🥟 Chao-Down #233 Tesla unveils new Optimus Gen 2 Robot, Microsoft and labor unions form 'historic alliance' on AI, Google launches AI studio for developers to build on latest Gemini model

Tesla has a new shiny robot, and this time it can do a lot more human-like tasks!

The EV company recently released a demo video highlighting the latest version of its Optimus Gen 2 humanoid robot. The video shows off a much-improved robot moving in real time performing various tasks like walking, crouching, manipulating eggs without breaking them, and waving its arms — all without any CGI!

It’s a big step-up in humanoid robotics and you can definitely believe that once more mature, Elon will deploy these robots all over his Gigafactories to help build more cars.

-Alex, your resident Chaos Coordinator.

What happened in AI? 📰

Microsoft and Labor Unions Form ‘Historic’ Alliance on AI (Yahoo)

LimeWire Is Back, and It's An AI Music Generator Now (Rolling Stone)

With AI Studio, Google launches an easy-to-use tool for developing apps and chatbots based on its Gemini model (TechCrunch)

Oracle can't build enough cloud computing for Elon Musk's xAI (qz.com)

Google unveils MedLM, a family of healthcare-focused generative AI models (TechCrunch)

Human brain cells hooked up to a chip can do speech recognition (MIT Technology Review)

Always be Learnin’ 📕 📖

7 questions to help you be a better writer (thecaringtechie.com)

CPython Dynamic Dispatch Internals: How a + b Works? (Substack)

10 hard-to-swallow truths they won't tell you about software engineer job (mensurdurakovic.com)

Projects to Keep an Eye On 🛠

lobehub/lobe-chat: 🤖 Lobe Chat - an open-source, high-performance chatbot framework that supports speech synthesis, multimodal, and extensible Function Call plugin system. Supports one-click free deployment of your private ChatGPT/LLM web application. (Github)

OscarXZQ/weight-selection - Initializing Models with Larger Ones (Github)

Bash One-Liners for LLMs (justine.lol)

The Latest in AI Research 💡

Textbooks Are All You Need (arxiv)

Sequential Modeling Enables Scalable Learning for Large Vision Models (yutongbai.com)

Magicoder: Source Code Is All You Need (arxiv)

The World Outside of AI 🌎

Elon Musk Is Reportedly Launching a New University in Texas (Gizmodo)

Gift card scam: What holiday shoppers should know about card draining (usatoday.com)

Netflix shares viewer data on top shows, movies for the first time (The Washington Post)

Michelin Stars: Just 1 Chinese Restaurant in U.S. Has One. Why? (sfstandard.com)

More than 10,000 research papers were retracted in 2023 — a new record (Nature)

JN.1 Variant: Covid Surge Prompts Return of Scanners, Masks in Asian Cities (Bloomberg)

One Last Bite 😋

As ChatGPT gets “lazy,” people test “winter break hypothesis” as the cause (Ars Technica)