Texti Newsletter #10

We have our mini jubile, it's the 10th edition of this newsletter. I'd like to welcome and be grateful to everyone who joined in the last 10 editions. You are the ones I make this for, and you make this a reality. Thank you. 🙏
Now into today's agenda!

The highlights of the week:

1. Zuckerberg wants to bring AGI into your home
2. Samsung's new AI SaaS

On Jan 20, in a short video posted on his instagram, Mark Zuckerberg said that he is preparing a new intergalactic infrastructure for the world. He wants to make it available for all developers out there. He said that Meta will make available to everyone another 350k Nvidia H100s, summing up to a total of 600k ($35k a piece) which means they'll make available to everyone about $21 Billion worth of hardware.

What the internet has taught us over the years, is that there's no such thing as free. There's always a catch, and the problem is that it ain't clear really what is Meta's purpose here, they promise AGI (Artificial General Intelligence), but skeptics say we're still years away from it, I'm on the skeptic's side, independent computer thinking is still very far from a reality. Current AI Models are purely optimal guesses which means it can't make decisions independently, it's just tries to copy existing information.

Coming back to Meta's hidden purposes, here are my theories:

1. Everything you build might be automagically owned by Meta. So read those terms and conditions.
2. Meta wants to change it's visual interpretation. Everybody knows that Meta is the evil corp 😈, what they try to achieve is become the new good guy and make everybody forget they sell your private information to everyone.
3. Exploit free human power and creativity. Open Source access proved in time that it's much better than a closed environment development. Unlimited human capacity > any company's resources.
4. On February 4, 2024 Facebook is going to be 20, maybe this is just a present to the world, for making trillions of $ on pure information provided to facebook by the world population? 🤷🏼‍♂️

Ultimately these are just speculations, I have no idea of the true purpose behind the generosity of Meta, maybe they don't even know it yet on their own. However, I doubt it. Zuckerberg is and always was a genius, he always had a plan for facebook, it did evolve with time, but he build his startup correctly – he started with a local community, and then slowly expanded it across the world. He always had a purpose and he always knew where he was going with it. But man he's a weirdo.

Samsung's new AI SaaS

This week right after the CES 2024, Samsung in it's usual habit, has presented their new flagship phones. Samsung couldn't stand the temptation of AI, so the flooded the presentation with AI!

Let's dive into the AI Features:

• Circle to search – this was available on almost any phone for the last 4-5 years, albeit in a different interpretation. ​
  Note: Google Image Search was added back in 2011! 13 years ago, and yet here's Samsung selling it as a new AI feature.
• Summarize – basically what is available in literally any AI powered editor online, select a text and click summarize, and AI will create a summary of the text. Meh 😑, not impressive in 2024.
• Generative Edit – a steroid photoshop where you can select a human in a picture and move it wherever on the picture, or even remove it and it would automagically fill in the gaps. Cool? Pff, it was there on Pixel 6, 3 years ago, and nobody called it AI, it was just a simple Magic Eraser.
• Chat Assist – literally translate on your phone, I don't see what's the AI deal here...
• Live Translate – probably the only cool feature, which allows you to live translate phone calls into a different language. If you're traveling or living in countries where you don't speak the language, this would be a super handy feature. It is supposed to intervene into the conversation in real time, and translate your speech and directly speak it to the other end, as a literal translator. Demos are cool and stuff, let's see how this translates into real life.

I am trying to be truly objective here, Samsung did an Apple thing. Same - same, but different, where they literally upgrade the cameras a bit, and add a bunch of buzz words, and say they've built the best Phone ever.

The kicker, Samsung has the audacity, to convert your phone features into a SaaS! On their website, all the AI features are marked with an asterisks. Life taught me, if you see an asterisks, find the worst visible text in the page, and read it out loud! It'll likely f*ck-up your life.

This likely means the models don't run on your local hardware, but rather in the cloud, and if you're on low connectivity all your AI Features, are just unavailable. SaaS businesses make this world a worse palce.

That's it folks, see you next week ❤️️️️️️️

Happy Prompting!

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