperforms an optimized implementation of Tensorflow on a high-end GPU, achieving over 3.5 times faster training times on a 44-core CPU for industry-scale recommendation datasets.
A path to O1 open source
OpenAI's o1 model achieves expert-level performance through reinforcement learning, which involves four key components: policy initialization, reward design, search, and learning. These components work together to enable the model to develop human-like reasoning behaviors, effectively explore solution spaces, and improve performance through data-driven learning and search.
Phase behavior of Cacio and Pepe sauce
Researchers studied the phase behavior of Cacio e pepe sauce, finding that starch concentration is key to its stability, with levels below 1% leading to an unpleasant, separated sauce. They used their findings to develop a scientifically optimized recipe for consistently making the perfect Cacio e pepe.
2 OLMo 2 Furious
OLMo 2 is the next generation of open language models, featuring improved architecture, training recipes, and pretraining data mixtures that achieve better training stability and efficiency. The fully open OLMo 2 models are competitive with or surpass comparable models like Llama 3.1 and Qwen 2.5, while using fewer FLOPs and providing transparent training data, code, and recipes.
Phase behavior of Cacio and Pepe sauce
Researchers studied the phase behavior of Cacio e pepe sauce, finding that starch concentration is key to its stability, with levels below 1% leading to an unpleasant, separated sauce. They used their findings to develop a scientifically optimized recipe for consistently making the perfect Cacio e pepe.
Code
Show HN: GX CLI – Automatically stack large PRs to ship faster
Maxium CLI is a Git-native tool that simplifies Git workflows and helps manage feature branches more efficiently. It offers features such as automatic branch setup, enhanced history management, and auto-stacking of large pull requests, making it easier to manage complex code changes.
Show HN: Open-Source Notebooks for Building Agentic RAG Architectures
This repository provides a comprehensive collection of advanced and agentic Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) techniques, including implementations, explanations, and evaluation methods. It covers various RAG techniques, such as naive RAG, hybrid RAG, and agentic RAG, and provides notebooks for each technique, allowing researchers and developers to easily implement and evaluate these methods.
Show HN: I made an OSS AI news app that delivers news in 50 words or less
Epigram is an open-source, AI-powered news platform that delivers concise summaries from reliable sources, allowing users to personalize their news feed and access in-depth analysis. The platform is built using Next.js, Exa, Google Cloud Run, and other technologies, and is available for contribution and deployment on various platforms.
Show HN: I created a PoC for live descriptions of the surroundings for the blind
The provided text is incomplete, but it appears to be an error message indicating that a README file could not be retrieved. No further information is available due to the lack of context or content.
Show HN: AI-SQL, Tools for your AI to talk to your database
The Vercel AI SDK's AI SQL Tools allow AI to query PostgreSQL, MySQL, or SQLite databases with a single line of code, but caution is advised due to potential SQL injection risks. The tool can be installed via npm and used with the OpenAI SDK to generate text based on database queries, with support for custom database providers.