🍔🧠 Master LLMs with This Free Course

🍔  THIS WEEK’S MENU  🥗

• 📚 Dive into Large Language Models, learn everything about CDNs, and get 7 front-end design practices.

• 🗞️ Google's Gemini AI launch, Meta's AI tool advancements, Spotify's major workforce shift.

• 👨🏻‍💻 Quick byte: Simplifying asynchronous operations in JavaScript with async/await.

Reading time: 5 minutes

Food for Thought
A mindset, an example, and an action item to start the week

Mindset: This quote reminds us that while logic is important, creativity and imagination are what allow us to innovate and push boundaries.

Example: IDEO is renowned for human-centered design fueled by imagination, leading to iconic products like the first mouse for Apple.

Action item: Brainstorm 10 creative ideas today for improving your business or workplace, no matter how imaginative.

(Share on Twitter)

The Rabbit Hole
Deep dives, trends, and resources curated to stay ahead

💾  SIDE DISHES  💾

ARTICLE (deep thoughts) → A blog post on the argument that writing = thinking

GITHUB REPO  (apple oss) → An array of frameworks for Apple Silicon

ESSENTIAL (know your basics) → The Google way of throwing exceptions

ARTICLE  (security) → How Nike protects itself from bot attacks

TUTORIAL (svg design) → How to design and code SVGs with noise and gradients

ARTICLE (git) → Git branches: Intuition vs reality

ARTICLE (aws) → Everything you need to know on AWS Lamba CLI

The Weekly Digest
Software, AI, and startup news worth your time

🚀 Google Launches Gemini, its Most Advanced Generative AI Model Yet (2 min)

Brief: Google introduces Gemini, a groundbreaking generative AI model that surpasses current state-of-the-art benchmarks in various domains, demonstrating its native multimodality and advanced reasoning abilities.

Takeaway: With the launch of Gemini, Google aims to lead the competitive AI race by setting new standards in generative AI, enabling more sophisticated content creation and problem-solving for developers, enterprises, and startups.

🖼️ Meta Announces Updates to Meta AI Tools, Including AI Image Generators (2 min)

Brief: Meta introduces new features to its Meta AI tools, allowing users to remix AI-generated images in chat apps and access the "imagine" tool on the web, powered by the Emu image foundation model for "creative hobbyists."

Takeaway: As Meta competes with Google's Gemini news, these updates highlight Meta's commitment to enhancing user creativity and engagement through generative AI tools, reinforcing its position in the fast-evolving AI landscape.

⚔️ Google's War on Ad Blockers: The Power Play from YouTube and Chrome (2 min)

Brief: Google is intensifying its battle against ad blockers by implementing Manifest V3 in Chrome, a move that will give YouTube and Chrome an advantage overextension developers by limiting their ability to quickly update their software in response to changes.

Takeaway: As Google pushes forward with its Manifest V3 extension platform, it is effectively slowing down the cat-and-mouse game between ad blockers and YouTube, asserting its control and dominance in the realm of online advertising. This power play serves as a reminder of Google's determination to maintain its grip on the digital advertising market.

🔀 Spotify to Lay Off 17% of Employees (2 min)

Brief: Spotify announces plans to cut 17% of its workforce, citing the need to "rightsize" costs amidst a new economic reality, despite reporting a profitable quarter.

Takeaway: The significant layoffs at Spotify reflect the company's determination to prioritize profitability and adapt to the challenges posed by a changing economic landscape. It also signals the company's continued commitment to diversify its offerings beyond music streaming.

🔍 Perplexity AI Unveils Online LLMs That Could Dethrone Google Search (2 min)

Brief: Perplexity AI releases its own AI large language models (LLMs) called pplx-7b-online and pplx-70b-online, which are fine-tuned and augmented versions of existing models, aiming to become the premier search destination with no knowledge cutoff.

Takeaway: Perplexity AI's introduction of online LLMs challenges established search engines like Google, indicating a shift in the search landscape towards more powerful and up-to-date AI models.

🔮 Generative AI: Building Trust and Safety (2 min)

Brief: Purple Llama, an umbrella project, aims to create a center of mass for open trust and safety in generative AI development, providing tools and evaluations for cybersecurity and input/output safeguards to enable responsible and standardized development.

Takeaway: As generative AI fuels a new wave of innovation, the launch of Purple Llama reflects the need for collaboration and responsible development to improve cybersecurity and address the risks associated with AI-generated content. It sets a precedent for industry-wide standards and community collaboration in the AI safety landscape.

💡 Elon Musk's AI Startup Launches Grok, a Rebellious Chatbot on X (2 min)

Brief: Grok, a new chatbot developed by Elon Musk's AI startup, xAI, has officially launched on X, the site formerly known as Twitter, providing conversationally intelligent answers to X Premium Plus subscribers in the U.S.

Takeaway: With the launch of Grok, xAI aims to disrupt the chatbot market by leveraging real-time access to X's data, offering genuinely up-to-date information while incorporating first-person conversational interactions, and challenging the traditional boundaries of accuracy and user experience.

The Quick Byte
One coding tip because you’re technical after all

The async/await syntax in JavaScript is a syntactical feature for handling asynchronous operations more elegantly. It allows you to write asynchronous code that looks and behaves more like synchronous code, improving readability and maintainability. async marks a function as asynchronous and enables the use of await within it, which pauses the execution until the awaited promise settles.

Before:

After:

Wen?

• Asynchronous Data Fetching: Ideal for operations like API calls, database queries, or any situation where you need to wait for data without blocking the execution thread.

• Sequential Asynchronous Operations: Useful when you have a series of asynchronous operations that need to be performed one after another, where each subsequent operation depends on the result of the previous one.

• Handling Concurrent Asynchronous Processes: Efficient for managing multiple asynchronous tasks concurrently, using Promise.all with await to wait for all tasks to complete, which streamlines the handling of various asynchronous operations running in parallel.

Why?

• Readability and Maintainability: Transforms complex promise chains into cleaner and more intuitive code, making it easier to understand and maintain.

• Error Handling: Simplifies error handling in asynchronous operations. With async/await, you can use traditional try/catch blocks, making the code more consistent with synchronous error handling.

• Debugging: Easier to debug compared to traditional promise handling. As the code looks synchronous, it fits better with standard debugging tools, allowing breakpoints and stepping through the code as if it were synchronous.

Burp-A-Laugh
The most important meal of your day